Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/78

Rh The next Congress re-affirmed the Fugitive Slave Bill, "Twice they routed all their foes, And twice they slew the slain."

The new Representative from Boston, Mr. Appleton, gave the vote of Boston for it. He was never censured for that act. He was approved, and re-elected.

You remember the conduct of the Boston newspapers. Almost all of them went for the Fugitive Slave Bill. They made Atheism the first principle in American politics—"There is no Higher Law-" The instinct of commerce is adverse to the natural rights of labour: so the chief leaders in commerce wish to have the working man but poorly paid; the larger gain falls into their hands; their labourer is a mill, they must run him as cheap as they can. So the great cities of the North were hostile to the slave—hostile to freedom. The wealthy capitalists did not know that in denying the Higher Law or God they were destroying the rock on which alone their money could rest secure. The mass of men in cities, servants of the few, knew not that in chaining the black man they were also putting fetters on their own feet. Justice is the common interest of all men! Alas, that so few know what God writes in letters of fire on the world's high walls! You have not forgotten the general tone of the pulpit,—"Conscience and the Constitution," at Andover. Mr. Stuart says, " Keep the laws of men, come what may come of the Higher Law of God." One minister of Boston said, "I would drive the fugitive from my own door." The most eminent Doctor of Divinity in the Unitarian ranks declared he would send his own mother into slavery. He says he said brother ! Give him the benefit of the ethical distinction: he would send back his own brother! "What had Andover and New Haven to say, in their collegiate churches? What the churches of commerce in New York. Boston, Philadelphia, Albany, Buffalo? They all went for kidnapping. "Down with God and up with iniquity." That was the short of the lower law religion which Uttered the land. The ecclesiastical teachers did more to strengthen infidelity then, than all the "infidels" that ever taught. What else could you expect from lower law divines? All at once this blessed Bible seemed to have become a treatise