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404     DOUGLASS' MONTHLY.     February, 1861.
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'Now, in saying these things, I wish also to say that my views of American slavery have undergone no change.  I still regard it as a system of stupendous iniquity--a great curse, and a great crime.  And yet I distinguish between the system, and those connected with it.  I will not forget that my brethren at the South were born into it, have always been under its disastrous influence, and have never known any other social state.'

Now, read that extract again, and mark, first of all, the mendacious, foul and scandalous libel upon Radical Abolitionists, all the more detestable because delivered where no answer could be made to it, and at a time when, under the terror of disunion and treason, an Abolitionist can not in Rochester be publicly heard.  Mark, next, how the amiable and charitable Rev. J. B. SHAW, D. D., the high priest of the Brick Church, while launching his heaviest thunder bolts (fortunately not very heavy) at the heads of Abolitionists, charging [[italics]] them [[/italics]] with worshiping some [[italics]] 'ghost of a God, on whose bloody altar they would offer up all that is dear, and sacred, and holy,' [[/italics]] makes room, at the same time, in the heart of [[italics]] his [[/italics]] God for the traffickers in human flesh, and for all other robbers and murderers of their kind.  Mark, next, the assertion of the insignificance of the class he asperses, and learn from the whole thus far that you have been reading the utterances of an accuser without courage, a man without honesty, and a priest without religion.

But our Rev. Dr. SHAW uses a dangerous weapon when he descends to the low trick of making mouths at the 'God' of the Abolitionists.  That is a two-edged sword, and is as likely to wound those who use it as those against whom it is used.  He charges that the Abolitionists worship [[italics]] 'some ghost of a God, on whose bloody altar they would offer up all that is dear, and sacred, and holy.' [[/italics]]-- For this mode of attack we have long felt a deep repugnance.  The God of the Abolitionists will not suffer in comparison with the God of the slaveholders, or with Dr. SHAW's God, who has 'room in his heart' for slaveholders.  Men fashion their Gods after their own images, and attribute to them their own virtuous or vicious principles.  Hence there seems to be as many Gods as there are conflicting interests.  Dr. SHAW's God, the one who melts in mercy over the poor slaveholder, and deals in thunder bolts towards the Abolitionists, is but the result of Dr. SHAW's own imagining, under the influence and trammels of the corrupt moral sentiment about him.  A few stripes laid on his own tender, clerical back, right between the shoulders, by a practiced slave-driver, or a little lower down with a paddle, drawing the blood and raising the blisters at every blow, would do much to clear up his vision and open his eyes to the existence of a God of the oppressed, bruised and down-trodden slaves of the land.  He would soon conjure up before his startled vision some Abolition 'abstraction,' in preference to the slaveholder's God.  But we have no taste for this sort of warfare; and if any are shocked by this reference, let them remember that it is a Doctor of Divinity, one charged with the duty of inculcating reverence for religion, who has, in total forgetfulness of his duty, invoked the name of God in vindication of slavery, a system of blood, pollution and all uncleanness.  But we will not allow the imputation.  The crimes of slavery are the crimes of men--proud, selfish and mean men--men who, like the false prophet
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of the Brick Church, wishing to live at ease on the hard earnings of others, invests a system of robbery, murder, adultery and wholesale concubinage with divine sanction, because for the moment that best suits their convenience.  The same persons will condemn slavery as a sin against God and a crime against man, the very moment they cease to make money out of the slave system.  The divine sanction is the after thought.  Urged on by their brutal lusts, selfishness and love of power, they hurry across the ocean, steal men and women from their native land, crowd them in the hold of some infernal slave ship, and when they have got their victims well fettered and at work, they cover the hell-black villainy with the Providence of God, elaborate a misty theology, and with psalms, prayers and hymns, befool themselves into the notion that they are saints, while before God and man they are naked pirates and robbers.

We are charged by Dr. SHAW with 'magnifying the evils [[italics]] connected [[/italics]] with slavery.'-- Cunning priest!  You have put your charge in the form of a question; but that shall not avail you.  The form of the charge, as well as its nature, proclaims the character of the man who made it, as well as the falsehood of the charge itself.  It proves that Dr. SHAW either has no just conception of the immeasurable crimes and curses of slavery, or that he is too inhuman and dishonest to declare them, or to have them declared by others.--  Magnifying the evils of slavery!  How can such evils be magnified?  Who can measure them?  What eloquence can depict them?--  They defy alike the power of the pen and even the tremulous, half-shuddering utterances of the human voice to describe them.  It is a system of blood, tears and agonies.  Human language is unfamiliar with its ten thousand breathing horrors, and falters when pressed to unlock to us the deeds of deep damnation comprehended in the relation of master and slave.  And yet this Doctor of Divinity in the Brick Church, with a heart resembling the material of his church, looks upon four millions of his fellow men, bound in the iron chains of slavery, robbed of every thing that makes life dear, divested of every safeguard of virtue, the family abolished, the Bible prohibited, daughters without mothers, sons without fathers, all the natural relations of life ruthlessly broken up, each new born babe, newly stamped with the image of innocence, welcomed not to be trained up according to righteousness, to enjoy liberty, to grow in knowledge and goodness, but a beast of burden, without rights, a piece of property, a chattel personal; and instead of pouring out a gust of abhorrence of the frightful enormity, he shrieks out the obdurate question, 'Have we not magnified the evils of slavery?'  After that allegation, the way was smooth for his elaborate apology for slavery, and for the slaveholders who refuse to emancipate the slaves.  His deep cunning is displayed again in his question, 'Shall they abolish the traffic in flesh and blood, restore in all its sanctity the marriage relation, and keep them on the soil where they were born, until they shall have eaten the very land up?'  Dr. SHAW knew to whom he was speaking, and how far the fear of having the land eaten up would reconcile the Christian saints with traffic in '[[italics]] flesh and blood [[/italics]]' and the abrogation of the [[italics]]marriage tie[[/italics]].  He knew that with all their [[/column 2]]
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pretended trust in God, with all their pretended love of purity, that the mass of them were eady to say, let the traffic in human flesh be continued, and marriage be sunk into the bottomless pit of pollution, rather than that their salvation should endanger the physical comforts of the guilty wretches who hold the slaves in bondage.  This proud priest, having stolen the livery of the court of heaven to serve the Devil in, appeals to the basest motives of his hearers, and attempts to stir up the deep-seated prejudices of his fellow saints against the colored race, by asking, Shall they be allowed to remain on the soil of their birth? and implying that such an allowance would be a great evil.  Heartless priest! after dragging the negro from Africa and compelling him to toil for you more than two hundred years, hunting him down and bringing him back when he has attempted to escape for his freedom, your Christian pride is shocked with the idea of allowing the freed slave to remain on the soil watered with his tears, enriched with his blood, and tilled for generations by his hard hands.  Could any thing be more malignant and cruel?

Our Rev. Dr. SHAW next complains that pulpits of the North are closed against Christian ministers of the South.  He knows full well that the statement is false.  We defy him to point to a single instance where any minister has been excluded from a Northern pulpit because he lived at the South.  Where any exclusions have taken place, and they are rare, the ground has not been a geographical but a moral one.  It was not because of where the minister lived, but how he lived.  Some Christians there are, who think that the holders and traffickers in human flesh are not fit to preach the unsearchable riches of the gospel of Christ; but we admit that Dr. SHAW is not among this class of conscientious men, nor is this extremely singular.  All our churches in Rochester were opened to the ministers from the South who attended the Old School General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church last Spring, though they came from the blood-stained churches of the South, while Dr. CHEEVER, an Abolitionist, found all pulpits closed against him.

After all, Dr. SHAW would not be understood as believing in slavery--not he!  But he distinguishes between the evil and the evil doer, the 'system and those connected with it,' between the theft and the thief, between the robbery and the robber.  Amazing charity!  Why not apply the same rule to the whole circle of human transgression?  Why not fling open your prisons and welcome thieves and robbers to your holy communion table, remembering that most of them were born and brought up in the haunts of vice and crime?  Why bestow all your charity on the slaveholders?  Whatever may be your answer, here is the true explanation: the men-stealers are rich, powerful and popular, and the ordinary criminals are not.  The same priest who frames apologies for the stealers of men, would do the same for the stealers of horses, if horse stealing were equally popular.

Dr. SHAW denounces the Abolitionists.-- They are unwise, if not wicked, in his estimation.  We answer all such fault-finders with the very natural suggestion: come and do the work better.  If we have sought a good end by bad means, come you, who profess to be wiser and better than the rest of mankind, and
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