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Show 76 ties, those of family and civil society, are severed by death. This, founded as it is on what is immortal in our nature, has an everlasting sacredness, and is never broken ; and every man has a right and still more is bound to lift up his voice against its violation. There are many whose testimony against slavery is very much diluted by the fact of its having been so long sanctioned, not only by n!age, but by law, by public force, by the forms of civil authority. They bow before numbers and prescription. But in an age of enquiry and innovation, when other institutions must make good their title to continuance, it is a suspicious tenderness, which fears to touch a heavy yoke, because it has .:rown by time into the necks of our fellow-creatures. Do we not know that unjust monopolies, cruel prejudices, barbarous punishments, oppressive institutions, have been upheld by law for ages? Majorities are prone to think that they can create right by vote, and ean legalize gainful crimes by calling the forms of justice to their support. But these conspiracies against humanity, these insults offered to the majesty and immutableness of truth and rectitude, are the last forms of wickedness to be spared. Selfish men, by combining into a majority, cannot change tyranny into right. The whole earth may cry out, that this or that man was made to be owned and used as a chat- ' 77 tel, or a brute, by his brother. But his birthright as a man, as a rational creature of God, cleaves to him untouched by the clamor. Crimes, exalted into laws, become therefore the more odious, just as the false gods of heathenism, when set up of old on the altar of J ehovah, shocked his true worshippers the more, by usurping so conspicuously the honors due to him alone. It is important, that we should each of us bear our conscientious testimony against slavery, not only to swell that tide of public opinion, which is to sweep it away, but that we may save ourselves from sinking into silent, unsuspected acquiescence in the evil. A constant resistance is needed to this downward tendency, as is proved by the tone of feeling in the free states. What is more common among ourselves, than a courteous, apologetic disapprobation of slavery, which differs little from taking its part. This is one of its worst influences. It taints the whole country. The existence, the perpetual presence of a great, prosperous, unrestrained system of wrong in a community, is one of the sorest trials to the moral sense of the people, and needs to be earnestly withstood. The idea of justice becomes unconsciously obscured in our minds. Our hearts become more or less seared to wrong. The South says, that slavery is nothing to us at the North. But through our trade we are brought into constant 7* |