Note B — * * * * * THIRD EDITION. Price 6 1-4 cents single, 62 1-2 cents per dozen, $4 per hundred. No. 3. THE ANTI-SLAVERY EXAMINER. * * * * * LETTER OF GERRIT SMITH TO REV. JAMES SMYLIE, OF THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPI.

1st. The book of Acts sets forth the fundamental doctrines and requirements of Christianity. It is to the letters of the Apostles we are to look for extended specifications of right and wrong affections, and right and wrong practices. Why do these letters omit to specify the sin of slaveholding? Because they were addressed to professing Christians exclusively; who, far more emphatically then than now, were "the base things of the world," and were in circumstances to be slaves, rather than slaveholders. Doubtless, there were many slaves amongst them—but I cannot admit, that there were slaveholders. There is not the least probability, that slaveholding was a prevalent sin amongst primitive ChristiansB. Instructions to them on that sin might have been almost as superfluous, as would be lectures on the sin of luxury, addressed to the poor Greenland disciples, whose poverty compels them to subsist on filthy oil. No one, acquainted with the history of their lives, believes that the Apostles were slave-holders. They labored, "working with (their) own hands." The supposition, that they were slaveholders, is inconsistent with their practice, and with the tenor of their instructions to others on the duty of manual labor. But if the Apostles were not slaveholders, why may we suppose, that their disciples were? At the South, it is, "like people, like priest," in this matter. There, the minister of the gospel thinks, that he has as good right to hold slaves, as has his parishioner: and your Methodists go so far, as to say, that even a bishop has as good right, as any other person, to have slaves