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Show 106 tice and evils of this institution, and to the evidence of the benefits of Emancipation ; and if so, then the weight of guilt on this nation is great, and increasing. Our fathers carried on slavery in much blindness. They Jived and walked under the shadow of a dark and bloody past. But the darkness is gone. The "mystery of iniquity" is now laid open. Slavery, from its birth to its last stage, is now brought to light. The wars, the sacked and burning villages, the kidnapping and murders of Africa, which begin this horrible history ; the crowded hold, the chains, stench, suffocation, burning thirst, and agonies of the slave ship ; the loathsome diseases and enormous waste of life in the middle passage; the wrongs and sufferings of the plantation, with its reign of terror and force, its unbridled lust, its violations of domestic rights and cha9ties-these all are revealed. The crimes and woes of slavery come to us in moans and shrieks from the old world and the new, and from the ocean which divides them ; and we are distinctly taught, that in no other calamity are such wrongs and miseries concentrated as in this. To put an end to some of these woes, the most powerful nations have endeavored, by force of laws and punishments, to abolish the slave trade ; but the trial has proved, that, while slavery endures, the traffic which ministers to it cannot be suppressed . At length the axe has been laid at the root of the accursed tree. 107 By the act of a great nation nearly a million of slaves have been Emancipated; and the first results have exceeded the hopes of philanthropy. All this history of slavery is given to the world. The truth is brought to our very doors. And, still more, to us, above all people, God has made known those eternal princi pies of freedom, justice, and humanity, by which the full enormity of slavery may be comprehended. To shut our eyes against all this light ; to shut our ears and hearts against these monitions of God, these pleadings of humanity; to stand forth, in this great conflict of good with evil, as the chief upholders of oppression ; to array ourselves against the efforts of the Christian and civilized world for the extinction of this greatest wrong; to perpetuate it with obstinate madness where it exists, and to make new regions of the earth groan under its woes-this, surely, is a guilt which the justice of God cannot wink at, and on which insulted humanity, religion, and freedom call down fearful retribution. |
