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But not alone in the States where they are numerically superior will they justly claim the position their merits shall secure for them. In every State the same privileges must be accorded. No more and no less in Carolina than New York should they rise higher than they merit. Here as there, whoever deserves the highest seats, should sit there. Frederick Douglass, one of the first orators and clearest headed statesmen of America, should be the representative in Congress from his district. He has no equal in the national estimation within its boundaries. He would soon show that he was worthy to follow his great Auburn neighbor into the Senate chamber and the Cabinet. He might win what the other has lost, because to his ability is joined more popularity if not more principle the highest honor the nation can bestow. "Palmam ferat qui meruit" is the only motto for a democratic people. If he deserves the palm he should carry it, by the votes and with the applause of all the nation.

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(3.) This work should be carried forward in the Church. Sad is the fact, but most true, that those who call themselves the disciples and representatives of Jesus Christ are in their body, the most tenacious of this iniquity. Whatever the name of the Church, her spirit and act is the same. No professed Church of Jesus Christ here has reached the hights of fraternity which every other profession has allowed. The medical and the legal bodies have admitted them as equals; not so the clerical. They visit around the same couch, they act as attorneys for the same client as their whiter fellows; they cannot belong to the same conference with us, travel the same circuit, or be settled over the same congregation. And yet the Church professes to represent, and should represent, the highest ideas that man can receive or entertain. It is the depository, the vehicle of God. His best truths he commits to her as a distributing reservoir to all the world. Her ministers He deigns to call

His servants and embassadors; her members, His sons and daughters; and yet when His Son, the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person, calls himself especially the Son of man not of men, much less of a class of men, and that white men, but the Son of MAN; when His Spirit orders His servant to declare to the Churches that in Christ Jesus the middle wall of partition is broken down; that in Him there is neither Greek nor Jew, Barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free, male nor female; when He forbids the setting off one portion of the Church by itself for any outward distinctions; against the words of Christ, the teachings of the apostles, the lessons of history, the testimony of every conscience in the sight of God, the Church in America gives herself earnestly to the support of this heaven-hated sin. She compels these her brethren and sisters to form Churches of their own. She separates God's ministers, if the least tinged with this complexion into conferences by themselves. If any of these Christians come into her Brahmin assemblies, she hastens to commit the very sin that James rebukes, and has "the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of persons," saying unto his brother, often of the very complexion of James and the Lord Jesus Christ, "Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool." How those holy words rebuke our haughty sin! "If ye fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, ye do well. But if ye have respect of persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced of the law as transgressors." Then comes that dreadful imprecation, so awfully fulfilled upon the apostate Churches of the South, so fearfully experienced in our own griefs and calamities : "For he shall have judgment without mercy that hath showed no mercy."

O, that the Church would arise and wash herself of this abomination! She should instantly invite her despised brethren to sit in her exalted seats. She should abolish

the iniquity known only to Protestant America, the colored Church. She should invite all those whom God has called to serve at her altars, which are not hers, but His. She should throw her mighty influence against this cruel and false prejudice, and drive it from the land. She should proclaim the great doctrine of the Bible, the central doctrine of the Cross, the unity, the fraternity of man, and should declare that what God hath put together man shall not put asunder. Then, and then only, will God's smile and benediction rest upon her. Then shall she go forth, not as now, to feeble victories and frequent defeats, but to constant, glorious, and increasing triumphs. Scriptural holiness will spread rapidly over all the land, and the coming of Christ speedily redden the divine horizon.

To this high and heavenly work the great election calls us. This grand future opens its celestial vistas to our waiting eyes. Union, emancipation, democracy, the triad of triumphant principles, will insure the unification, the liberation, the fraternization of America. Her sons, of whatever hue, shall wear her honors of whatever hight. Sella Martin will be the popular pastor of a popular Church, having no taint in its composition of the present bitterness of Christians against their better brethren, but composed indiscriminately of those who, though of many complexions, are of one Lord, one faith, one baptism. John S. Rock will sit as judge where now not one of his race can sit as a juror even when those of their own color are on trial for their life; and the perfection of justice will be consummated, and God the Judge of all, be satisfied then, and then only, when one of this blood whom our late Chief-Justice declared had no rights, shall occupy his seat as the administrator of equal rights to all the land. Such a one is the Queen's highest judicial representative in Jamaica to-day. Such will be America's in Washington to-morrow.

Such are some of the results and obligations which spring

from that national decree. The work is not yet accomplished. Our brothers yet pine in prison-houses, and suffer unto death on the bloody field. The foe is yet stiff-necked and rebellious. It may be long ere the high lands of perpetual peace are reached. We may see days as dark as any which have covered us. Yet the end is sure. The grand uprising assures its coming. Does it also that higher, that diviner end to which the whole creation moves? Will the nation, will the Church, will every Christian, every minister, every man gird himself for this greater task? If so, that higher glory will speedily dawn. The sun will rise that knows no setting. The kingdom of Christ will be established. The whole earth, one family, will dwell in Him, knit together in love, in labor, in faith, in joy; while over it all will bend the cloud of witnesses, with celestial faces, the martyred and sainted dead of every age and clime, not the least in honor and happiness those of our own age and clime, reliving happiest lives in their more saintly children, the inheritors of their sacrifices, their grace, their renown.

"For all they thought, and loved, and did,
And hoped, and suffered, is but seed
Of what in these is flower and fruit."

THE VIAL POURED OUT ON THE SEAT

OF THE BEAST.*

"AND THE fifth angel POURED OUT HIS VIAL UPON THE SEAT OF THE BEAST; AND HIS KINGDOM WAS FULL OF DARKNESS; AND THEY GNAWED THEIR TONGUES FOR PAIN, AND BLASPHEMED THE GOD OF HEAVEN BECAUSE OF THEIR PAINS AND THEIR SORES, AND REPENTED NOT OF THEIR DEEDS. Revelation xvi. 10, 11.

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E have often been summoned to the sanctuary, in the progress of the great controversy so near its

end, at times to exult, but chiefly to mourn. We

have been constrained to set forth the national sin and the national danger; to point to the cloud charged with God's thunderbolts, that hung black and fiery over a vain and careless land, and to urge upon the Church and the nation the tears, the words, the deeds of repentance. We have seen that cloud gather blackness as the nation and the Church went plunging from sin to sin, until at last it broke forth in such a storm as has not fallen upon any land since the fiery shower fell upon Sodom. Under that cloud, through that sea, we have waded forward, slowly and tremblingly,

* A sermon preached in Boston on the occasion of the Fall of Charleston, March 5, 1865.

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