Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/255

Rh to point to the Bible and say, "That is the foundation of the law. It all rests on the word of God!" So every wicked statute, each "ungodly custom become a law," had a divine authority! The same experiment is often, tried with the Fugitive Slave Bill—it is declared "divine," having "the sanction of the Law, and the Prophets, and the Gospel." With these two poisons do men corrupt the public fountains of morality!

Religion is the only basis for everything. It must go everywhere, into the man^s shop, into the seamstress' workroom, must steer the sailor's ship. Reverence for the Infinite Mind, and Conscience, and Heart, and Soul, who is Cause and Providence of this world,—that must go up to the highest heights of our speculation, down to the lowest deeps of our practice. Take that away, and there is nothing on which you can depend, even for your money; or for your liberty and life. Without a reverence for the higher law of God everything will be ruled by interest or violence. The Church will collapse into nothing, the State will go down to ruin! All around us are monuments of men who, in the name of truth broke the priest's creed, defied the king's statute in the spirit of justice. Look at them! There is a little one at Acton where two men gave their lives for their country; another at Concord; one at Lexington,—a little pile of dear old mossy stone, "Sacred to Liberty and the Rights of Mankind;" another at West Cambridge; another at Danvers,—all commemorative of the same deed; and on yonder hill there is a great stone finger pointing to God's higher law, and casting its shadow on the shame of the two sister cities. All New England is a monument to the memory of those men who trusted God's higher law, and for its sake put an ocean three thousand miles wide between them and their mothers' bones. It is this which makes Plymouth Rock so dear. Our calendar is dotted all over with days sacred to the memory of such men. What are the First of August, the Twenty-second of December, the Nineteenth of April, the Seventeenth of June, the Fourth of July, but bright red-letter days in our calendar, marked by the memory of men who were faithful to God, say the statutes of tyrants what they may say?