The fugitive slave law had been often resisted in Philadelphia, as I remember well. In the same city, the first anti-slavery society had been formed, and within its present limits the first ecclesiastical protest ever raised against slavery was signed in the Mennonite meeting house in Germantown, where in summer I sometimes worshipped. The agitation of the abolitionists, and the burning down of Pennsylvania Hall were all matters of fresh memory to adult listeners in 1859. "I now take up that question of questions--can this Union be perpetuated? I answer 'yes'. Take the Bible for our rule and guide. Let it be the sheet anchor of our hope.... No tempest that crowned heads or despotic sceptres can invoke will ever throw our ship upon the lee shore or put out the light of this American Union". After a fling, by the way, at the divine right of kings, "a right which God gave in his wrath", he quoted the legend of Franklin's calling for prayer in the constitutional convention, noted the incident of Jesus and the tribute to Cæsar, and then dwelt on the necessity of the adopted citizen, especially, keeping his oath. He intimated that those immigrants who did not like our constitution "had better pack up and go home.... The constitution and laws of this country are our Cæsar and on us rests the solemn duty of obedience". He then passed to the duties of husbands and wives, of children to their parents, and to the duty of training the youth to speak with respect of rulers and laws. His final exhortation was to the sacred obligation to obey the constitution and the laws. He pointed out the danger of the dissolution of the Union, showing that the peril was great "unless our pulpits cease their clamor against the constitution and the laws". Ministers must not urge "the higher law (as they call it) of instinct, but preach God's revealed word, and cease, too, from declaring from the altar that it is better to put into a man's hand a rifle, a death weapon, rather than a mother's Bible". He urged that we cease the agitation and abuse, that arrays state against state, and that sectionalism be abandoned. The conclusion was made with tremendous effect. "If I were on the banks of the Potomac, standing by that vault at Mount Vernon, I would say it over the sacred dust of the immortal Washington, the man that would labor or would wish for the dissolution of the American Union, let him be "anathema, maranatha".