“So, for the quieting of this rumor, Nero judicially charged with the crime, and punished with most studied severities, that class, hated for their general wickedness, whom the vulgar call Christians. The originator of that name was one Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, suffered death by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate. The baneful superstition, thereby repressed for the time, again broke out, not only over Judea, the native soil of that mischief, but in the city also, where from every side all atrocious and abominable things collect and flourish.”[228] The writer of this remarkable passage was the wisest and most penetrating mind of his generation, and he lived close upon the events which he describes. Listening to him, you may find apology for those among us who heap upon contemporaries similar obloquy. Abolitionists need no defence from me. It is to their praise--destined to fill an immortal page--that from the beginning they saw the true character of Slavery, and warned against its threatening domination. Through them the fires of Liberty have been kept alive in our country,--as Hume is constrained to confess that these same fires were kept alive in England by the Puritans, whom this great historian never praised, if he could help it. And yet they are charged with this Rebellion. Can this be serious? Even at the beginning of the Republic the seeds of the conspiracy were planted, and in 1820, and again in 1830, it appeared,--while nearly thirty years ago Andrew Jackson denounced it, and one of its leading spirits recently boasted that it has been gathering head for this full time, thus, not only in distant embryo, but in well-attested development, antedating those Abolitionists whose prophetic patriotism is made an apology for the crime. As well, when the prudent passenger warns the ship’s crew of the fatal lee-shore, arraign him for the wreck which engulfs all; as well cry out, that the philosopher who foresees the storm is responsible for the desolation that ensues, or that the astronomer, who calculates the eclipse, is author of the darkness which covers the earth. [_Enthusiastic applause._]