There is one institution to which we owe our first
allegiance, one that is more sacred and venerable than any other,--the
soul and conscience of Man.
What claim has Slavery to immunity from discussion? We are told that
discussion is dangerous. Dangerous to what? Truth invites it, courts the
point of the Ithuriel-spear, whose touch can but reveal more clearly the
grace and grandeur of her angelic proportions. The advocates of Slavery
have taken refuge in the last covert of desperate sophism, and affirm that
their institution is of Divine ordination, that its bases are laid in the
nature of man. Is anything, then, of God's contriving endangered by
inquiry? Was it the system of the universe, or the monks, that trembled at
the telescope of Galileo? Did the circulation of the firmament stop in
terror because Newton laid his daring finger on its pulse? But it is idle
to discuss a proposition so monstrous. There is no right of sanctuary for
a crime against humanity, and they who drag an unclean thing to the horns
of the altar bring it to vengeance and not to safety.
Even granting that Slavery were all that its apologists assume it to be,
and that the relation of master and slave were of God's appointing, would
not its abuses be just the thing which it was the duty of Christian men to
protest against, and, as far as might be, to root out? Would our courts
feel themselves debarred from interfering to rescue a daughter from a
parent who wished to make merchandise of her purity, or a wife from a
husband who was brutal to her, by the plea that parental authority and
marriage were of Divine ordinance? Would a police-justice discharge a
drunkard who pleaded the patriarchal precedent of Noah? or would he not
rather give him another month in the House of Correction for his
impudence?
The Antislavery question is not one which the Tract Society can exclude by
triumphant majorities, nor put to shame by a comparison of
respectabilities.
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