it is too much; I must speak out; I must assign them their true position. You say that I am excited. I am. I never can discuss these great principles, involving all that pertains to this deep, mysterious nature of ours, without becoming excited; but God grant it may not lead me to take ground for slavery! I have endeavored to compress my remarks into as brief a space as possible. I leave it to my audience to say whether I have maintained my proposition. I have, so to speak, merely endeavored to throw out the bones of the argument. I have already declared that the leading influences of the church and ministry in America are in a position to support the system of slavery as I have described it. In exemplifying this position, I may seem unnecessarily severe. I have no time to get on a Sabbath-day face or adopt a holy tone. I know no better way than get right, and speak right on as I feel. I confess it seems utterly impossible that any of these religious bodies should yield an influence to support such a system. I persuade myself sometimes in my closet that it cannot be so; but, alas! the delusion soon gives place to reality. Talk not of robbery-I cannot descend to mention it in the same connection with slavery. Common robbery merely takes the earned; slavery takes the EARNER; common robbery takes only the property; slavery takes the PROPRIETOR; common robbery clutches the thing; slavery lays rude hands upon the MAN. Why, the slave cannot say my hands, my feet, my body—my SOUL, without using a figure of speech! All he has belongs to another. Legislators and constitution-makers talk gravely about the rights of property. I pray you, sir, what is the foundation right of all property-the grand, indestructible

Gibraltar upon which all rights are based? My right to myself. That gone, you have swept away all that is great and awful in man. Now, when we lay at the feet of the leading ecclesiastics of the age the awful charge of conniving at this atheistical principle, and of strengthening the hands of these man-hyenas who practice on it, we are warned off as laying hands on the sacred and the holy. I cannot help it. For when I discover the massive moral power of these large and influential bodies pressing with ponderous weight upon the prostrate forms and crushed hearts of my Father's children, and hear their suppressed sighs and groans, and see them striving, and struggling, and surging beneath the awful incubus, and all in vain, I must and will cry out, GET OFF-IN GOD'S NAME, GET OFF !"

Certain enemies of Mr. Codding, especially in the west, have endeavored to injure his influence by base falsehoods respecting his religious sentiments. We cannot do better than quote a few paragraphs from a letter written by the Hon. Francis Gillette, from the west, and which was published two years since :

"From Beloit I passed down into Northern Illinois, to Lockport, a village situated on the Des Plaines river and Illinois canal, thirty-five miles south of Chicago. In that place and its vicinity I spent several days with Mr. Codding, a gentleman whom very many of the readers of the 'Republican' remember with a lively interest, as, for some years a very eloquent and effective advocate of reform in this state, and those who had

the pleasure of his personal acquaintance, as a truly fraternal and genial man. It is now ten years since Mr. Codding went from this state to visit some relatives in the vicinity of his present abode, with no thought but to return and resume his labors here; but he became so much interested in the great moral harvest-field of the west, that he finally yielded to pressing solicitations, and concluded to devote himself to that fresh and inviting field of labor. As a public speaker and an itinerating lecturer, no one of his many eastern friends and admirers will be surprised to learn that, in Illinois and Wisconsin, through which he has often passed and repassed, on missions of humanity and mercy, he is spoken of and admired by many, even, who differ from him in sentiment, as the Whitfield of the west, before whose truthful tongue and flashing eye the chosen and fitted champions of the opposition have quailed and slunk away never to encounter him again. In his person and manners he appears but slightly changed by the last ten years, time having brushed him lightly with his hoary wing. I found this admirable man, who, could he put his great soul into his wallet, could occupy a princely mansion and a most genteel city pulpit stuffed with the softest and downiest cotton, occupying his " own hired house," a very humble dwelling, quite retired from the village of Lockport, which, he told me, he had taken with a view of securing that retirement which is so favorable to study, and dividing his ministerial labors between two societies, neither of which is large-one in Lockport, and the other in Joliet, a village five miles south.

"Though regularly ordained some years since, after the strictest modes of Congregationalism, and cordially fellowshiped as

Possi

sound in the faith, I understand that Mr. Codding is now regarded by the vigilant sentinels of sectarian orthodox, as having apostatized from the true standard, and they have raised against him the cry of heretic. I was unable to ascertain the exact points of his heterodoxy, though, as I was informed, it was gravely alleged, 'as a stone of stumbling and rock of offense,' to many, who would not be thought lacking in true piety, that men and women even, who had been 'stayers at home' from public worship, and others, not a few, who had been Universalists, Unitarians, and I know not what other suspicious ones, were seen to attend on his ministrations. bly it may be true of Mr. Codding, as of some other persons in this marvelous age of the world, that his most alarming heresy consists in the rejection of that most unadorable trinity of slave-mongers, lower-law theologians, and hunker demagogues; and especially the denial of that new article which has recently been adopted into their creed, viz: that slave-catching is both a political and saintly duty, without which there can be no salvation to the Union. He does insist that a democracy which crushes liberty is a despotism, and that a religion without humanity is not christianity. He teaches that the worst heterodoxy is that which violates the divine law, in practice, and that sect-making is not christianizing society, but, on the contrary, filling it with discord and bigotry, thus impeding the progress of peace on earth and good will to men. In addition to the performance of his parochial labors, he occasionally goes out on a lecturing tour, his great aim still being to be diligent in his Master's vineyard, and devote all his noble powers to the elevation and advancement of his race."

It is impossible by description or quotation to give the reader a just idea of Mr. Codding as a writer or speaker. He must be seen and heard to be appreciated. He is now in the full maturity of his powers, and though he perhaps lacks something of the impetuosity of his youth, he has more of wisdom and charity for his foes. We consider him, in many respects, a model reformer. He scarcely ever indulges in bitter denunciations of slaveholders-scarcely ever makes enemies, unless it be among the most depraved class of people. All over the north there are men opposed to him, in his political, anti-slavery views, who, nevertheless, respect and love him. Yet he does not ever flinch a hair from rigid adherence to principle.