“In every reform from intemperance, from vice, from crime, each individual citizen is responsible to the degree of influence which he has, and if he does not exert it he is responsible for a neglect of duty—a binding duty. He is bound to create a public sentiment that shall work for virtue. He is bound to drain the community of all those evils that run together and form a channel for vice and crime. It is not a matter of election, it is a matter of obligation; and because there are the most respectable classes in the community that don’t do it, you are not set free. Because the men of riches and the men of power and the men of standing in society don’t do it, the poorest laboring man in the community, if he does not, under the direction of his reason and conscience, labor for the purification of the commonwealth, is responsible to God. He is bound to do it. If his individuality on the one side has shielded him against aggression, it brings with it also certain obligations, and he is bound to meet them. All parties hold their members only subject to the corrected judgment and moral sense of the individual. If they go with their party on the general ground that it is going right and is doing right, as far as the limitations of human ignorance and human power are concerned, travelling in the right direction also with many imperfect steps and many imperfect elements, he may justly go on with it; but if he is committed, as were the parties of slavery, to so atrocious a wrong as that which violated the fundamental rights of the whole human family, a man is bound to fight the party, in and out of it: in it by correction, out of it by protest and opposition. And merely because he can say, ‘The party did it, I did not,’ he is not relieved of responsibility. Inasmuch as you knew what was right and did not do it, so much you are involved in the guilt; and there was a great deal of guilt. The Church itself was involved in the same—dumb pulpits, uncirculated Bibles, a corrupt and vicious public sentiment. “When I came into Plymouth Church as its pastor there was probably hardly a single church in the bounds of New York or Brooklyn of any note that dared to say a word for the liberty of the abject slave. Was I wrong in protesting against it, with the knowledge that I had? With the conscience that I had, had I been silent I should have been doomed justly to the stroke of God’s righteous judgment; and the want of moral courage under such circumstances is a very great sin everywhere. You are not right to stand still in any great party, moving in any direction, doing wrong, without deliberately taking account with yourself. Am I striving to correct the evil by all the influence I can wield? On finding that to be impossible, do I free myself from all imputation of partnership in any such guilt, one way or the other?”