Page:An Address, Delivered in Tremont Temple.djvu/7



are sober days. The judgments of God have found us out. Years gone by chastised us with whips—these chastise us with scorpions. Thirty years ago, how strong our mountain stood, laughing prosperity on all its sides! None heeded the fire and gloom which slumbered below. It was nothing that a giant sin gagged our pulpits; that its mobs ruled our cities, burnt men at the stake for their opinions, and hunted them like wild beasts for their humanity. It was nothing that, in the lonely quiet of the plantation, there fell on the unpitied person of the slave every torture which hellish ingenuity could devise. It was nothing that as husband and father, mother and child, the negro drained to its dregs all the bitterness which could be pressed into his cup; that, torn with whip and dogs, starved, hunted, tortured, racked, he cried: "How long! oh Lord, how long!" In vain did a thousand witnesses crowd our highways, telling to the world the horrors of this prison-house. None stopped to consider, none believed. Trade turned away its deaf ear—the Church gazed on them with stony brow—Letters passed by with mocking tongue. But what the world would not look at, God has set to-day in a light so ghastly bright, that it almost dazzles us blind. What the world refused to believe, God has written all over the face of the continent, with the sword's point, in the blood of our best and most beloved. We believe the agony of the slave's hovel, the mother and the husband, when it takes its seat at our board. We realize the barbarism that crushed him in the sickening and brutal use of the relics of Bull Run, in the massacre at Fort Pillow, in the torture and starvation of Libby Prison, where idiocy was mercy, and death God's best blessing; and now bitterly we realize it in the coward spite which strikes an unarmed man, unwarned, behind his