Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/158

Rh whom, according to the Methodist Episcopal Church, Christ died! The Orthodox Sunday School Union spent last year $248,201; not a cent against Slavery, our great national, sin. They print books by the million. Only one of them contains a word against Slavery; that is Cowper's Task, which contains these words—my mother taught them to me when I was a little boy, and sat in her lap:—

You all know it: if you do not, you had better learn and teach it to your children. That is the only anti-Slavery work they print. Once they published a book written by Mr. Gallaudet, which related the story, I think, of the selling of Joseph; at any rate, it showed that Egyptian Slavery was wrong. A little girl in a Sunday school in one of the Southern States one day said to her teacher, "If it was wrong to make Joseph a slave, why is it not wrong to make Dinah, and Sambo, and Chloe slaves?" The Sunday school teacher and the church took the alarm, and complained of the Sunday School Union: "You are poisoning the South with your religion, telling the children that Slavery is wicked." It was a serious thing, "dissolution of the Union," "levying war," or at least, "misdemeanor," for aught I know, "obstructing an officer of the United States." What do you think the Sunday School Union did? It suppressed the book! It printed one Sunday school book which had a line against Egyptian Slavery and then suppressed it! and it cannot be had to-day. Amid all their million books, there is not a line against Slavery, save what Cowper simg. There are five million Sunday school scholars in the United States, and there is not a Sunday school manual which has got a word against Slavery in it.

You all know the American Tract Society. Last year the American Tract Society in Boston spent $79,983.46; it visited more than fourteen thousand families; it distributed 3,334,920 tracts—not a word against Slavery in them all. The American Tract Society in New York last year visited 568,000 families, containing three million