Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/154

150 But the influence of Slavery extends beyond the South, and poisons also the literature of the Northern men who support it. Look at the newspapers of the slave editors of the North—some of you read them every day; listen to the orations of slave orators—you can hear enough of them to-morrow; hearken to the sermons of the slave preachers—you may hear such to-day; and learn the ghastly effect of slavery on the literary activity of the people. Nay, look at the school-books composed by such men, and see how the slave power, afar off, can debauch even a Northern mind. More than thirty years ago, Von Humboldt, the grandest scholar of all Christendom, wrote a political essay on the Island of Cuba. It circulates in the court of every tyrant of Europe; it is welcome in Spain, translated into that sonorous tongue. He tells the tale of the black man's wrong, and the woe which may one day spring out of the ground which has been fattened by his sweat and reddened by his blood. But an American democrat translates the book into English, leaves out the magnificent philanthropy of Mr. Humboldt, and puts in his own twaddling partisanship sustaining slavery, and declaring that free society is a mistake. I do not wonder the indignation of the old man, almost four score and ten years venerable, is stirred within him when he learns the disgraceful fact.

Third. Then Slavery degrades the religious activity of the people. At the South it is only the least enlightened sects which prevail; such as have the lowest ideas of man and God, and their relation to each other. Southern men are proud of this, and make it their boast that “there are no Unitarians of the South;” that is, none who preach an intelligible, rational idea of the oneness of God. They are proud that they “have no Universalists”—none who think that God is too good to damn even a slaveholder for ever and ever. Nay, they declare that heresy rends not asunder the seamless veil of the pro-slavery Church, behind which the slave-holder and the slave-hunter stand. They make it their boast that there are no Tylerites nor Taylorites, no Bushnellites nor Beecherites among them, but that all equally accept the faith once for all delivered to the saints for the enslavement of the Negro and the salvation of the