and the liberty of the world." With this view of the objects for which the Hungarians supposed themselves to be contending, let the reader compare the following passage from the North American Review:

The Magyars, indeed, fought with great gallantry; it was hardly possible to avoid sympathizing with a people who struggled so bravely against immense odds. But their cause was

bad; they sought to defend their ancient feudal institutions, and their unjust and excessive privileges as an order and a race, against the incursion of the liberal ideas and the reformatory spirit of the nineteenth century." — p. 122.

We presume it must have been to this and similar passages in "The War of Races" that the author referred, when he informed the gentlemen who called on him with a request for a lyceum lecture, that this article contained much that was "new" even to himself.*

Our limits compel us to close. We have here considered the view taken by the North American Reviewer of the general character and objects of the war in Hungary. In a future article we shall examine the specific statements which he makes in regard to the war and the events which immediately preceded it, and shall point sout the extraordinary errors in regard to facts and date into which he has fallen. We shall also examine his statements in regard to the affairs of Transylvania and Croatia, and shall consider the confirmatory testimony adduced in his second article, entitled "The Politics of Europe."

M. L. P.

* "I answered that I had nothing on hand which was fitted for such use, and had no leisure to prepare any thing; but that I had just finished a Review article, on which a good deal of labor and research had been expended, and, as it contained much that had appeared new and very interesting to me, perhaps a popular audience might not be unwilling to hear a portion of it read to them."- Letter of the Editor of the North American Review.

NOTICES OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS.

The Rights and the Duties of Masters. A Sermon preached at the Dedication of a Church erected in Charleston, S. C., for the Benefit and Instruction of the Colored Population. By REV. J. H. THORNWELL, D. D. Charleston: Walker &

We have read this pamphlet with that interest which always attaches in our minds to every attempt of Christian ministers in the Slave States to connect the Gospel with chattel slavery. The introduction informs us that the sermon was preached on Sunday evening, May 26, 1850, before a large assembly of intelligent and respectable citizens. Whether any of the slaves were pres. ent at the services we are not informed, but the phraseology and tenor of the discourse, in which the word slave is freely used, would lead us to think they were not. The edifice, however, is intended for a mixed congregation. It is in the form of a capital T, the transepts, which are entered by separate doors, being appropriated to white persons. The congregation worshipping in it will be under the ecclesiastical supervision of the Session of the Second Presbyterian Church, of whose fold the communicants will be members, and by which the minister will be appointed, so that there will be no separate ecclesiastical organization. A Sunday school of about one hundred and eighty pupils is connected with the congregation.

The text of the sermon is Colossians iv. 1. The preacher begins by rejoicing in the completion of an undertaking which met at first with opposition, as it involved to some extent the separation of masters and servants in the offices of religion. As it was found that a large number of the colored population would be left without any religious instruction unless a separate provision was made for them, such separate provision has been ven. tured upon. The result, says the speaker, is to be regarded as a triumph of Christian benevolence, as it has been attained during a period of fierce excitement, and in a community which has been warned by experience to watch with jealousy all combinations of the blacks. The preacher does not at all disguise or smother over the indignant feeling which he knows has been aroused against slavery. He says plainly, "The Slaveholding States of this confederacy have been placed under the ban of the public opinion of the civilized world." And again, “God has not permitted such a remarkable phenomenon as the unanimity

of the civilized world, in its execration of slavery, to take place without design." We were sorry to find the preacher repeating the stale sarcasm that "the philanthropists of Europe and this country can find nothing worth weeping for but the sufferings and degradation of the Southern slave, and nothing worth reviling but the avarice, inhumanity, and cruelty of the Southern master, and nothing worth laboring to extirpate but the system which embodies these outrages," and that they "overlook the evils that press around their own doors." The falsehood of this statement exceeds its satire, for it so happens that, in the communities in which the antislavery spirit is most rife, all other charitable and reformatory efforts are most zealously sustained. If thousands have been given for the Abolition cause, hundreds of thousands have been spent for other merciful ends; and the North has furnished a score of temperance lecturers and charity agents for each single Abolitionist lecturer. After some general remarks upon the "vituperation and abuse" which have been heaped upon the slaveholders," the misrepresentations which ignorance, malice, and fanaticism are constantly and assiduously propagating," "the insane fury of philanthropy," which has aimed at a distance to stir up insurrections at the South, and the machinations of Northern man-stealers, who pretend that conscience moves them" to violate the faith of treaties, the solemnity of contracts, and the awful sanctity of an oath," after these remarks, and more in the same strain, the preacher acknowledges that the South has been unwisely, though naturally, moved, by the violence of resentment, to indulge in the language of defiance, and to yield to suggestions of policy which are not to be approved. In opposition to his own understanding of a scientific theory on the races of men, the preacher maintains that negroes are of the same blood with ourselves; in form and lineaments, in moral, religious, and intellectual nature, our brethren; and he takes credit to the slaveholders for their rejection of an infidel theory which might seek the protection of our property in the debasement of our species." We will not, however, digress to discuss the question whether there is the lesser measure of faith and humanity in regarding the blacks as men and women, descended from a distinct human stock, or in maintaining their unity of descent with ourselves, while we treat them as beasts.

The preacher then identifies the Abolition spirit with the politi cal and philosophical speculations which are agitating Europe, "the excesses of unchecked democracy," "the social anarchy of communism and the political anarchy of licentiousness," and he thinks that, if God will enable the slaveholders, as such, to discharge their duties with moderation and dignity, they will give efficient help towards settling for the world "the principles of

regulated liberty." He says that the Apostle, in the text, "sums up all that is incumbent, at the present crisis, upon the slaveholders of the South," and affirms that time would be wasted in proving that the servants addressed by the Apostle were slaves. He avails himself of the allowance made by many commentators, that while the spirit of the Scriptures is against slavery, the letter is distinctly and unambiguously in its favor. To those who make this allowance, he gently insinuates that it is for them, and not for him, to reconcile this imputation of a defective morality with the Protestant rule of the sufficiency of the Bible, and to explain why slaveholders, whom Paul received into Christian fellowship, should be repelled now. But the preacher thinks it worth his while to expose the confusion of ideas from which has arisen this distinction between the letter and the spirit of the Bible, and which " has been a source of serious perplexity both to the defenders and the enemies of slavery." He grants that if it can be shown" that slavery contravenes the spirit of the Gospel, that as a social relation it is essentially unfavorable to the cultivation and growth of the graces of the spirit, — that it is unfriendly to the development of piety and to communion with God, or that it retards the onward progress of man, — that it hinders the march of society to its destined goal, and contradicts that supremacy of justice which is the soul of the state and the life-blood of freedom, if these propositions can be satisfactorily sustained, then it is self-condemned," - religion, philan thropy, and patriotism require us to wipe out the foul blot.

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We come now to the main argument of the discourse. Dr. Thornwell ascribes the confusion of ideas on this subject to a twofold misapprehension, one in relation to the nature of the slavery tolerated in the letter of the Scriptures, and the other in relation to the spirit of Christianity itself." He then controverts a common description of slavery as "the property of man in man, the destruction of all human and personal rights, the absorption of the humanity of one individual into the will and power of another," and quotes some sentences from Dr. Channing and Professor Whewell, who draw such a definition of slavery. The preacher allows that, if the description be just, the indignation of the world upon so monstrous an outrage cannot fall too soon. But he affirms its falsity, and says, that, whatever may be the technical language of the law in relation to certain aspects of slavery, "the ideas of personal rights and personal responsibility

* If we could for one moment suppose that the preacher was writing ironically, we should think that he had stated here an almost exhaustive, and certainly a most impressive, enumeration of the actual enormities and outrages involved in slavery, which, so far from needing "to be shown," do but too painfully and literally appear as self-evident.

a

pervade the whole system. It is a relation of man to man, form of civil society, of which persons are the only elements,and not a relation of men to things." This is the Christian view of slavery, under which Christianity tolerates slavery, protects the rights and enforces the obligations mutually of slaves and masters. "Paul treats the services of slaves as duties, — not, like the toil of the ox or the ass, a labor extracted by the strinof discipline, but a moral debt, in the payment of which gency they were rendering a homage to God." Slaves, being thus addressed by motives, are treated as if possessed of conscience, reason, and will. The preacher affirms that it is "upon this absurdity, that slavery divests its victims of humanity, that it degrades them from the rank of responsible and voluntary agents to the condition of tools or brutes, that the whole philosophical argument against the morality of slavery, as an existing institution, is founded." Slavery, then, being vindicated from being inconsistent with personality of rights and obligations, its peculiarity is defined to be, "the obligation to labor for another, determined by the providence of God, independently of the provisions of a contract." The right of the master is not a right to the slave as a man, but to his labor. "The essential difference betwixt free and slave labor is, that one is rendered in consequence of a contract; the other is rendered in consequence of a command."

Perhaps we ought to say here, that we are not trifling with our readers, but are honestly quoting a printed pamphlet that actually lies before us. That Dr. Thornwell can state so concisely the essential difference, and yet does not discern that it involves the vital matter of personal rights for the slave, is the most marvellous specimen of judicial blindness that ever passed beneath our eyes. It will be observed that what little grain of plausibility there is in the basis of his plea is found in the rhetorical exaggeration sometimes used in saying that slaveholders deal in the bodies and souls of men. And yet is even this an exag geration, in any intelligible definition of the word soul?

But to proceed. Dr. Thornwell next asserts, that "whatever control the master has over the person of the slave is subsidiary to this right to his labor; what he sells is not the man, but the property in his services." True, he chastises the man, but in this case "the punishments inflicted for disobedience are no more inconsistent with personal responsibilities than the punishments inflicted by the law for breaches of contract." As if to complete the astounding outrage upon common sense and humanity which his whole argument involves, the preacher adds that this view of his subject exposes the confusion [!], which obtains in most popular treatises of morals, of slavery with VOL. XLIX.-4TH. S. VOL. XIV. NO. III.

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