Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/27

Rh the powers that be, is no more sanctioned by the supreme law of the land than stealing or murder. No enactment of man can make that right which was wrong before. It can never be 'abstractly right in any circumstances to do what is abstractly wrong.

But that other slavery, which comes from yourself, that is wholly within your power. And which, think you, is the worse, to be unwillingly the slave of a man and chained and whipped, or to be the voluntary slave of avarice, passion, peevishness, intemperance! It is better that your body be forcibly constrained, bought and sold, than that your soul, yourself, be held in thraldom. The spirit of a slave may be pure as an angel’s; sometimes as lofty and as blessed too. The comforts of religion, when the heart once welcomes them, are as beautiful in a slave's cabin as in a king's court. When death shakes off the slave's body, the chain falls with it, and the man, disenthralled at last, goes where the wicked cease from troubling, where the weary are at rest, where the slave is free from his master; yes, where faithful use of the smallest talent and humblest opportunity has its reward, and unmerited suffering finds its ample recompense. But the voluntary slavery under sin—it has no bright side. None in life; in death no more. You may flee from a taskmaster, not from yourself.

Body-slavery is so bad that the sun might be pardoned if it turned back, refusing to shine on such a sin; on a land contaminated with its stain. But soul-slavery, what shall we say of that? Our fathers bought political freedom at a great price; they sailed the sea in storms; they dwelt here aliens on a hostile soil, the world's outcasts; in cold and hunger, in toil and want they dwelt here; they fought desperate wars in freedom's name! Yet they bought it cheap. You and I were base men, if we would not give much more than they paid, sooner than lose the inheritance.

But freedom for the soul to act right, think right, feel right, you cannot inherit; that you must win for yourself. Yet it is offered you at no great price. You may take it who will. It is the birthright of you and me and each of us; if we keep its conditions it is ours. Yet it is only to be had by the religious man—the man true to the nature