“Tell me, then, no more that the pulpit has nothing to do,--that I as a Christian minister have nothing to do with politics, when I see how politics have corrupted, yes, utterly spoiled the once noble (we used in our admiration to say), godlike Daniel Webster! If that man, with his surpassing strength of intellect and once enlarged, generous views of the right and the good,--if he has not been able to withstand the demoralizing influences of political partyism, but has been shrivelled up into a mere aspirant for office, basely consenting to any and every sacrifice of humanity demanded by the oppressors of our country, and at last pledging himself to sustain all the provisions of a law more ingeniously wicked than the stimulated fears of the most cowardly tyrants ever before devised,--I repeat, if such a man as Daniel Webster once was has been corrupted and ruined by politics, shall I, a minister of the Christian religion, fail to point out as plainly as I may, and proclaim as earnestly as I can, the moral dangers that beset those who engage in the strife for political preferment?... “For one, I will not help to uphold our nation in its iniquity,--no, not for an hour. If it cannot be reclaimed, let it be dissolved. The declaration so often made by the professed friends of our Union, that it cannot be preserved unless this horrible law can be enforced, is unwittingly a declaration that it is the implacable enemy of liberty,--an obstacle in the way of human progress. If it really be so, it must be, it will be removed. And he who attempts to prevent its dissolution will find himself fighting against God. If such a law as this for the recapture of fugitive slaves be essential to our Republic as now constituted, let it be broken up, and some new form of government arise in its stead. A better one would doubtless succeed. A worse one it could not be, if the enslavement, continued degradation and outlawry of more than three millions of our people, be indeed the bond of our present Union....