of an existing evil, which the founders of that Constitution designed to cease, made the pretext for an Act after the lapse of more than sixty years, rendering the freedom of the free black precarious, and making the whole Union aiders and abetters of the "peculiar institutions" of the South.* Surely, if the Southern States have a right to pass laws, without the sanction of the Union, for treating of their slaves, the Northern States have at least a right to say, without the sanction of the Union, "keep them, then, for yourselves." The great minds of America should be above technical difficulties in the way of great public and national duties. The splendid abilities of Daniel Webster should be employed in showing the people how they may get rid of the evil, which is at this moment at once their greatest danger and dishonour, and he should emulate Washington, framing a state of things in accordance with right and light, and not some technical lawyer of George III.'s government, showing how the colonies were bound, by their duty to the English constitution, to bear the wrongs inflicted on them, and aid in their infliction. The scholars should tell the people that the safest thing for a nation has always been to do justly, and its greatest danger to continue within its own bosom, three millions of wronged to such claimant a certificate of his right to take any such person, identified and proved to be owing service or labour as aforesaid, which certificate shall authorise such claimant to seize, or arrest, and transport such person to the State or Territory from which he escaped: Provided, That nothing herein contained shall be construed as requiring the production of a transcript of such record as evidence as aforesaid, but in its absence, the claim shall be heard and determined upon other satisfactory proofs competent in law. Approved, September 18, 1850.

MILLARD FILLMORE.

" is an exag

Nothing can more clearly demonstrate the absolutely retrograde course of American legislation on this subject, than the remarks of Mr. Webster on the former Fugitive Act, and the exaggerated impressions which prevailed of its effects: The first of these misapprehensions," he says, gerated sense of the actual evil of the reclamation of fugitive slaves, felt by Mass chusetts, and the other states. What produced that? The cases do not exist. There has not been a case within the knowledge of this generation, in which a man has been taken from Massachusetts into slavery by process of law-not one."-" What I mean to say is, that there has been no man, under the constitution and laws of the country, sent back from Massachusetts into slavery, in this generation."-Speech in the Senate on the Compromise Bill, July 17th, 1850. But can this be said now, and under the new and more stringent Act? and if it has been followed by many of those cases, of which Mr. W. declared there had not under the old Act been one, has the opposition to it, both in its progress and on its passing, been without cause?

human beings held in slavery, and three millions more in liberty, and ready to sympathize with them and act for them. Where would England have been in 1848, if the cries of her Anti-corn-law men, her Parliamentary-reform men, her Protestant Dissenters and her Roman Catholic subjects, had been still entering the chambers of her government unlistened to? It was by getting these various wrongs out of the way, and turning them all into rights, that she stood her ground among the convulsed nations of Europe. And America, instead of vainly telling the Abolitionists to cease their turmoil (which they will never do) and to reverence the law (which as long as it is wrong and bad, they never can), had better apply herself to lessen, not to intensify and embitter, her peculiar evil. The clergy should tell the people that it is a fixed law of God, that the right, when once perceived, shall triumph over the wrong, and that it is the duty of citizens to bring their laws and institutions into harmony with that right, or they will perish. There does not exist on the face of the earth, a nation more able and more free to take up and forward the right in every direction, if they will only refuse to be slaves to their own slavery, and to bind down the freedom of their own hearts and consciences with the same fetters which bind the bodies of their captives. We should believe that such considerations would in time have their weight with the leading minds in America, were it not, that there is an unexpressed difficulty, which, so long as it exists, will ever prevent them from doing anything in active help towards freeing this wretched population. They hate this slavery with a perfect hatred, or rather with a perfect vexation and disgust. This is manifest in Mr. Webster, this is manifest in Dr. Dewey. But in what spirit do they hate it? They wish the whole black race were at the bottom of the sea-or far into the Sahara. They think them a bad breed. They look at them as something worse than the scum of Ireland and Europe, which year by year is dashed upon their shores, to deteriorate their own native population, as fast as, or faster than, they can introduce it to comfort and education. They do not hate slavery so much as the slaves themselves. They wish they had never had them: they do not want to see them multiplied they do not like to see new slave-states intro

duced into the Union: they do not want to see the extension of the system: they would willingly see its annihilation: they would send them across the Rocky Mountains: they would send them back to Africa: they would give two hundred million dollars to be rid of them: * but they will not free them. They believe, what it is not now thought prudent to say, that they are an inferior stock, who may do very well among themselves and by themselves, but who must be in subjection, if they live among whites. They deliberately believe them to be better and happier under a mild slavery than in the possession of actual freedom. They do not believe them equal to selfcontrol or self-improvement: they believe that they would be every way worse in freedom than in slavery. This, we think, must be Mr. Webster's feeling-we are pretty sure it is that of Dr. Dewey and of others. Would that these gentlemen would reflect whence this incompetence to manage for and improve themselves arises; and why, as long as slavery exists, this must always be true of slaves. Aristotle said, long ago, 66 a slave can have no virtue." Longinus said, that "slavery is the prison of the soul, and a public dungeon." Brutus thought it "non modo bello, sed morte repellendum." Sir Walter Raleigh considered it a condition" as much below that of brutes, as to act against reason is worse than to act without it." We doubt not that these blacks, turned into liberty without the capital of any virtue, to protect and guard them, may suffer loss or bankruptcy. Perhaps then they would "die out," as Dr. Dewey, by some inscrutable process, seems to hope that the system will. As we have no faith whatever in the natural death of evil, but believe that it never dies, except when good is the executioner-we would earnestly commend to the great and good minds of these vast states to beware how they "treasure up for themselves wrath against the day of wrath," but on the contrary apply themselves to putting their house in order and in strength, that it may stand before the rain and the flood—and if they have, by our own wretched example, been two hundred years bringing up slaves in the vices of slavery, let them apply themselves, also by our example, to bring up the same race as freemen in the virtues of liberty.

* Offer of Mr. Webster to give Virginia back the value of her ceded territory.

ART. IV.-RELIGION AND GEOLOGY.

The Religion of Geology and its connected Sciences. By EDWARD HITCHCOCK, D.D., LL.D., President of Amherst College, and Professor of Natural Theology and Geology. 8vo. Boston (N.E.) 1851.

Ir is remarkable that while philosophers of a certain school depreciate the argument derived from the evidences of design in creation for the Being of God, no class of works is more eagerly read by the cultivated part of the religious world, than those in which this argument is varied and extended with every enlargement of the natural sciences. Small metaphysicians sneer at Paley's watch, and men of more profound research declare that when passed through the alembic of their analysis, the argument a posteriori leaves no residuum of logical proof. And yet, from the dialogue of Socrates with Aristodemus the Little, down to the Bridgewater Treatises, in which the whole compass of human knowledge respecting the exterior world is brought to bear on this argument, it has been the mainstay of theism, so far as belief in it has been the result of reasoning. Of those who have cast it aside, some leave us to atheism or pantheism, while others offer us in its stead, reasoning of so very subtle a texture, that it collapses into nothing when the practical understanding attempts to grasp it.

We believe that it will always be so. No doubt, one who builds his faith in the existence of an Intelligent Cause upon the argument derived from the marks of design in creation, is liable to be asked, "If creation require for its production a Being of infinite power and wisdom, how can you avoid the conclusion, that the Creator himself requires a cause, and so on, till you find that you are vainly pursuing the idea of a First Cause, through an endless secondary succession?" Plausible, however, as this may seem, we believe that it has the slightest possible effect in disturbing the mind's repose in that conviction of a personal Deity, which it derives from the marks of adaptation in the different parts of nature and the wisdom of

its general laws. If we are told that an organized world rose out of Chaos, the impulse is irresistible to ask, "And Chaos whence?" But this impulse is exhausted, and the desire to pursue the chain of causation is satisfied, when we have arrived at the conception of power united with spiritual intelligence. It may be that this only proves how prone we are to assimilate the unknown to the known, and that we associate power with mind, because we are conscious of their union in ourselves. At all events this propensity is no idiosyncrasy of the philosophical theist. The whole history of religious belief, from the rudest fetisch worship to the most refined theism, is nothing else than the association of nature and events with some intelligent cause. The idolater does not believe that the stocks and stones which he worships are true causes of the phænomena he beholds, confused as his mind may be between the symbol and that which it symbolizes. We may therefore call it an universal and ultimate fact-a law-in human nature, that it seeks to connect material phænomena with will and intelligence residing in some unseen cause, and that having established such a connection it rests satisfied in "full assurance of faith." The more extended culture of the mind and moral faculties spiritualizes and purifies the conception of this unseen intelligence, but the process by which the human mind arrives at the conviction of its existence is always the same. We have little fear therefore that this faith will be disturbed by attempts to prove that the process is not logically unassailable; and just as little confidence in the efficacy of the attempts that are made to supply its place, by arguments drawn from the obscurest depths of human consciousness.

Paley (whom we shall be old-fashioned enough to quote as a master in the school of Natural Theology) justly observes that the argument from design and adaptation to the existence of an intelligent First Cause is cumulative, and is perfect in every single instance in which such design and adaptation is clearly made out. Nevertheless we are influenced by number as well as weight of testimonies, and are glad to receive additional illustrations from every new branch of physical science. Geology is one of the youngest-or if not the latest born, is the last that has come to years of discretion and made good her