Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/252

240 than men's passions and calculations; the law of some power which makes the Universe and sways it for noble purposes and to a blessed end.

Then comes the doctrine:—While the statute is on the books it must be enforced: it is not only the right of the legislator to make any constitutional statute he pleases, but it is the moral and religious duty of the magistrate to enforce the statute; it is the duty of the people to obey. So in Pharaoh's time it was a moral duty to drown the babies in the Nile; in Darius' time to pray to King Darius, and him only; in Herod's time to massacre the children of Bethlehem; in Henry the Eighth's time to cast your Bible to the flames. Iscariot only did a disagreeable duty.

It is a most dreadful doctrine; utterly false! Has a legislator, Pharaoh, Darius, Herod, Henry the Eighth, a single tyrant, any moral right to repudiate God, and declare himself not amenable to the moral law of the universe? You all answer, No! Have ten millions of men out of nineteen millions in America a right to do this? Has any man a moral right to repudiate justice and declare himself not amenable to conscience and to God? Where did he get the right to invade the conscience of mankind? Is it because he is legislator, magistrate, governor, president, king? a right to do wrong!

Suppose all the voluptuaries of America held a congress of lewdness at New Orleans, and said, "There is no law higher than the brute instinctive passion of lust in men,"—then would the pimps, and bawds, and lechers have the moral right to repudiate conscience and crush purity out of the nation?

Imagine that all the misers, and sharpers, and cheats held a convention of avarice at New York or Boston, and made statutes accordingly, declaring, "There is no law higher than covetousness,"—would they have the moral right to lie, and steal, and cheat, and "crush out" all the honest men?

Fancy all the ruffians and man-killers assembled in San Francisco,—it would be a fit place, for there were twelve hundred murders committed there in less than four years,—held a convention of violence, and sought to organize murder, and declared, '^ There is no law higher than the