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LETTER FROM REV. DR. PENNINGTON.

MR. EDITOR:—By comparing my dates,
you will see that I am writing leisurely. I
have a reason for so doing.

Somewhere about two years since, a per-
son unknown to me, sent me a slip from the
printed columns of a newspaper, of which
the following is a copy:

"Rev. J. W. C. Pennington, D. D., a fugi-
tive slave, was recently elected Moderator of
the Third Presbytery of New York. This is
the Presbytery of which that pompous and
windy defender of the lower law, Rev. Dr.
Cox, is a member. That Dr. Pennington, who
has felt in his own person, the miseries and
horrors of slavery, should be a member of
that Presbytery, or any other forming a
constituent part of the Presbyterian Church,
is a fact which we cannot explain without
him to be either ignorant of the
position of that church in respect to slavery,
or lacking in self respect and sympathy for
them in bonds."—Pa. Freeman.

The editor does not say whether he is a
Quaker, a Methodist, an Episcopalina, a
Baptist, or a Congregrationalist, or whether
he belongs to no church—nor does he in-
form his readers by what authority he un-
dertakes to explain the reasons of my con-
nexion with the Presbyterian Church—that
fact, however, my connexion with the Pres-
byterian Church, he attempts to explain by
three suppositions, either one of which, if
proven, would be enough to place any man
in an unenviable position. But, really, I
cannot but demur to the editor's logic. To
dispose of a question of such grave import-
ance, relating to a man's right of conscience
and private judgment, by three sweeping
suppositions, without a single argument, is a
specimen of logic I have not met with in any
book on that science I have ever read, or in
the volume of common sense logic, which is
the best of all.

I am reminded of a story that Old Uncle
Taff, my master workman at the blacksmith-
ing business, used to tell among hundreds of
others, when I was young and working un-
der him. He told of a man named Wise
Peter, in one of the lower counties of Mary-
land, who was so called because he could
give a reason for any fact or event that came
under his notice, so that the slaves in their
quarterings at night, and in their Sunday
and holiday discussions, would always ap-
peal to Uncle Peter, who generally succeed-
ed in settling a matter, because, like modern
judges, he always gave his opinion, with reas-
sons sustained by strong talk. one day
some of the slave children found a curious
species of bat; it flies with hairless wings
while its body resembles a mouse. One of
those creatures had flown with such force
against an out building as to kill and deform
itself considerably. Well, it was brough
into the yard on a crooked stick, and Uncle
Peter was consulted to know what it was.—
Well, it so happened that Wise Peter, tho' a
knowing kind of a man, had not studied
natural history, and he got stuck. As the
creature lay on the ground, he walked
around it, turning it over now and again
with his cane. Finally, he stooped down,
and with a very sage-like nearer glance, said,
"Well, it is either a ground mole or a flying
squirrel." Such as the termination of
Wise Peter's inquest upon the dead bat.

But, to be serious, the Freeman, notwith-
standing the import of its name, and altho'
it may have acquainted itself with many
things, seems not to have learned one fact,
namely, that colored men have as strong
jealousy of their rights of private judgment
and conscience as white men have, and as