Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/50

44 they held fast to orthodoxy they might let morality go, or rather because they had no real faith in them, but only a traditional creed, bowed, under the hypocritical pretence of political neutrality, to the dominant iniquity of the hour. Conspicuous among them in compliance was that Church—the Church, as we have said, of wealth and fashion—the presence of which in America appears to our High-Churchmen the only redeeming feature in that God-forsaken world. Soon, even in New England, abolitionists were hunted down as noxious fanatics; the rich, and, as they call themselves, the respectable citizens, heading the mob which assailed them. The moral life of the community was fast ebbing away under the deadly pressure. The national legislature was gagged, and the press was in danger of being gagged on the question most vital to the well-being of the state. Men do not yet know what a crisis in the world’s history this was. The supreme moment seemed to have come, when Daniel Webster, a puny soul in a giant body of intellect, passed to the side of Slavery in hope of obtaining the Southern nomination to the presidency, which, however, the mocking fiend denied him, when he had sold his principles and his fame. Humanity will for ever honour the names of Theodore Parker and those who with him struggled in this the darkest hour of American history, at the cost of social excommunication, at the risk of personal violence, to stem the mingled tide of Slavery, materialism, and political atheism which was overwhelming the moral world, and beneath which, as Parker says in his funeral oration on Webster, everything had sunk, even the steeples of the highest churches, except the ark of God. Their indignation against dominant wrong may have provoked these men to the use of violent language. Their