“This horrible law, which in the middle of the nineteenth century of the Christian era the legislators of the most highly favored nation on earth have had the effrontery to enact,--this law peremptorily, under heavy fines and penalties, forbids us to give assistance and comfort to a certain class of our fellow-men in the utmost need of help,--those who have fled and are longing to be saved from the greatest wrongs that can be inflicted upon human beings,--_the wrongs of slavery_. And yet we are told by many--many who profess to be Christians, even teachers of Christianity, ah! Doctors of Divinity--that the pulpit may not remonstrate against this tremendous iniquity, because, forsooth, it has passed into a law. What, are we, then, to allow that there is no authority higher than that of the earthly government under which we live,--a government framed by our revered but fallible fathers, and which we administer by agents of our own election, who are by no means incorruptible? Has it come to this? Is this the best lesson our Republican and Christian wisdom can teach the suffering nations of earth? Nay, are we to submit to this human authority without question? May we not so much as discuss the justice of its demands upon us? Must even those men be silent who were set in our midst for the defence of the Gospel,--the Gospel of Him who was ‘anointed to preach to the poor, who was sent to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, to set at liberty them that are bruised?’ Such is the doctrine of our politicians and of our politico-religious ministers. But a more heartless, demoralizing, base, antidemocrat, and antichristian doctrine could not be preached. I repudiate it utterly.... _The pulpit has no higher function than to expound, assert, and maintain the rights of man._ The assumption of Mr. Webster and his abettors--that there is no higher law than an enactment of our Congress or the Constitution of the United States--is glaringly _atheistical_, inasmuch as it denies the supremacy of the Divine Author of the _moral constitution_ of man....