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The Payments amounted to 6491. 15s. 6d.

Progress of the Society. The Dean of Bristol and the Archdeacons of Cleveland and Ely are become Vice-Presidents of the Society.

Societies have been formed in the Dioceses of Durham and Gloucester, under the patronage of the respective Bishops, which circulate the Tracts of the Society. Branch Associations having been formed, during the year, at Wolverhampton and at Derby, the Committee enumerate Thirteen Societies and Associations in England and Ireland which circulate the Society's publications.

Religious Tract Societies among Episcopalians at Baltimore and at Boston, in the United States, have reprinted some of the Society's Tracts. A third Institution has been formed at St. Paul's Church Philadelphia, for the purpose of circulating the Homilies of the English Church, and such Tracts as are calculated to cherish and diffuse the pirit of her Reformers and Martyrs.

New Tracts.

While large editions of the Tracts which were out of print have been Grepared, the following New Tracts ave been issued:

An Appeal to Holy Scripture for the urchman's Confirmation in the great etrine of the TRINITY, to the proion of which he was dedicated at his tism.

he Festivals of the United Church ngland and Ireland; or, a short lain Explanation of her Services ⚫ose occasions: Part the Second, Furch, 1823.

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Of the Tract on the Trinity, which forms the Sixty-seventh in the general series, it is said

Testimonies to that fundamental docIt presents a summary of Scripture trine of our faith; and thereby furnishes an antidote to the infidel and deistical principles which are so awfully and widely disseminated in publications of every size and shape in the present day. Sunday-School Tracts.

The other three Tracts above mentioned are additions to the series for the use of Children and Sunday Schools. On the Tracts of this series, which now contains nine, it is remarked

The Teacher who devotes to this ob

ject several hours of the Sabbath, will find this Society to be a safe and a useful auxiliary to his labours, by furnishing him with a series of Tracts (either as school-books or as rewards) adapted to the capacities of children; and calculated not only to infuse into their minds the

principles of religion, but also to train them up in conscientious communion with the Establishment, by shewing them that its doctrines and discipline, its creeds and formularies, are founded upon, and in close accordance with the Word of God.

Issue and Stock of Tracts.

The number printed during the year was 146,000: that issued was 203,240; which consisted of 177,291 sold in separate Tracts, 6800 sold in bound volumes, and 19, 149 gratuitously distributed.

In the Depositoryat Bristol, there is a stock of Tracts on hand amounting to 281,173, and in other places 130, 202 forming a total of 411,375.

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the Legislature was passed in 1807 after a struggle of twenty years, would have tended rapidly to the mitigation and gradual extinction of Negro Bondage in the British Colonies: but that in this hope they have been painfully disappointed; and, after a lapse of sixteen years, they have still to deplore the almost undiminished prevalence of the very evils, which it was one great object of the Abolition to remedy

That, under these circumstances, they feel themselves called upon, by the most binding considerations of their duty as Christians, by their best sympathies as men, and by their solicitude to maintain unimpared the high reputation and the solid prosperity of their country, to ex, ert themselves, in their separate and collective capacities, in furthering this most important object, and in endeavouring, by all prudent and lawful means, to mitigate, and eventually to abolish the Slavery existing in our Colonial Possessions.

Appeal in behalf of the Society.

The misery and vice which result from Personal Slavery, are forcibly urged by the Committee, as motives for exertion in procuring its Mitigation and ultimate Abolition:

Among the manifold evils to which Man is liable, there is not, perhaps, one more extensively productive of wretchedness than Personal Slavery.

Slavery may, without exaggeration, be described as inflicting on the unhappy subjects of it almost every injury which Law, even in its rudest state, was intended to prevent. Is property an object of solicitude ?-the Slave, generally speaking, can neither acquire, nor securely enjoy it. Is exemption from personal wrong indispensable to comfort ?the Slave is liable to indignity and in sult, to restraint and punishment, at the mere caprice of another: he may be harassed and rendered miserable in a thousand ways, which, so far from admitting of the proof that would be requisite to obtain legal redress (even where any legal redress is ostensibly provided), can perhaps with difficulty be distinguished from such exercise of a master's power, as admits of no regulation or controul: even life itself may, with impunity, be wantonly sported with it may be abridged by insufficient sustenance-it may be wasted by excessive labour

nay, it may be sacrificed by brutal violence, without any proportionate risk of adequate punishment.

In short, the Slave can have no security for property, comfort, or life; because he himself is not HIS OWN: he belongs to another, who, with or without the offer of a reason or pretence, can at once separate all from him, and him from all, which gives value to existence.

Again: What sense of moral obligation can he be expected to possess, who is shackled with respect to every action and purpose, and is scarcely dealt with as an accountable being? Will the man, for example, whose testimony is rejected with scorn, be solicitous to establish a character for veracity? Will those who are treated as cattle, be taught thereby to restrain those natural appetites which they possess in common with their fel

low-labourers in the team? Or will women be prepared for the due performance of domestic and maternal duties, by being refused the connubial tie; or by being led to regard prostitution to most honourable distinction to which their owner, or his representative, as the they can aspire ?

From this source of Slavery, then, flows every species of personal suffering and moral degradation, until its wretched victim is sunk almost to the level of the brute; with this farther disadvantage, that, not being wholly irrational, he is capable of inspiring greater degrees of terror, resentment, and aversion, and will therefore seem to his owner to require and to justify severer measures of coercion.

And let it not be forgotten, that Slavery is itself not merely the effect; it is also the very cause, of the Slave Tradeof that system of fraud and violence, by which Slaves are procured. If Slavery were extinct, the Slave Trade must cease: but, while it is suffered to exist, that murderous traffic will still find a fatal incentive in the solicitude of the Slaveholder to supply the waste of life which his cupidity and cruelty have occasioned. Thus, in every point of view, is Slavery productive of the worst consequences to all the parties concerned. Besides all the direct and wide-wasting injuries which it inflicts on its immediate victims, it substitutes for the otherwise peaceful merchant a blood-thirsty pirate trading in human flesh; and by minis

:

tering to pride, avarice, and sensuality, by exciting the angry passions and hard. ening the heart against the best feelings of our nature, it tends to convert the owner of Slaves into a merciless tyrant. The Society, be it remembered, are not now endeavouring to rouse indignation against particular acts of extraor dinary cruelty, or to hold up to merited reprehension individuals notorious for their crimes they are only exhibiting a just picture of the nature and obvious tendencies of Slavery itself, wheresoever and by whomsoever practised. They are very far from asserting, or supposing, that every one of the enormities to which they have alluded, will be found to co-exist in all their horrors in every place where Slaves may be found: but they know, that, in such places, they have existed, at one time or other, in a greater or less degree-that, in many places, they are even now in full and fearful force and that they are liable to be revived in all.

Should this picture appear to some persons to be overcharged, they would refer them to the most decisive and unquestionable authorities.

The felon

Slave-trader, indeed, they consign to the laws of England, and to the recorded reprobation of Europe; but for the aecuracy of their delineation of the wretchedness and degradation connected with the condition of Personal Slavery, (willing as they are to admit the humanity of many of the Owners of Slaves, and

the efforts which some of them have

made to mitigate the evils of Colonial
Bondage,) they appeal to Ancient and to
Modern History, and to every traveller
worthy of credit who has visited the
regions where that condition of society
prevails. Three thousand years ago, a
Heathen Poet could tell us,

Jove fixed it certain, that whatever day
Makes man a Slave takes half his worth away.
And this might be shewn to be the con-
current testimony of all ages.

The enemies of Negro Freedom, in our own age and country, were so sensible of this truth, that, with great shrewdness, they disputed the claim of the Negro Race to be regarded as men. They, doubtless, felt with Montesquieu, that if "Negroes were allowed to be men, a doubt might arise whether their masters could be Christians." This position, however, has been abandoned as untenable; and we may therefore indulge in a sanguine hope, of at length

recovering for them the indubitable rights of humanity, so long and so cruelly withheld by the strong arm of oppression.

Some persons, however, may here be disposed to ask, how it is possible, if Slavery were an evil so enormous as it has now been represented to be, that it should not only have been tolerated, but recognised and established as a legal condition of society, by so many polished, and even Christian Nations, up to this very day.

The Society admit, that, to a humane and considerate mind, nothing can seem more extraordinary, than that this and other enormities, the removal of which lies obviously within the compass of human ability, should yet continue to torment mankind from age to age. But our past supineness in no degree weakens the obligation which we are under to attempt their removal, when their real nature has been detected and exposed. Nor will the plea of prescription and antiquity, or of previous connivance, justify the prolongation of practices, which both religion and natural justice condemn as crimes. The African Slave Trade, with all the abominations accompanying it in every stage, had been carried on for centuries, without attracting observation; and, even after it had excited the attention of a few benevolent individuals, it cost many a laborious effort and many a painful disappointment, before a conviction of its inherent turpitude and criminality became general, and its condemnation was sealed in this country. In the exultation produced by this victory, it was perhaps too readily believed, that the Colonial Slavery, which had been fed by the Slave Trade, would, when all foreign supply was stopped, undergo a gradual but rapid mitigation, until it had ceased to reproach our Free Institutions and our Christian Profession, and was no longer known but as a foul blot in our past history. It was this hope, joined to a liberal confidence in the enlarged and benevolent purposes of the Colonial Proprietary, which prevented the immediate prosecution of such further Parliamentary Measures as should have, at once, placed the unhappy Slave under the protection of the law, and have prepared the way for his restoration to those sacred and inalie nable rights of humanity of which he

had been unjustly dispossessed. But if, as is the fact, every such hope has proved illusory, and all such confidence has only served to render their disappointment more bitter and mortifying, shall the

friends of the African Race be now reproached for waiting no longer, when the real ground of reproach is, that they should have waited so long? They place themselves then on the immoveable ground of Christian Principle, while they invoke the interference of Parliament, and of the country at large, to effect the immediate mitigation, with a view to the gradual and final extinction, in all parts of the British Dominions, of a system which is at war with every principle of religion and morality, and outrages every benevolent feeling. And they entertain the fullest conviction, that the same spirit of justice and humanity, which has already achieved so signal a victory, will again display itself in all its energy, nor relax its efforts until it shall have consummated its triumphs.

On an occasion of this nature, when the consummation and ultimate end of all his benevolent labours in behalf of the oppressed people of Africa is brought into view, their untired and undaunted Champion could not remain silent : a forcible Address has just appeared from the eloquent pen of Mr. Wilberforce, in furtherance of the object of this. Society. Another pamphlet, entitled "Negro Slavery, or a View of some of the more prominent Features of that State of Society," has been lately published, which comes powerfully in aid of the same object, as it exhibits a series of Facts, on unquestionable authority, which place in the most affecting point of view the demoralizing and degrading effects of the State of Slavery.

HIBERNIAN TRANSLATION SOCIETY. Object and Grounds of the Society. THIS Institution was established at a Public Meeting, held in the Lecture Room of the Dublin Institution, on the 30th of April, of last

year-the Right Hon. the Earl of Roden in the Chair-for the purpose of forming a Society for aiding the Translation of the Holy Scriptures into Foreign Languages."

19

An Address has been lately circulated by the Committee, some extracts from which will explain the grounds on which the Society has been established:

:

Among all the Societies at present existing in Ireland for promoting the knowledge of the Redeemer's Name among Heathen Nations, there is not one specifically directed to the Translation of his Holy Word into their various languages. Hitherto, Ireland has borne no share in this important conHer Bible Society is purely do. mestic; and though her Missionary Exertions have been laudably extensive, considering her means, and eminently successful, as yet she has made no effort that foreign tribes and nations may read in their own tongues the wonderful works of God.

cern.

Under such circumstances, the Committee of the "Hibernian Society for aiding the Translation of the Holy Scriptures into Foreign Languages" conceive that they have just ground to congratulate the Irish Public upon its formation. It is not a Bible Society, for it does not circulate the Scriptures: it is not a Missionary Society, for it has nothing to do with the explanation of them but its simple object is, to assist all Societies engaged in the Translation of the Holy Scriptures into Foreign Languages.

Society, it is presumed, should protect This simplicity of object in the it from every jealousy; and, at the same time, commend it to public patronage. It interferes not with any cther Society, but is in the strictest harmony with all: and, even should the Hibernian Bible Society, at some future period, find herself in a situation to imitate her elder sister of Great Britain, and embrace foreign objects in her principle, and bend her energies to foreign operations; still it is conceived that they would not clash, and that the Hibernian Bible Society would find in the Hibernian Translation Society a powerful and efficient auxiliary.

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