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Show 30 the Church is mistaken, " Down with the Church! " If the people are wrong, then it says, " Woe unto you, 0 ye people ! you are sinning against God, and your sin will find you out." It does not appeal to the politician, the priest, the editor alone; it goes to the people, face to face, eye to eye, heart to heart, and speaks to them, and with immense power. It knows no man after the flesh. Let me suppose an impossibility,- that Mr. May should become as Everett, and Mr. Garrison as Webster: would their sin be forgiven by the Abolitionists? No : those who sit behind them now would stand, not on this platform, but on this table, and denounce them for their short-coming and wrongdoing. They spare no man; they forgive no sin against the Idea of Freedom. They are not selfish; for they ask nothing except an opportunity to do their duty. And they have had nothing except a "chance" to do that; always in ill report until now, when you shall judge how much there is of good report awaiting them. 'I'hey are untiring. I wish they would sink through the platform, so that I could say what would now put them to the blush before so large an audience. They appeal to the high standard of absolute right. This is their merit. The nation owes them a great debt, which will not be paid in this life. Their reward is in the nobleness which does such deeds and lives such life: thus they will take with them "an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and which fadeth not away." (2.) Here, I think, is their defect. They forget, some· times, that there must be political workmen. This comes from the fact, that, to so great an extent, they are Non· voters, even " non-~esistants." If they were the opposite, they would have appealed to violence: being Quakers and non-resistants, they have not done quite justice always, it seems to me, to those who work in the political way. 31 This has been charged against them: that they quarrel among themselves; two against three, and three against two; Douglass against Garrison, and Garrison against Douglass; the Liberty-party men against the old Antislavery 1nen ; and all that. That is perfectly true. But remember why it is so. You can bring together a Democratic body, draw your line, and they all touch the mark: it is so with the Whigs. They have long been drilled into it. But, whenever a body of men with new ideas comes to organize, there are as many opinions as persons. Pilate and Herod, bitter enemies of each other, were made friends by a common hostility to Jesus; but, when the twelve disciples came together, they fell out: Paul resisted Peter; James differed from John; and so on. It is always so on every platform of new ideas, and will always be so,- at least for a long time. We must bear with one another the best we can. I think that the antislavery party has not always done quite justice to the political men. See why. It is easy for Mr. Garrison and Mr. Phillips or me to say all of our thought. I am responsible to nobody, and nobody to me. But it is not easy for Mr. Sumner, Mr. Seward, and Mr. Chase to say all of their thought; because they have a position to maintain, and they must keep in that position. The political reformer is hired to manage a mill owned by the people, turned by the popular stream,- to grind into antislavery meal such corn as the people bring him for that purpose, and other grain also into different meal. He is not Principal and owner, only Attorney and Hired Man. He must do his work so as to suit his employers, else they say," Thou mayest be no longer miller." The non-political reformer owns his own mill, which is turned by the stream drawn from his private pond: he put up the dam, and may do what he will with his own,- run it all night, on Sunday, and the Fourth of July; 1nay grind just as he likes, for it is his own corn. |