I was engaged to preach on the following Sunday for Brother Young, in Summer Street Church. Of course I could not again speak to a congregation, as a Christian minister, and be silent respecting the _great iniquity_ of our nation. The only sermon I had brought from my home in Connecticut, that could be made to bear on the subject, was one on Prejudice,--the sermon about to be published as one of the Tracts of the American Unitarian Association. So I touched it up as well as I could, interlining here and there words and sentences which pointed in the new direction to which my thoughts and feelings so strongly tended, and writing at its close what used to be called an _improvement_. Thus: “The subject of my discourse bears most pertinently upon a matter of the greatest national as well as personal importance. There are more than two millions of our fellow-beings, children of the Heavenly Father, who are held in our country in the most abject slavery,--regarded and treated like domesticated animals, their rights as men trampled under foot, their conjugal, parental, fraternal relations and affections utterly set at naught. It is our _prejudice_ against the color of these poor people that makes us consent to the tremendous wrongs they are suffering. If they were white,--ay, if only two thousand or two hundred _white_ men, women, and children in the Southern States were treated as these millions of colored ones are, we of the North should make such a stir of indignation, we should so agitate the country, with our appeals and remonstrances, that the oppressors would be compelled to set their bondmen free. But will our _prejudice_ be accepted by the Almighty, the impartial Judge of all, as a valid excuse for our indifference to the wrongs and outrages inflicted upon these millions of our countrymen? O no! O no! He will say, “Inasmuch as ye did not what ye could for the relief of these, the least of the brethren, ye did it not to me.” Tell me not that we are forbidden by the Constitution of our country to interfere in behalf of the enslaved. No compact our fathers may have made for us, no agreement we could ourselves make, would annul our obligations to suffering fellow-men. “Yes, yes,” I said, with an emphasis that seemed to startle everybody in the house, “if need be, the very foundations of our Republic must be broken up; and if this stone of stumbling, this rock of offence, cannot be removed from under it, the proud superstructure must fall. It cannot stand, it ought not to stand, it will not stand, on the necks of millions of men.” For “God is just, and his justice will not sleep forever.” I then offered such a prayer as my kindled spirit moved me to, and gave out the hymn commencing, “Awake, my soul, stretch every nerve; And press with vigor on.”