“And this is slavery! All these brutalities and wrongs spring from slavery as naturally as the fruit from the blossom. That which is inherently wrong must, by eternal laws, still produce and reproduce wrong. The right to hold one innocent man a slave, implies the right to enslave or murder any other man! There is no such right. It is a lie born in the inmost brain of hell. No laws can make it a right. No clamor of majorities can give it a sanction. In slavery, Satan once more scales the heavenly heights. “Jeff Davis, I hear, has just joined the church. Would he be pardoned, and _retain_ the offence? If so, not prayers nor sacraments can save his trembling and perjured soul from the guilt of such wrongs as I and mine, and hundreds of other true men and women, here in Texas have fallen under because of slavery. God is not to be cheated by any such flattering unction as Davis is laying to his heart. The more he seeks to cover profane with holy things, the deeper will be his damnation in that world where all shams and self-delusions are dissolved, and the true man stands revealed, to be judged by his fidelity to Christ’s golden rule,—to the cause of justice and humanity on earth. “Our national agony is the old conflict of the Divine with the Satanic principle. Believe in God, my son, and you cannot doubt the result. Do you suppose Eternal Justice will be patient much longer? Think of the atrocities to which this American slave system has reconciled us! A free white man can, in any of the Slave States, go into a negro’s house and beat or kill any of the inmates, and not be prosecuted by law, except a free white man sees him do it; because _a negro’s testimony is not taken against a white man_. As for the _marriage_ of slaves, you well know what a mere farce—what a subject for ribaldry and laughter—it is among the masters. No tie, whether of affection, of blood, or of form, is respected.[35]