Southern Preachers

- Mr. Douglas, formerly a slave at the South, at a meeting of the Plymouth county A. S. Society remarked : - "But all this prejudice sinks into insignificance in my mind, whcn compared with the enormous iniquity of the system which is its cause - the system that sold my four sisters and my brother in bondage, and which calls on its priests to defend it even from the Bible! The slaveholding ministers preach up the divine right of slaveholders to property in their fellow men. The southern preachers say to the poor slave, 'Oh! if you wish to be happy in time, happy in eternity, you must be obedient to your rnasters; their interest is yours. God made one portion of men to do the working, and another to do the thinking; how good God is! Now you have no trouble or anxiety; but, ah! you can't imagine how perplexing it is to your masters and mislresses to have so much thinking to do in your behalf! You cannot appreciate your blessings: you know not how happy a thing it is for you that you were bom of that portion of the human family which has the working instead of the thinking to do! Oh! how grateful and obedient you ought to be to your masters'. How beautiful are the arrangements of Providence! Look at your hard, horny hands- see how nicely they are adapted to the labor you have to perform! Look at our delicate fingers, so exactly fitted for our station, and see how manifest it is that God designed us to be the thinkers and you the workers - oh', the wisdom of God !' I used to attend a Methodist church, in which my master was a class leader; he would talk most sanctimoniously about the dear Redeemer, who was sent to preach deliverance to the captives, and set at liberty them that are bruised' - he could pray at morning, pray at noon, and pray at night; yet he could lash up my poor cousin by his two thumbs, and inflict stripes and blows upon his bare back, until the blood streamed to the ground! all the time quoting Scripture for his authority, and appealing to that passage of the Holy Bible which says, 'He that knoweth his master's will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten wilh stripes!' Such was the amount of this good Methodist's piety!"