They are guilty of a glaring
anachronism in assuming the same opinions and prejudices to have existed
in 1825 which are undoubtedly influential in 1858. The Antislavery
agitation did not begin until 1831, and the debates in the Virginia
Convention prove conclusively that six years after the foundation of the
Tract Society, the leading men in that State, men whose minds had been
trained and whose characters had been tempered in that school of action
and experience which was open to all during the heroic period of our
history, had not yet suffered such distortion of the intellect through
passion, and such deadening of the conscience through interest, as would
have prevented their discussing either the moral or the political aspects
of Slavery, and precluded them from uniting in any effort to make the
relation between master and slave less demoralizing to the one and less
imbruting to the other.
Again, it is claimed that the words of the Constitution are conclusive,
and that the declaration that the publications of the Society shall be
such as are "satisfactory to all Evangelical Christians" forbids by
implication the issuing of any tract which could possibly offend the
brethren in Slave States. The Society, it is argued, can publish only on
topics about which all Evangelical Christians are agreed, and must,
therefore, avoid everything in which the question of politics is involved.
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