“Every citizen must obey a law which inflicts injury upon his person, estate, and civil privilege, until legally redressed; but no citizen is bound to obey a law which commands _him_ to _inflict_ injury upon another. We must _endure_ but never _commit_ wrong. We must be patient when sinned against, but must never sin against others. The law may heap injustice upon me, but no law can authorize me to pour injustice upon another. When the law commanded Daniel not to pray he disobeyed it; when it commanded him to be cast into the lions’ den he submitted. “A law which enjoins upon a citizen the commission of a crime, and still more of an open, disgraceful, and flagitious crime, has violated the confidence of the citizen, and is dissolved in the court of God the moment it is enacted. “Let no man stand uncommitted, dodging between daylight and dark, on this vital principle. Let every man firmly and openly take sides. This vibrating between humanity for the fugitive and conscience for the law, this clandestine humanity in spite of law, to which the lips only give a sullen and pouting obedience, is not consistent with sincerity and open-hearted integrity. We adjure every Christian man, every man to whom conscience is more than meat, and honor better than thrift, to stand forth and enunciate the invincible truth of the Christian’s creed: _Obedience to laws, even though they sin against me: disobedience to every law that commands me to sin._” His conviction of the origin of this whole trouble, his policy concerning it, and his confidence in the working out of natural causes are well set forth in an article at this period upon “The Cause and Cure of Agitation”: “It ought primarily to be understood that our Constitution has _invited_ this whole conflict which has raged about it. Had the framers been gifted with prescience they would, we cannot but think, have regarded the inevitable future mischief of that compromise by which slavery had its rights embedded in a constitution of liberty, as too great to be risked. They acted with the light which they had. They swaddled and laid in one cradle two infant forms. These were rocked together and grew up together; but one was a wolf’s cub and the other a lamb. Both were alike peaceful at birth—for a lion’s whelp when first dropped is as gentle as a doe. Growth brought forth separate natures. Then appeared hostility. Each acted to its nature.