A Methodist Paper on Mobs. ========================== The Texas Christian Advocate, a regular paper of the M. E. Church, defends the action of the late mob in Bonham, Texas, by which a conference of ministers of the Methodist Episcopal Church were disturbed on the Sabbath, and warned to leave the town to escape personal violence. It says: A meeting was held at the Court House, in Bonham, on the 12th ult., with the design of paving the way for the exist of these organizing emigrants. The meeting was addressed by several gentlemen, all of whom concurred in the belief that the Northern Church had for its object the extirpation of slavery; and they agreed, with equal unanimity, that the extirpation of the said Northern Church became, therefore, a desirable thing. We agree with these speakers entirely. From the Texas Christian Advocate More Tea in the Harbor ====================== On our first page will be found an article from Zion’s Herald, Boston, on the late proceedings in Fannin County. It is entitled, A Conference Dispersed by a Mob. We publish it, that our readers may see a Northern view of the subject. Our reply is as follows: First, whenever a church organizes upon a political question, it is essentially mobocratic. So long as it does, nothing it may be laughed at as a kind of absurdity; but whenever it interferes with constitutional interests, it becomes, at least, revolutionary. A church has no earthly right to be illegal. If it is determined to interfere with laws and constitutions, it must appeal to an unearthly tribunal. The Government has never attempted the abolition of slavery. It never will, while the people claim the right under the Constitution to hold slaves. No State in this confederacy ever really emancipated a slave. Wherever the system has ceased to exist, the cause is not to be found in a conviction that slavery was immoral, but in the fact that it had become unprofitable. All assumptions of superior morality on the part of our Northern friends are absurd. Their opposition to slavery arises out of the worst passions of their nature. Abolitionists are honest only in so far as they are self-deceivers. Their principles lead them willingly to such conclusions as that the slaying of the master by the slave is not murder, and that the stealing of a slave is not theft. To which of the heathen gods they appeal in defence of such doctrines, and in justification of a policy which issues so questionably, we cannot tell; but we are certain that the Scriptures received among us are divine, abhor and renounce that kind of philanthropic incendiarism. The peaceable abolition of slavery in the Southern States is impossible. All practical efforts to abolish it can only serve to produce evils at once annoying and dangerous. The Herald admits that the Northern Church aims at abolition—that it comes among us for that special purpose—denouncing us meanwhile as heathens and despots of the vilest grade. A political church undertakes the modest task of revolutionizing our Government, and of making our people insecure in the possession of their rights, and when it is warned to desist from its destructive operations, it coolly determines to provoke the people to violence that it may appeal to the law to protect it in its work of subversion. The votaries of such a scheme can be screened from a charge of villainy only by the supposition that they are fanatical. And when a man is applying a lighted torch to your premises, you are not likely to pause upon a consideration of the difference between a ruffian and an enthusiast. He may think it is doing God service to burn you out, or he may be instigated by an unmitigated malevolence—the result is the same. The Church North may be honest or dishonest, she may be right or wrong, according to some real or imaginary super-legal standard; that makes no difference; she is to all intents and purposes an invasive force, and if she is greeted with active resistance in any slaveholding community, it would be nothing more than she has good reason to expect. Russia has no more right to colonize a band of monarchists in our midst for the avowed purpose of working our conversion to monarchy, than the Northern Church has to organize her legions upon our soil with a view to the abolition of slavery. It is useless for the Herald to talk about a free press and a free pulpit; the question is not one of opinion merely, but of interest. She admits it when it declares that the toleration of the Northern Church among us must eventuate in the abolition of slavery. The case then is this: that the church is determined on abolition, the Southern people are against it; and the question is, what will be the issue if neither of the parties recoils from its position? Has the Northern Church a moral or legal warrant for compelling us to the solution of the problem? We do not wish to solve it; we ask that it may not be stated. The Northern Church has the power to abandon the enterprise; we have neither the power nor the will to submit to its prosecution; for, if we would abolish slavery, we could not, and we would not if we could. If the Northern Church can, we do not want her to do it; and if she cannot, we do not want her to try. Abolition tea is, doubtless, a very good thing; but if, as appears from Zion’s Herald, we must let Boston teach us how to use it, can the Herald blame us much for preferring the impromptu method of Boston in 1774, to the troublesome Boston patient for 1859? Doing As He Would Be Done By! ============================= The following concluding sentences of the decision given by Judge Swan, of the Supreme Court of Ohio, in the case of the Oberlin rescuers, is a new and most extraordinary rendering of the Golden Rule:— As a citizen, I would not deliberately violate the constitution or the law by interference with fugitives from justice. But if a weary, frightened slave should appeal to me to protect him from his pursuers, it is possible I might momentarily forget my allegiance to the law and constitution, and give him a covert from those who were on his track. There are, no doubt, many slaveholders who would thus follow the instincts of human sympathy. And if I did, and was prosecuted, condemned and imprisoned, and brought by my counsel before this tribunal on a habeus corpus, and was then permitted to pronounce judgment in my own case, I trust I should have the moral courage to say before God and the country, as I am now compelled to say, under the solemn duties of a Judge, bound by my official oath to sustain the supremacy of the Constitution and the law:—The prisoners must be remanded. From the Marksville (Louisiana) Central Organ. Run, Nigger, Run! ================= The undersigned has a PACK OF HOUNDS for RUNAWAY NEGROES! His charges will be for catching a runaway $25, or $5 per day for hunting a runaway; and if the runaway should come back to his quarter, or give himself up to any person, the same charge will be made. N. R. FISHER. Evergreen, Parish of Avoyelles, June 16, 1858.