Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/90

86 glory. Their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust, if they cast away the law of the Lord, and despise the word of the Holy One.

In America the people are strongly attached to the institutions, constitutions, and statutes of the land. On the whole, they are just establishments. If not, we made them ourselves, and can make them better when we will. The execution of laws is also popular. Nowhere in the world is there a people so orderly, so much attached to law, as the people of these Northern States. But one law is an exception. The people of the North hate the fugitive slave law, as they have never hated any law since the Stamp Act. I know there are men in the Northern States who like it—who would have invented slavery, had it not existed long before. But the mass of the Northern people hate this law, because it is hostile to the purpose of all just human law, hostile to the purpose of society, hostile to the purpose of individual life; because it is hostile to the law of God—bids the wrong, forbids the right. We disobey that for the same reason that we keep other laws, because we reverence the law of God. Why should we keep that odious law which makes us hated wherever justice is loved? Because we must sometimes do a disagreeable deed to accomplish an agreeable purpose? The purpose of that law is to enable three hundred thousand slaveholders to retake on our soil the men they once stole on other soil! Most of the city churches of the North seem to think that is a good thing. Very well: is it worth while for fifteen million freemen to transgress the plainest of natural laws, the most obvious instincts of the human heart, and the plainest duties of Christianity, for that purpose? The price to pay is the religious integrity of fifteen million men: the thing to buy is a privilege for three hundred thousand slaveholders to use the North as a hunting-field whereon to kidnap men at our cost. Judge you of that bargain.

But I must end this long discourse. The other day I spoke of the vices of passion: great and terrible evils they wrought. They were as nothing to the vices of calculation. Passion was the flesh, ambition the devil. There are vices of democracy, vices of Radicalism; very great