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340 DOUGLASS' MONTHLY. October, 1860. [[line]] [[3 columns]] [[column 1] day or for a year; we live for all time, now and hereafter. Wishing to pursue that course which shall serve in the future as well as the present, upon which we can look with pleasure, we fling before our readers candidates for their votes, who represent sound anti-slavery principles and doctrines, who give the trump of freedom no uncertain sound, and who occupy the ground which must finally be occupied if slavery is ever brought to a peaceful termination. Let Abolitionists, regardless of the outside pressure, regardless of smiles or frowns, mindful only of the true and right, vote in the coming election for the only men now in the field who believe in the complete manhood of the negro, the unconstitutionality and illegality of slavery, and are pledged to the immediate and unconditional abolition of slavery, not where it does not exist, but just wherever it does exist in the States or in the Territories. [[line]] SLAVEHOLDING RELIGION. [[line]] The lash, wielded by the iron arm of the Slave Power, is a long one. The hard-twisted extremity of the overseer's whip not only reaches the shrinking back of Tom on the coach box, or the quivering flesh of DINAH in the kitchen, but strikes at the freedom of the national mind, goads the orator in the Senate chamber, and quickens the utterance of Southern speech makers in the hall of Representatives. Its effects are seen in the oratorical performances of Southern placemen, as well as in the hound-like grimaces of the Northern doughfaces. It reaches the pocket nerve of book mongers and publishers, and makes many an editor dance to its unwelcome music. The Southern citizen dare not buy a book without permission from the knights of the thong. Many a man who would be glad to own a copy of the Impending Crisis, or Uncle Tom's Cabin, dare not inquire for it at the counter of a Southern bookseller, or have it sent to him through a Southern Post Office. A complete system of terrorism dictates the character of the political and religious reading of the Southern mind. The postmaster adds to the usual prerogatives of this office, that of general censor of private correspondence and the public press, burning private letters and public journals with remorseless tyranny. The impudence of the multiform despotism reaches its climax in the attempted surveillance of the religious sentiments and opinions of the people. The churches and ministers of the South assume to be the standard of orthodoxy. The Northern people have but a faint conception of the intensity with which Southern religion clings to the fleshless skeleton of a theological system. The belief in certain dogmas, through whose web there runs now a thread of truth, and then a thread of absurdity in most inexplicable confusion has usurped, in the gospel of the South, the place of justice, mercy and purity; and the principles of benevolence and humanity in their application to half the population are regarded as manifest infidelity. A belief in the five points of CALVIN, and in the divine character of slavery, is the standard by which every man's godliness is to be tried, Books, sermons and lectures are all brought to the test of this Southern iron bedstead. The man who lives in the unpaid toil of a score of his own church members, if his creed be [[/column 1]] [[column 2]] of the approved pattern, is, in Tennessee, unquestionably one of the elect; while he who advocates the doctrine of a human brotherhood, is not only and infidel, but is also a criminal of such heinous character, that he would be driven out of the community, or murdered outright. A mistress may be a saintly model of Southern piety, if she believe in Total Depravity, Foreordination, Election, Reprobation, Damnation, and the Devil, notwithstanding her general habit of slapping the face of her chambermaid with her shoe, beating her cook with the tongs, and breaking the washboard over the head of her washerwoman, before prayers in the morning. Stealing the life-long wages of these poor sister, and beating them brutally while doing it, is no stain upon the character of the most saintly matron of the South. An eye and ear witness has just related to use the following case: A man owned a mother and two children- one girl of seven of eight years old, and the other a babe of nine moths old. While of mother of the black child was at work in the kitchen, her little one crawled about the house for hours, until hungry and weary, it crept into the sitting room where the white mistress was lounging. While there, the little sister of the slave child came through the room, and the babe moaningly put up its hand as she passed, to get taken up from the floor. The mistress interfered and whipped the little pleading hands, and forbade the sister from taking it up.- The child screamed with pain and fright and still stretched the little bare arms to the sister for protection- the mistress still whipping them. The mother heard her babe scream, until her heart could bear it no longer, and coming into the room respectfully told her mistress that it was tired and hungry and begged to be permitted to nurse it. the mistress flew at the mother in a furious passion, and tore the child from her arms, driving her from the room, and punished the child until it became quite quiet from sheer exhaustion- the mother being all this time compelled to listen to the screams of her babe from another room. When the master came in, his wife told him a terrible story of impudence and disobedience of the slave mother, and he gave her a savage whipping because she begged to nurse her own child ! Now this mistress was a perfect pattern of slaveholding godliness. She had been a Sabbath School teacher when young. She almost exhaled in prayers and pious ejaculations. She worshiped the very calf skin covering and gilt binding of her Bible. She consigned Mrs. CHILD, Mrs. STOWE and ELIZA FOLLEN to the deepest hell, as infidels, and regarded Northern religionists as walking in eminent danger of a constant shower of red hot thunderbolts because of their unbelief. Cruelty and lying were virtuous in her estimation, in comparison with the terrible criminality of Mrs. CHILD'S Appeal and Uncle Tom's Cabin. To half murder a slave baby was innocent by the side of a doubt of Predestination. To belie and cruelly beat a mother for seeking to protect her infant from a she tiger, was a graceful manifestation of godliness, in comparison with the hell deserving crime of doubting the existence of a personal devil, with horns, and a hot pitch fork on his shoulder.- She is a silken mannered woman, with velvet hands, and a purring voice, and given to prayer [[/column 2]] [[column 3]] meetings, monthly concerts for the benefit of the heathen, and has a heavenly style of sighing and rolling up pious eyes. She is the pet of her slaveholding minister, and a leader on subscriptions for the conversion of the heathen of Boorahboolah-gah! It is quite natural that a people whose religion had been emasculated of the great practical virtues, and has sunk down below the working standard of decent, unregenerate humanity, to plume themselves of their dogmatic orthodoxy. They have nothing else to which they can cling. Conscious that if judged 'by their deeds' they must be condemned, it is not surprising that they should insist upon being judged by the length and age of their creeds. Knowing that their hearts and hands are full of cruelty and oppression, it was to be expected that they would plume themselves on the orthodox furniture of their heads. but these slaveholding religionists are not content with attempting to conceal the nakedness of their own system of wicked oppression, under the thread-bare cloak of an orthodox dogmatism, but they insist upon being recognized as models of godliness, and denounce the votaries of the practical virtues as infidels and atheists. Dr. CHEEVER may well ask: 'It is not wonderful that at this day, under the light of Christianity, 1860 years after the death of Christ, a crime executed by the Divine law under the penalty of death, along with that of murder, should have been rescued from that criminal fellowship, and revived under the Gospel into Christian communion, as if it were a virtue? Was there ever a more malignant and extraordinary hallucination? The church in which in continues remains in the favor of God! A crime gibbeted by law of God is taken by Christian surgeons from the gallows, is exhumed by Gospel resurrectionist, galvanized into hideous life, and set among the living guests at the sacramental feast as a suitable companion with faith, hope and charity. And those who undertake to thrust the torch of God's flaming law within the skeleton, and to drag it forth beneath condemnation of the Gospel, are themselves assaulted and pronounced as being greater sinners and infidels than those who, in the very church of god, practice and make profit of the iniquity. i say it is an unparalleled madness.' [[line]] HORSE DEMOCRACY. 'The Southerners own their niggers jest as I own my horses. If I buy a farm in Kansas, haint I a right to take my horses there, I'de like to know? And haint the masters jest as good a right to take their niggers there? Haint the niggers their property, jest as my horses are my property?' These words smote upon our ear, through the gloaming twilight, as we were going home from the Post Office the other evening. They formed the grand climax of a Democratic wayside argument, and came from the occupant of a wagon which was jolting along over the stones a few rods ahead of us.- They were addressed to a republic, who rode a little behind the Democratic speaker, and they came out in a triumphant tone, which assured us that the said speaker was confident that he had extinguished his opponent. the effect on us was to produce something like the following train of reflections: In some parts of this world such political philosophy, coming from such a source, might be regarded as the expression of the lowest strata of ignorance and brutality. the enlightened fellow-countryman who should hear it would say, 'This sounds very badly; but it is only the thought of a poor, ignorant clown, who is not to be regarded as giving utterance to general public sentiment. He is [[/column 3]]
