Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/87

74 is non-resistant; "New England is a Quaker,—when a blustering little State undertakes to ride over us. Georgia offers a reward of five thousand dollars for the head of a non-resistant in Boston,—and Boston takes special pains to return Ellen Graft to a citizen of Georgia, who wished to sell her as a harlot for the brothels of New Orleans! Northern clergymen defended the character of her "owner"—a man of "unquestionable piety." You know what denunciations were uttered in this city against the men and women who sheltered her! Boston could not allow the poor woman to remain. Did the churches of commerce "put up a prayer" for her?" Send back my own mother! Not a Northern minister lost his pulpit or his professional respectability by that form of practical atheism. Not one! At the South not a minister dares preach against Slavery; at the North—think of the preaching of so many "eminent divines!" My friend, the Rev. Dr. Edward Beecher, thinks I have been unjust to the ministers,—judging from the Sermon as reported m the Commonwealth. So he published the following article in that paper on Friday, June 9. I gladly insert it below. It comes from a powerful and noble man. I wish he had made out a stronger case against me. "Mr. Editor—In his Sermon, last Sabbath, Mr. Parker seems to charge the clergy of the country with a general, if not universal, delinquency in the cause of freedom with respect to the Fugitive Slave Law. He says, 'You all remember the tone of the pulpit.’ As if on that subject the pulpit had been a unit. He adds, ’What had Andover and New Haven to say in their collegiate churches? What the churches (of commerce) of New York, of Boston, of Philadelphia, of Albany, of Buffalo? They all went for kidnapping. "Down with God and up with kidnapping." That was the short of the lower law religion that littered the land. The ecclesiastical teachers did more to strengthen infidelity than all the infidels that ever taught.' He does not say that these charges are true of a part only of the ministry. His language would convey to any reader, ignorant of the fact, the opposite impression. He says that when Thomas Sims was sent back, "the clergy were for returning the Fugitive. "Send back our brother." ’The next Sunday the leading ministers of the city—I call them leading, though they lead nobody—gave God thanks.' "Speaking of the Slave Bill and its execution, he says, ’Not a prominent clergyman spoke against it.' "And when he speaks of the Nebraska Bill, he scarcely mentions the petition of the three thousand and fifty ministers. And then, not as if he desired to give them due praise, he merely mentions it incidentally in dealing with Mr. Everett—He did not dare to present the remonstrance which three thousand and fifty of his fellow-clergyman sent to their clerical brother, and asked him to lay before the Senate.' And