Mixed though it has been with politics, it is in no
sense political, and springing naturally from the principles of that
religion which traces its human pedigree to a manger, and whose first
apostles were twelve poor men against the whole world, it can dispense
with numbers and earthly respect. The clergyman may ignore it in the
pulpit, but it confronts him in his study; the church-member, who has
suppressed it in parish-meeting, opens it with the pages of his Testament;
the merchant, who has shut it out of his house and his heart, finds it
lying in wait for him, a gaunt fugitive, in the hold of his ship; the
lawyer, who has declared that it is no concern of his, finds it thrust
upon him in the brief of the slave-hunter; the historian, who had
cautiously evaded it, stumbles over it at Bunker Hill. And why? Because it
is not political, but moral,--because it is not local, but national,
--because it is not a test of party, but of individual honesty and honor.
The wrong which we allow our nation to perpetrate we cannot localize,
if we would; we cannot hem it within the limits of Washington or Kansas;
sooner or later, it will force itself into the conscience and sit by the
hearthstone of every citizen.
It is not partisanship, it is not fanaticism, that has forced this matter
of Anti-slavery upon the American people; it is the spirit of
Christianity, which appeals from prejudices and predilections to the moral
consciousness of the individual man; that spirit elastic as air,
penetrative as heat, invulnerable as sunshine, against which creed after
creed and institution after institution have measured their strength and
been confounded; that restless spirit which refuses to crystallize in any
sect or form, but persists, a Divinely-commissioned radical and
reconstructor, in trying every generation with a new dilemma between case
and interest on the one hand, and duty on the other.
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