Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/291



the last Sunday of May, 1854, which was also the beginning of Anniversary Week, I stood here to preach a Sermon of War. In 1846, at the beginning of the Mexican trouble, I spoke of that national wickedness, and again, at the end of the strife, warned the country of that evil deed, begun without the People's consent. When the next great quarrel broke out, in 1854, and Russia, Turkey, England, and France, were engaged in a war which threatened to set all Europe in a flame, I prepared an elaborate sermon on the causes and most obvious consequences of that great feud, an account of the forces then in the field or on the flood, and tried to picture forth the awful spectacle of Christian Europe in the hour of war. I spent many days in collecting the facts and studying their significance. But, while I was computing the cost and the consequence of foreign wickedness, a crime even more atrocious was getting committed under our own eyes, in the streets of Boston; and, when I came to preach on the Russian attack against the independence of a sister state, I found the sermon wholly out of time: for the Boston Judge of Probate had assaulted a brother man, innocent of all offence, poor, unprotected, and apparently friendless. The guardian of orphans—a man not marked by birth for such a deed, but spurred thereto by cruel goads—had kidnapped an American in our streets, clapped him into an unlawful