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Show 26 there is a doughfaced constituency." It is true; but the constituency is not always quite so soft as the delegate: it is at least slack-baked, and does not pretend to be what it knows it is not. Here, too, let me say, it is a great misfortune that the North has not sent more strong men to the political work. In time of war, you take the ablest men you can find, and put thern to do the military work of the people. The North commonly sends her ablest men to science, literature, productive industry, trade, and manufactures; the South, hers to politics; and so she outwits and beats us from one fifty years to another. But, in such a terrible battle as this before us now, rest assured the North cannot afford to send her strong men to callings directly productive of pecuniary value: we must have them in politics,- men of great mind, able to see far behind and before ; of great experience, to organize and administer. Above all must our statesmen be men of great Justice and Humanity, such as reverence the Higher Law of God. Integrity is the first thing needed in a statesman. The time may come when the men of largest human power may go to the shop, the countingroom, the farm, the ship, to science, or preaching: just now we cannot afford to make a land-surveyor out of a Washington, or turn our Franklins into tallow-chandlers. When we can afford such expenditure, I shall not object: now we are not rich enough to allow Moses to tend sheep, asses, and young camels, or to keep Paul at tent-making. Here are the antislavery forces which are not political. They are various. At first, the antislavery men looked to the American Church, and said, That will be our great bulwark and defender. Instead of being a help, it has been a hinder· ance. If the American Church, twenty years ago, could have dropped through the continent, and disappeared alto· 27 gether, the antislavery cause would have been further on than it is at this day. If, remaining above ground, every minister in the United States had sealed his lips, and said, ~' Before God, I will say no word for freedom or against it, In behalf of the slaveholder or of his victim,'' the antislavery enterprise would have been further on than it is at this day. I say, that, notwithstanding the majestic memory of William Ellery Channing, a magnanimous man, whose voice rung like a trumpet through the continent, following that other clearer, higher, more widely sounding voice, still spared to us on earth (Mr. Garrison's) ; notwithstanding the eloquent words which do honor to the name of Beecher and the heart of humanity ; notwithstanding the presence of this dear good soul (referring to Samuel J. May), whose presence in the antislavery cause has been like the month whose name he bears, and has brought a whole lapful of the sweetest flowers,- the Church has hindered more than it has helped. For the tallest heads in the great sects were lifted up to blaspheme the God of righteousness, and commit the sin which Mr. Remond says is second only to Athe· ism,- the denial of humanity. While the Atheist openly denied God, many a minister openly denied Man. I think the minister committed the worst sin; for he sinned in the name of God, and hypocritically: he wrought his blasphemy that he might gain his daily bread, while the Atheist perilled his bread and his reputation when he stood up, and said, " I think there is no God." I have no respect for Atheism; but, when a man in the pulpit blasphemes the Divinity of God by treading the humanity of man under his anointed foot, I say I would take my chance in the next world with him who speaks out of his own heart, in his blindness, and says, " There is no God," rather than share the lot of that man who, in the nan1e of Jesus and of the Father, treads down Humanity, and declares there is no Higher Law. |