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A- B, with a heavy heart aud troubled spirit, seeks his slave and informs him of the difficulties which surround him; no alternative being left but to cease to be his master, or cease to avouch to the world that he himself is a servant of the Most High. With a flood of tears and a bursting heart, the slave implores him not to forsake him, and reminds him that if he lets him free, he can find no resting place for the sole of his foot within the bounds of the slave-holding States, and that he would be in danger of being kidnapped or mobbed, and fettered in cruel bondage, where he would never again hear his Saviour's name but in curses and imprecations; and that if he ever should reach a free State, he would be required to give security for his maintenance, good behaviour, &c. or comply with some other requisitions equally unjust . and oppressive. He tells him, too, that he cannot, he must not leave him; that his wife is united to him by as tender ties as that of the white man; that the Lord of heaven hath said; that which God hath joined together let not man put asunder. In language which a fond husband will understand, he exclaims, How can I, how dare 1 voluntarily take an everlasting farewell of that being who is my solace in this world of tears, and who is dearer to me than liberty or life itself? Must I be a willing instrument in breaking that heart which I have sworn before God and man I would love, cherish and protect? My children, too! though I am denied a parent's rights, I feel all the yearnings of a father's heart.

The pleadings of humanity, the pleadings of nature, the pleadings of religion, are all to no purpose; the slave must be emancipated. His wife and children are the property of those over whom the church has no control, and who care for none of these things, and of course they must be deserted. Need I attempt to describe that which is indescrib able, the writhing agony of a widowed heart, not widowed by the fiat of Him who gave the husband, and who has an unquestionable right to take him, but widowed by cruel man, and done too under the sanctity of that religion which proclaims peace from heaven and good will to men?

Shall we follow the poor banished, ignorant, friendless African, in his wanderings? Unused to the ways of men, he is the sport of fortune, the dupe of knaves, and a nuisance to all. It would not be strange if he should finally become a slave to his own lusts, and end his days. in the grog shop or the brothel. At whose hands will his soul be required? But let the curtain drop. Sure, if angels weep they shed bitter tears, when they behold saints at such a work as this!

My brethren, is this a dream, is it a fancy sketch, have I been on imagination's wing, soaring through chaotic regions, contemplating unsubstantial fantastic beings whom God neither made nor governs? Ah, no! we have been contemplating the sad realities which "flesh and blood is heir to," and gravely justified as founded on the word of God. Yes, we are told, solemnly told, that we must do our duty and leave consequences with Him who seeth the end from the beginning. We are told that, sustaining the relationship of master, is no better than stealing or killing, or living in adultery, and, of course, we have no choice, but must abandon the God dishonoring sin, be the result what it may. We are told that to free the slave is our duty, and that if the consequences depicted follow, sin lies at the door of the State, and not at our door. Poor consolation, truly, to the unhappy sufferer!

It is true, that rather than break God's law, we ought to be ready to

suffer such persecution, to cut off right hands and cast out right eyes, but in this case we are called upon to make no sacrifice, and yet by our act innocent persons are involved in crime, in suffering, in woe intolerable. Has any advocate of such doctrines ever made the case his own, and seriously pondered whether such a plea would avail at the bar of final accounts? Who seriously believes that Nero, scape goatlike, will bear the sins of a similar case if any such took place in his day, to the acquittal of the parties immediately concerned?-But why pursue the melancholy subject farther? I am sick at heart, and must close by asking the editor's and the reader's pardon for so far extending preliminary observations to the exclusion of the matter intended. God willing, I may be heard from again. A. R.

ART. III. A Memorial to the Committee of the Edinburgh Bible Society, concerning the use of the Scriptures in teaching children to read-By the Rev. GEO. PAXTON.

Our native country has been long distinguished among Christian nations, by considerable attainments in religious knowledge, and by a steady sobriety and firm adherence to the truth. These attainments have not been confined to the higher and better educated classes; they are to be found in the lower ranks of the community, enlightening the mind, elevating the sentiments and adorning the conduct of the laboring poor; and I am not sensible of yielding to a natural, and, I trust, pardonable partiality, when I venture to assert, that a more generally intelligent, sober and industrious people, is no where to be found. These enviable distinctions your memorialist is disposed to ascribe in part to a custom very ancient in this country, and perhaps universally practised till within the last twenty or thirty years, of teaching the children to read the scriptures from their tenderest age. The scriptures, or a part of the scriptures, as introductory to a more extensive perusal of them, was in all, or in almost all our public schools, put into the hands of children very soon after they had acquired their letters. In fact, the Bible was almost the only school-book in use. The minds of children were, by this method of teaching, stored with biblical knowledge from their earliest years. The facts upon which our holy religion is founded, the precepts which it inculcates, the doctrines which it reveals, the life and immortality which it brings to light, were presented to the mind in its most susceptible and ductile state; were imperceptibly, gradually and indelibly stamped upon the memory, wrought into the understanding and judgment, and mingled with the best feelings of the heart. An internal and valuable treasure of divine truths, and moral precepts, was thus provided for the time when reflection begins to fix and conscience to overawe the mind, and the stripling approaches to the active scenes of life. For many years past, however, this wise and beneficial plan of education has been too generally discountenanced, especially by persons of better circumstances and superior education: and the natural consequence has followed; the time allotted to the reading of the scriptures in public schools, both parochial and others, has been unduly abridged; while in the more fashionable seminaries, it has been almost

entirely appropriated to books of a different character and tendency. The Old and New Testaments have been supplanted by collections of different kinds, in which the truth and morality of Revelation occupy a very disproportionate place; in which false views of life and manners are not uncommonly given; and dangerous principles of action, to say the least, indirectly recommended.

Our children are often taught from Cato, to regard suicide as a lawful remedy for the severer calamities of life, and, in common conversation, to be every now and then irreverently addressing the Heavens for mercy or favor :-from Shakespeare and other writers of the same class, to adopt the dashing language, and the ambiguous or impure sentiments of the corrupt and vicious; to embellish their sentences with oaths and curses; to admire and cherish the precious and manly virtues of pride, wrath, revenge, and others of the kind :-from Pope's universal prayer, to consider the worship of a benighted savage, or idolatrous heathen, as of equal purity and value with the homage of a genuine christian, as equally acceptable to God and beneficial to man; and to address the majesty of heaven without any respect to the only Mediator between God and our fallen race :-from Douglass, to covet renown as the highest and noblest end of human existence, and to insult the living God by a mock address to his throne. The greater part of the stories and anecdotes with which collections for the use of schools are filled, are evidently meant to operate chiefly upon the affections, to rouse and agitate the feelings of the susceptible and inexperienced mind, while the understanding is neither enlightened, nor the heart sustained and regulated by solid principles. The consequence is, that minds of a more delicate texture, are exposed to the ravages of a morbid sensibility, one of the most grievous affections to which the human bosom is liable; meanwhile, those of a firmer character are filled with romantic ideas which are even dangerous to the peace of the individual, and the comfort of the circle in which he moves; or they are inclined to the study and practice of virtue, but without respect to christian principles, the only foundation on which the sublime and beautiful structure of genuine virue can be raised; or to christian motives, by which only the christian disposition of the heart can be excited with greatest glory to God and advantage to man. With the Holy Scriptures as a mere school-book, such collections are not worthy to be compared. All the benefits which the latter are supposed to contain, the former supply in greater perfection, and with safety.

The Bible can agitate the bosom and awaken the finest sensibilities of our nature, without perverting the understanding or misleading the heart. The Bible can raise the tone of feeling, purify and elevate the sentiments, and impart energy to the character, without producing by its own proper influence one extravagant or romantic idea, or generating pride, fierceness, revenge, or any other of the vicious dispositions which enter into the composition of what the world approvingly calls a high and lofty spirit. No book contains so great a mass of important historical information, in so small a space, as the Bible; information in which we are so deeply interested, and details so richly fraught with lessons of genuine wisdom and prudence. The specimens which the word of God contains in every species of fine writing, are equally numerous and beautiful. Is it desirable to present the tyro with a model of historical description, where shall a more perfect one be found than the history of Joseph, (which is only one out of many in the scrip

tures,) from the pen of Moses? simple without meanness, minute with out prolixity, it possesses a charm which we shall look for in vain in the narrative of the greatest uninspired masters, ancient or modern.

If the rules of art are little regarded, the rules of nature are so closely followed, that the unbiassed reader immediately forgets the difference of time and place; he becomes one of the party, and hears, and sees, and participates in all that passes, with a liveliness and interest little inferior to that which is felt in real life. Is it wished to display the innocent simplicity of rural life? Can a more beautiful and affect ing story be chosen for this purpose than the story, where amiable simplicity of manners, endearing sentiments of conjugal affection, sin gular filial attachments, maternal tenderness and care, dignified generosity, chastened and refined by the habitual fear and love of God, and an accurate and lively statement of local customs and manners are equally conspicuous? Is the opening mind to be entertained, warmed and elevated with the effusion of poetic genius? What lyric composi tion may be compared with the song of Moses at the Red sea? and the odes of David, Asaph and Ileman ?--What elegiac strains, with the lamentations of David, on the death of Saul and Jonathan, or of Jeremiah, over the ruins of his country? What strains so lofty or so beautiful, as those of Isaiah, or so sublime as the prayer of Habakkuk? Or if dramatic writing be necessary to awaken the finer sensibilities of our nature; to exercise and invigorate the understanding, and to engage or agitate the heart, the christian teacher need not go to the astonishing productions of Shakespeare, or any other writer for the stage, where every flower conceals a thorn. The book of Job contains a drama, which mere human genius in its happiest mood will attempt to imitate in vain. Into the long agitated question, whether the book is a real history, or partly real and partly parabolic, I need not enter; which The ever way it is decided, the effect on my argument is the same. book is still in the form of a drama, and stands unrivalled among compositions of this kind, for characteristic and spirited dialogue, animated sentiment, beautiful description, and genuine sublimity, closed with a scene to which we have nothing comparable in the writings of dramatic poets; where, clothed in what may be called terrible sublimity, Jehovah himself descends to become the speaker, and to challenge his own. afflicted creature to answer. Is it necessary to exercise the youthful mind on pieces distinguished for close and logical argument? The writings of Paul, and in particular his Epistle to the Romans, are well adapted for that end. Or, is it necessary to give him a specimen of the highest order of reasoning, and argument and intercession? I would venture to affirm without the fear of being contradicted by any competent judge, that the patriarch Judah, in his address to Joseph in behalf of Benjamin, for the sagacious choice of the most powerful and affecting arguments of which the subject would admit, and the artful management of them never has been surpassed by any pleader in ancient or modern times. Were it the object of a teacher to give his pupils profound views of human nature in its present state, and of the workings of the human heart in almost every situation, accompanied with the best maxims of wisdom and prudence, for the conduct of life, these he will find displayed in the most easy and perspicuous language in the writings of Solomon. It was justly asserted by Sir William Jones, one of the most accomplished men and greatest scholars of his age, that the Bible contains a greater quantity of elegant writing, of beautiful and

sublime composition than any other book of the same size. I am happy to support my sentiments by the testimony of another eminent writer, Dr. Olinthus Gregory, who, in his evidences of the christian religion, replies to an objection of the infidel, that the Bible is a tasteless, insipid, inelegant, uninteresting book, composed always in a dull heavy style, by asking "Where else can be found such wonderful and varied specimens of sublimity, as in the fifth chapter of Judges, the fourth, twentysixth, and thirty-seventh chapters of Job, the twenty-ninth, hundred and fourth, hundred and seventh, and hundred and thirty-ninth Psalms, several portions of Isaiah and Ezekiel, and the first chapter of the Apocalypse? Taking them even as they appear, under the disadvantage of a translation, I will venture to affirm, that nothing can be found in Homer, Virgil, Shakspeare or Milton, that will bear comparison with most of them in point of splendor, majesty or grandeur.

"Where again will you find such interesting stories, so artlessly yet often so pathetically told as those of Jacob and Rachel, of Joseph and his brethren, of the Death of Jacob, of the widow of Zarephath's and of the Shunamite's sons, and of Naomi and Ruth? Where will you find more genuine touches of nature, more delightful pictures of the effects of friendship and sympathy, than those in the eleventh and fourteenth chapters of John's Gospel and the twentieth of the Acts? Be assured that those who lay by the Bible under the notion of its being dull, dry, and and uninteresting, deceive themselves most miserably, and thereby deprive themselves of the highest intellectual delight.

"This most excellent of all books, besides being of the highest authority in its historical portions, and of invaluable utility as furnishing the only consistent and practicable scheme of morality, contains very much that is superlatively adapted to gratify the finest mental taste. It enters more sagaciously and more deeply into human nature; it developes character, delineates manners, charms the imagination, and warms the heart more effectually than any book extant; and if once a person would take it into his hand, without the strange unreasonable idea of its flatness, and be only not unwilling to be pleased, I doubt not that he would find all his favorite authors dwindle in the comparison, and soon perceive that he was not merely reading the most religious but the most entertaining book in the world." Such is the spontaneous testimony of Olinthus, a layman, and one of the ablest philosophers of the pre sent day.

No book, therefore, considered merely as a school-book, is better adapted (perhaps none so well) to enlighten the understanding, to invigorate the mind, to elevate and refine the sentiments, to form the taste for every elegance of composition than the Bible. And if a teacher wish to initiate his pupils in pure and correct English, our authorised translation, in this respect, far excels any other book of the same size. Our translation of the scriptures is in fact a standard book, and the best standard we have of the English language. In its fitness to produce all the effects on which the more genteel part of community sets so high a value, the Bible as a mere school-book surpasses all others. But if to these we add the salutary, and above all, the saving impressions which it may produce even on the mind of a child, it is infinitely preferable. It may be difficult to determine how early such impressions may be made on the tender mind by means of the scriptures, but the heart of a child seems to be capable of receiving them, as soon as reason begins to act, and the judgment to open. I willingly avail myself once more VOL. XV.

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