This disturbed conscience is evident from the
very agony with which men wrest the Scriptures
for some sort of warrant with which to repel the



Importance op the Question. 23

accusation of wrong. It is an amazing spectacle,
presented at this hour. Half a million slave own-
ers, and half a million abettors, North and South,
in the church and out, voluntarily, as a final refuge,
fleeing to the Word of God, and asserting a Di-
vine warrant for the relation. On the other hand,
four million slaves, every day groaning under an
oppression more bitter than that of Israel in Egypt
— their very helplessness, and ignorance, and suf-
fering, crying to the throne of God — *' the plea is
blasphemy ;" and the Christian world adding its
protest against it as an inhuman and appalling
crime. Verily, were we to be silent, the stones
would cry out ! And the dumb, mournful wail of
the slave, bound in a doom, every year more ter-
rible, would ascend to God, with the unanswera-
ble accusation, " I was poor, sick, in prison, and
in boiids, and ye remembered me not, nor plead for
me, nor visited me. "

Of the men (ministers of Christianity, alas !) of
the North, who defend slavery, and would bind the
captive with new chains, — I will not speak nor
name them. They have their reward I I do not
know of a more melancholy spectacle, — surely
none more painful to a Christian heart, touched
in any measure with the compassion of Jesus Christ
than to look on the name of an ambassador of
eternal mercy, going abroad as a sanction and in
defence of the crime of slavery, in the year of
grace 18611 ! 1



24 The Ethics op Slavery.
