Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/315

Rh must worship the Bible; he must not read it! It is a crime even in a Sunday school to teach a child the great letters which spell out "Holy Bible." I knew a minister, he was a Connecticut man, too, who went off from New Orleans because he did not dare to stay; and he did not dare to stay because he tried to teach the slave to read in his Sunday school. He went back to Connecticut, whence he will, perhaps, go as a missionary to China or Turkey, and find none to hinder his Christian work.

At the North, the black man is shut out of the meetinghouse. In heaven, according to the theology of America, he may sit down with the just made perfect, his sins washed white "in the blood of the Lamb;" but when he comes to a certain Baptist church in Boston, he cannot own a pew. And there are few churches where he can sit in a pew. The rich and the poor are there; the one Lord is the Maker of them all; but the church thinks He did not make the black as well as the white. Nay; he is turned out of the omnibus, out of the burial-ground. There is a burial-ground in this State, and in the deed which conveys the land it is stipulated that "no coloured person or convict." can ever be buried there. He is turned out of the graveyard, where the great mother of our bodies gathers our dust when the sods of the valley are sweet to the soul. Nowhere but in the jail and on the gallows has the black man equal rights with the white in our American legislation!

The American Press—it is generally the foe of the slave, the advocate of bondage.

In Virginia, it is felony to deny the master's right to own his slaves. There is an old law re-enacted in the revision of the Virginia statutes, which inflicts a punishment of not more than one year's confinement on any one guilty of that offence. It was proposed in the Virginia Legislature, last winter, that if a man had conscientious objections to holding slaves, he should not be allowed to sit on any jury where the matter of a man's freedom was in question. Nor is that all. There is a law in Virginia, it is said, that when a man has three quarters white blood in his veins, he may recover his freedom in virtue of that fact. It is well known that at least half the slaves in Virginia are half white and one quarter of them three quarters white. Accordingly,