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through his instrumentality, were added to the ghastly group; -if all should shout in his ear, 'We are in hell because of you, and soon you will meet us;' who would buy liquor of such a man? and who, with such a palpable realization of the iniquity and consequences of the traffic, would dare engage in it? Yet the iniquity and its consequences are none the less awful, because they will not be disclosed till the day of judgment.

ARTICLE V.

PROPER MODE OF PREACHING.

By WILLIAM A. STEARNS.

THE preacher's power, is his power over consciences. Paul used it, and Felix trembled. And wherever this power is wielded, there is a bowing down of the soul beneath it. Under the influence of faithful preaching, the hearts of a whole audience are sometimes moved, by a simultaneous impulse, as the trees of the forest are moved by the wind.

Christ began his ministry with troubling the conscience. Though he came on an errand of mercy, with the sweetest, kindest message which men or angels ever heard, this he forebore to deliver, till many an eye had quailed, and many a cheek whitened, under the sermon on the mount.

But there is a way of preaching about religion, which shall not disturb, which shall even please the most unrelenting sinner.

"I was never more delighted at the theatre," said one of this description, as she came in tears from the house of God. The agitation and sighs of the audience had borne ample testimony, through the whole discourse, to the power of the preacher. Under the influence of his fervid eloquence, they were caught away into the presence of the invisible; and there their imaginations were made to burn and glow till they

almost saw him making "darkness his pavilion." They were carried into the society of the saints, and saw Gabriel and the seraphim, the palm trees and the golden streets. From that holy eminence they were made to look out upon the dark mountains, where men stumble, and on which no morning cometh. After these grand and agitating scenes, they came down and stood with the preacher in the garden of Gethsemane, and saw the bloody sweat; they went with him to the bar of Pilate, and heard the taunting Jew. As the preacher looked round upon his weeping audience, he thought indeed that he had done nobly for his Master. But those words of cruel applause met his ear, and sent him to his chamber, in the cutting consciousness, that he had been to his hearers only as "a very lovely song of one who hath a pleasant voice." The preacher had preached to the sensibilities and the imagination of his hearer, but the hearer preached to the conscience of the preacher.

The fact narrated developes à principle. Men may be moved and pleased by the affecting truths of religion, and agitated by its sublimities, without one right emotion. All men love excitement, and not a few find bliss in tears. Some of the hymns of Moore, one might almost think, were hymns of penitence. But weeping is not always religion. Among the thousands who have visited the famous painting of the crucifixion, by West, perhaps there is not an individual who went away unmoved. But many of those same eyes which wept with Judah's daughters, would weep as eloquently over the sweet sorrows of Ophelia and Desdemona, or the unfortunate loves of Romeo and Juliet. They were moved by the sight of the Saviour on his cross, not by the sins which nailed him there.

There is also a kind of religion which begins and ends with the imagination. The same order of mind which delights to revel in the Paradise of the Houries, may delight also to dream of "sweet fields beyond the swelling flood." Rousseau, Volney, and Voltaire, all saw grandeur in the works of God, and bowed down in poetic adoration. Could the scenes of the last judgment be reduced to canvass, the Saviour coming in the clouds with power and great glory, the angels flying through the heavens to gather in the redeemed, the congregating armies of the risen dead, the immense, the interminable field of men whose anxious faces await the

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dreadful separation, such a painting would be considered, even by infidels, as one of the most splendid triumphs of the pencil. And there is no reason why minds which admire the poetry of the firmament, and sublime paintings of Bible scenes, should not admire the same things clothed in language, and addressed from the pulpit. I have heard of irreligious men who loved to read those awful lines of Dr. Watts

Tempests of angry fire shall roll,

To blast the rebel worm,
And beat upon his naked soul,

In one eternal storm

struck with the fearful grandeur of the sentiment, while they disbelieved and disapproved it.

Now minds of the sensitive and imaginative character, with the exception of those who look upon religion only as philosophers, and upon the religion of Mohammed with the same philosophical spirit as upon the religion of Christ, are peculiarly exposed to mistake sentimentalism and elevated feeling for genuine religion. The truth is, people love excitement; and the excitement of the sensibilities and the imagination, much better than the excitement of the conscience. Now it is right that the preacher should make use of all those avenues to the heart which God has opened. He may roll the thunder and paint the rainbow if he can, to attract the gaze of men, while he parts the cloud and shows them God, whom they have offended. But he must be careful to remember that the imagination and the sensibilities are not the conscience; they are only the porchways, the ante-rooms to the conscience. Arguments must be gathered against the man which shall circumscribe his limits and urge him, through these outworks, back into the chamber of his own dark thoughts; and there he must be locked in alone with spirithands which write upon the walls of a soul unrenewed, Thou art weighed in the balance and art found wanting.'

It is a stern duty to drive the arrows of the Almighty fast into the hearts of the king's enemies; especially when we are compelled to include among them the young, the ingenuous, the cultivated, those whom we love

not for the lack of one thing, might be That must be an iron heart which thought of it. I wonder not that

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told men that they were enemies of the cross of Christ, told them weeping. And then, too, imaginative minds often dream so confidently and delightfully of heaven, that, oh, it is hard to spoil their fine visions. But one thought should make the preacher faithful. It may be hereafter, in case of disappointment, as we know that it is here,

Chords which vibrate sweetest pleasure
Thrill the deepest notes of wo!

ARTICLE VI.

SLAVERY IN THE UNITED STATES.

By THE EDITOR.

AFRICAN SLAVERY was introduced into Europe by the Spanish Moors, who had acquired from the Mohammedans of the North of Africa the practice of holding slaves. In this practice, they were soon joined by the native Spaniards. In the year 1500, permission was granted by the court of Spain to transport to the South American colonies, negro slaves, natives of Spain. Thus slavery was introduced into America. The excessive burdens imposed upon the Indians by their Spanish conquerors, at an early period arrested the attention of the philanthropists of that time. Among these, Bartholomew de Las Casas was conspicuous. He was a native of Seville, and with other clergymen, accompanied Columbus in his second voyage to Hispaniola. In 1516, Cardinal Ximenes, then regent of Castile, designated four persons, with unlimited power to regulate all judicial proceedings in the colonies. Las Casas was appointed to accompany them, with the title of Protector of the Indians. The first act of their authority was to set at liberty all the Indians who had been granted to Spanish courtiers, or to any individual not residing in America. A general alarm was excited among the colonists; and after mature consideration, the superintendents became convinced that the plans of Las Casas were impracticable, and that it was necessary that the Indians

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should remain in subjection to their Spanish masters. after, Las Casas proposed to Charles V. the expediency of importing slaves directly from Africa into the warm climates. of the colonies, in order to relieve the burdens of the Indians. In an evil hour, Charles listened to the proposal, though Ximenes saw and denounced the glaring inconsistency of benefiting one race by kidnapping another. In 1517, a Flemish favorite of Charles V., having obtained an exclusive right of importing 4,000 negroes annually to the islands of Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, and Porto Rico, sold it for 25,000 ducats to some Genoese merchants, who first brought into a regular form the commerce for slaves between Africa and America.

The first Englishman who was concerned in this nefarious traffic, was Sir John Hawkins, who afterwards attained so much celebrity as an admiral of the British navy. His father, an expert scaman, having made several voyages to Guinea, Brazil, and the West Indies, acquired considerable knowledge of those countries, and left for his son copious journals of his voyages and observations. In these papers, he described the soil of America as endowed with extraordinary fertility, but utterly neglected from the want of cultivators. Europeans were represented as unequal to the toil of agriculture in so sultry a climate, while the Africans were described as peculiarly adapted to this employment. Hawkins immediately deduced from these remarks the project of transporting Africans into the western world, formed a plan for the execution of his design, and laid it before some of his opulent neighbors. A subscription was immediately completed by Sir Lionel Ducket, Sir Thomas Lodge, Sir William Winter, and others, who at once perceived the lucrative promise of the trade. Hawkins reached Sierra Leone in 1562, and began his commerce. While trafficking with the natives, he took occasion to give them an inviting description of the country to which he was bound, contrasting the fertility of its soil, with the barrenness and poverty of Africa. The simple natives were ensnared by his flattering promises, and three hundred of them consented to embark for Hispaniola. On the night before they embarked, they were attacked by a hostile tribe; and Hawkins, hastening with his crew to their assistance, repulsed the assailants, and carried a number of them as prisoners on board his vessel. On the next day, he set sail, and during the passage, treated the

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