Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/25

Rh insult of base men, as well as to the pity of the good. Not only this, but his master strips him of his understanding; takes away his common sense, conscience, his reason, religion,—qualities that make a man differ from a beast; on his garments, his face, his wife and child, is written in great staring letters, so that he may read that runs—This man also has sold his birthright and become a slave. The jealous planter forbids his slave to learn; but he cannot take from him the understanding he has got. This refinement of torture it was left for intemperance to exercise, levelling at once the distinctions between rude and polished.

Bodily slavery is one of the greatest wrongs that man can inflict on man; an evil not to be measured by the external and visible woe which it entails on the victim, but by the deep internal ruin which it is its direct tendency to produce. If I had the tongue of the Archangel I could not give utterance to the awfulness of this evil. There is no danger that this be exaggerated,—no more than that the sun in a picture be .painted too bright. A wise man would do anything within the compass of righteousness, or Suffer a hundred deaths, if that were possible, rather than yield himself a slave, to be the tool and chattel of a master, who views him as a dog. A religious man will do all within the compass of religion to rescue others from a fate so hard. What we can do for this, then, let us do with faith in Him who brings good out of evil. You and I cannot move multitudes of men, but we can each move one, and so contribute our mite to remove the outward obstacles that oppose the freedom of man.

I know men say that you and I ought not to move in this matter; that we have nothing to do with it. They urge in argument that the Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the land, andi that sanctions slavery. But it is the supreme law made by the voters, like the statutes denouncing capital punishment. What voters have made can voters unmake. There is no supreme law but that made by God; if our laws contradict that, the sooner they end or the sooner they are broken, why, the better. It seems to be thought a very great thing to run counter to a law of man, written on parchment; a very little thing to run counter to the law of Al-