“In exploring this wilderness of inhumanity, filled with the shapes and motley sights of degradation, I live in a perpetual struggle how to calm the natural expressions of an honest soul into that measured phrase that may best suit the sated public ear. If one overhang this abyss until his spirit do drink in its very import, his soul must be full of thunder and his words glance like fire. Neither are these feelings the foul engenderings of fanaticism. They are the true feelings of a heart taught to hate injustice and degrading wrong, by that nature which God gave it; by the Bible which educated it; by the law under which it was made, and by the public sentiment in which it has been bred. It is with a sense of shame that we see strong words for oppression granted an unapologized liberty to walk up and down as they will; while he who speaks for freedom must rake up his ardor under the ashes of a tame propriety, and stand to answer for want of a Gospel spirit if indignation at double and treble wrongs do sometimes give forth a bolt! Nevertheless, we hope; we trust; we pray; and hoping, trusting, and praying, we soothe ourselves in such thoughts as these: ‘From this shame, too, thou shalt go forth, O world! God, who, unwearied sitting on the circle of the earth, hath beheld and heard the groanings and travailings of pain until now, and caused Time to destroy them one by one, shall ere long destroy thee, thou abhorred and thrice damnable oppression cancerously eating the breasts of liberty.’” He concludes by giving his views upon the position of the pulpit, and utters this solemn protest: “Therefore, against every line of the Coward’s Ethics of the _Journal_ we solemnly protest, and declare a minister made to its pattern fitter to be sent to the pyramids and tombs of Egypt to preach to old-world mummies than to be a living man of God among living men, loving them but never fearing them! God be thanked that in every age hitherto pulpits have been found, the allies of suffering virtue, the champions of the oppressed! And if in this day, after the notable examples of heroic men in heroic ages, when life itself often paid for fidelity, the pulpit is to be mined and sapped by insincere friends and insidious enemies, and learn to mix the sordid prudence of business with the sonorous and thrice heroic counsels of Christ, then, O my soul, be not thou found conspiring with this league of iniquity; that so, when in that august day of retribution God shall deal punishment in flaming measures to all hireling and coward ministers, thou shalt not go down, under double-bolted thunders, lower than miscreant Sodom or thrice-polluted Gomorrah!”