Massachusetts and New York ladies, but they had nothing of the ferocious intensity of contempt and hatred which marked these speakers. I could easily see how the secession feeling rages the hottest with the female part of the community, from Baltimore to New Orleans, when I heard the modest lips of godly matrons so full of ungodly speeches concerning their colored neighbors. All the Baltimore ladies are not like those above mentioned. Some of the most tender-hearted that I have ever known are here, showing their religion by their treatment of the degraded class among whom their lot is cast.

Let the fact teach us that He who made us of one blood is leading this nation, stuffed with pride and insolence, into the fires that shall humiliate and purify. These thoughtless, cruel-hearted mothers, and wives, and sisters shall bleed and cry, and come down from their seats of pride, and, like the desolated Egyptian haughtinesses of old, shall sit down in the dust beside their despised bondwomen, and seek for comfort from these long-suffering, and hence deep-experienced, souls.

This is some of the sweet juice the bruised reed of pride and hope yields to your taste. Is it unpalatable? Wait till the sorrow is yet sharper, and you may find your taste purged to apprehend its chaste and spiritual refreshment.

REAT events are sometimes ushered into being with thunders and earthquakings; sometimes with the still small voice unheard of men. It is true

that the kingdom of God cometh not with observation; yet in some of the chief movements of that kingdom to its ultimate and universal sovereignty, there is the utmost observation, and its final consummation will be accompanied with inconceivable pomp and glory. Both of these modes. of manifestation have been connected with the coming of the kingdom of God in the work of emancipation in America.

The message which but yesterday flew through all the land, and is already leaping over all seas, is one of the great epochs of that divine movement. The rising waves of liberty lap the throne of national sovereignty. He who but a year ago, in most careful terms, promised the protection of the national arm to the Satanic institution, now declares that it must gather up its feet to die.

We may well exult over such a proclamation. It will cause rejoicings in the hut of the slave, in the palaces of

* A sermon preached in the Clinton Street Methodist Episcopal Church, Newark, N. J., Sunday, March 9, 1862. See Note X.

the princes, in the courts of heaven.

If one could rėscue a brute creature from the pit on the Sabbath day, and rejoice over its deliverance, much more can we over the fast speeding salvation of these children of our common Father, brothers and sisters of our common Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

I. Let us notice the prominent steps in the eventful history of this great reformation.

It started without observation.

Thirty years ago the whole nation lay dead and buried in the grave of slavery. The long struggle of the fathers had not prevailed against the evil. Jefferson had written against it; Washington had labored to abolish it; Franklin, the President of the first Abolition Society in America, and in the world, and the first petitioner to Congress, the first to any legislative body for the abolition of slavery, had died an abolitionist, but with his desire unaccomplished. The Presbyterian Church, after passing strong resolutions against the sin, had gone to sleep in its arms. The Methodist Church, after having labored, through such great foes of slavery as Wesley, and Coke, and Asbury, to extirpate it from her fold and from the land, after having emancipated forty thousand bondmen in Maryland had given over the effort, and was in the complete control of the slaveholding, slave-trading ministers and members of the Gulf States. Statesmen, having vainly struggled to keep the hydra-headed Barbarism from crossing the Mississippi, had yielded Arkansas and Missouri to its sway, and retired, weary and disheartened, from the great conflict, and were busy in the little and forgotten rivalries of the hour. Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Rhode Island had abolished it in their limits, not by selling its victims South, as some of their own children ignorantly or irreverently affirm, but by liberating them on the spot, and from motives of conscience

alone. But the great movement had paused in its march. An imaginary line was the nominal barrier; the mighty power of the Iniquity was the real barrier. The broad waves of freedom that had rolled to Mason and Dixon's line had been stayed, and a reflex tide of paralysis, of compromise, of complicity, set back upon us from that sea of death. All parties, all seats, all persons were submerged in its waves. The Samson of Liberty lay bound and shorn, and sleeping in the lap of the Delilah of Slavery. Then came there forth from an unknown quarter, in the city of Boston, a solitary beam of light, kindled from the embers of the abolitionism of the fathers, deep covered though they were with the cold ashes of silence and servility.

"It smote the dark with uncongenial ray."

A few souls saw the light and followed it, as the wise men did the star, unseen of the worldly and the wicked. It led them to a small upper room, where, among his scanty types, sat a young Quaker, who had lately been driven out of Baltimore, and who was weekly proclaiming through his little sheet the duty of immediate and unconditional emancipation the very duty which Asbury and Garretson, and the Methodists of Baltimore, had proclaimed in that city forty years before. The darkness soon felt the light, and rose and raged around him. Ere many days, the men of wealth and standing of that city broke into a female prayer meeting, seized this brave and truth-telling young man, dragged him by a rope through the streets, with a mob howling for his life. He was rescued from destruction only by the strong arm of municipal authority, and the strong walls of a dungeon. From that hour to this, now in obscurity, now in the sight of all men, this Kingdom of God has been advancing. It brought men one by one into its service. Then single churches came, and from solitary altars the pure flame of the Shekinah of God's universal,

impartial, life-giving and liberty-giving love shone forth. Then it organized itself into associations and parties, had internal conflicts, as Peter and Paul had, and separations, as Paul and Barnabas had, and errors crept into portions of it, as into the Church at Corinth and Galatia. But it sloughed off the errors, and rose in increasing beauty and majesty. Then it gained the mastery over States, and finally has placed itself substantially in the supreme seat of authority.

Meantime the counter elements were none the less active. They made the rulers submit to them. The organized forces, religious and secular, had taken no side, directly, with the oppressed, and so were swept into the grasp of the oppressor. They declared, through a President, that the mails, over more than half of our territory, should bear no message favorable to human freedom. They declared, through a Secretary of State, that Slavery was the CornerStone of our Republic, as Mr. Stephens says it is of the horrible fiction of a government, which that system, expelled from national power, has sought to extemporize. They seized upon the territory of a weak neighbor, with whom we were at peace, to give new outlets to their accursed merchandise in the bodies and souls of men. They passed laws, requiring, with threats of heavy fines and imprisonments, every person in the nation, man or woman, to aid in stealing their brethren, and in reducing them to bondage. A minister of the Gospel now lies in prison in Northern Ohio, one of the freest sections of the land, for refusing to commit that crime. They abrogated the solemn ordinance of our fathers whereby this fearful sin was forbidden to march northward of a parallel of latitude, and strove by every means, presidential, congressional, judicial, military, and mobocratic, to push the Car of Juggernaut into the Free Territories, and thence into the Free States. Only by heroic sacrifices, sufferings, and death, was their scheme made to fail. Our future history will contain no more honorable names than the martyrs of Kansas.