PREFATORY LETTER. xxxvii 



labouring at the construction of public works, which are 

 most needful to the wealth and prosperity of the country. 

 This at least we may affirm, that no state in Christendom, 

 whatever be its extent, and be it weak or strong, can ever 

 be truly great and glorious while it willingly retains and 

 upholds domestic slavery as an element of its polity. Its 

 profession of religion would, in such a case, be nothing 

 better than a national hypocrisy; and it would but mock 

 us if it dared to boast of its social freedom. The advocates 

 of good and evil — of Christian freedom and social slavery 

 — cannot be so blended in the institutions of any nation 

 under heaven, as to work well together (like the antagonist 

 muscles of the human body) in maintaining its uprightness 

 and strength. Either the evil will overcome the good, or 

 the good will reform the evil. But the victory, on which 

 ever side it lean, may not be won without a long con- 

 flict: and while the champion of slavery is able to hold up 

 his head, what can we expect from him but fierce manners 

 in the place of Christian gentleness? The man who has 

 so hoodwinked his conscience as to be without any moral 

 sympathy with the purest elements of Christian truth and 

 love, will be ready to poison the fountains of legislation, 

 and to laugh to scorn those laws of nations which have long 

 supported the weak against the strong — which have mitigated 

 the horrors of war, and have helped to keep in remembrance 

 not the form only but the very substance of truth and 

 justice even among the bitterest trials of humanity. 



The power of Christian truth cannot be felt by the man 

 who denies the Divine authority of its author. There are 

 men, who deny the being of a God, and in His place pre- 

 tend to set up man as the creature of their idolatry. And 

 they do this while they are robbing him of hopes that are 

 the solace of his life, and debasing his understanding by 

 taking from it all true nobility and trying to cheat it of those 

 in-born powers by which it rises to the apprehension of the 



