The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V | Page 3

deacon? If the aim of the
Society be only to convert men from sins they have no mind to, and to
convince them of errors to which they have no temptation, they might
as well be spending their money to persuade schoolmasters that two
and two make four, or geometricians that there cannot be two obtuse
angles in a triangle. If this be their notion of the way in which the
gospel is to be preached, we do not wonder that they have found it
necessary to print a tract upon the impropriety of sleeping in church.
But the Society are concluded by their own action; for in 1857 they
unanimously adopted the following resolution: "That those moral duties
which grow out of the existence of Slavery, as well as those moral evils
and vices which it is known to promote and which are condemned in
Scripture, and so much deplored by Evangelical Christians,
undoubtedly do fall within the province of this Society, and can and
ought to be discussed in a fraternal and Christian spirit." The Society
saw clearly that it was impossible to draw a Mason and Dixon's line in
the world of ethics, to divide Duty by a parallel of latitude. The only
line which Christ drew is that which parts the sheep from the goats, that
great horizon-line of the moral nature of man, which is the boundary
between light and darkness. The Society, by yielding (as they have

done in 1858) to what are pleasantly called the "objections" of the
South (objections of so forcible a nature that we are told the colporteurs
were "forced to flee") virtually exclude the black man, if born to the
southward of a certain arbitrary line, from the operation of God's
providence, and thereby do as great a wrong to the Creator as the
Episcopal Church did to the artist when without public protest they
allowed Ary Scheffer's Christus Consolator, with the figure of the
slave left out, to be published in a Prayer-Book.
The Society is not asked to disseminate Anti-slavery doctrines, but
simply to be even-handed between master and slave, and, since they
have recommended Sambo and Toney to be obedient to Mr. Legree, to
remind him in turn that he also has duties toward the bodies and souls
of his bondmen. But we are told that the time has not yet arrived, that at
present the ears of our Southern brethren are closed against all appeals,
that God in his good time will turn their hearts, and that then, and not
till then, will be the fitting occasion to do something in the premises.
But if the Society is to await this golden opportunity with such
exemplary patience in one case, why not in all? If it is to decline any
attempt at converting the sinner till after God has converted him, will
there be any special necessity for a tract society at all? Will it not be a
little presumptuous, as well as superfluous, to undertake the doing over
again of what He has already done? We fear that the studies of
Blackstone, upon which the gentlemen who argue thus have entered in
order to fit themselves for the legal and constitutional argument of the
question, have confused their minds, and that they are misled by some
fancied analogy between a tract and an action of trover, and conceive
that the one, like the other, cannot be employed till after an actual
conversion has taken place.
The resolutions reported by the Special Committee at the annual
meeting of 1857, drawn up with great caution and with a sincere desire
to make whole the breach in the Society, have had the usual fate of all
attempts to reconcile incompatibilities by compromise. They express
confidence in the Publishing Committee, and at the same time
impliedly condemn them by recommending them to do precisely what
they had all along scrupulously avoided doing. The result was just what

might have been expected. Both parties among the Northern members
of the Society, those who approved the former action of the Publishing
Committee and those who approved the new policy recommended in
the resolutions, those who favored silence and those who favored
speech on the subject of Slavery, claimed the victory, while the
Southern brethren, as usual, refused to be satisfied with anything short
of unconditional submission. The word Compromise, as far as Slavery
is concerned, has always been of fatal augury. The concessions of the
South have been like the "With all my worldly goods I thee endow" of
a bankrupt bridegroom, who thereby generously bestows all his debts
upon his wife, and as a small return for his magnanimity consents to
accept all her personal and a life estate in all her real property. The
South is willing that the Tract