The Vigilance Committee appointed on the 4th of October, and the Association we formed on the 12th, to co-operate with that committee, and to bear mutually the expenses that might be incurred in resisting the law, kept the attention of our citizens alive to the subject. And their interest was quickened and their determination confirmed by the reports that came to us from Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and many other places, of the preparations that were making to protect the colored people, and set at defiance the plan for their re-enslavement. The historian of our country, if he be one worthy of the task, will linger with delight over the pages on which he shall narrate the uprising of the people generally, in 1850 and 1851, throughout the Northern States, in opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law. There were not wanting fearless preachers who took up the arms of the Gospel and faithfully fought against the great unrighteousness. Only a few days after the infamous speech of Mr. Webster on the 7th of March, Theodore Parker addressed a crowded audience in Faneuil Hall, and exposed to their deeper abhorrence the atrocious provisions of the Bill which the Massachusetts senator had had the effrontery to advocate and pledge himself to maintain. On the 22d of September following he preached to his hearers in the Melodeon a thrilling discourse on “The Function and Place of Conscience in Relation to the Laws of Men,” which must have fired them all the more to stand to the death in defence of any human being who had sought, or should seek, an asylum in Massachusetts. And again on the 28th of November, 1850, the day of annual Thanksgiving, he delivered his comprehensive, deep-searching discourse on “The State of the Nation,” showing the reckless impiety of rulers who could frame such unrighteousness into law, and the folly of the people who could suppose themselves bound to obey such a law. Oh! if the ministers of religion generally, throughout our country, had said and done, before and after that date, a tithe as much as Mr. Parker said and did against the “great iniquity” of our nation, the slaveholders could never have gained such an ascendency in our Government, nor have become so inflated with the idea of their power, as to have attempted the dissolution of the Union, which it cost all the blood and treasure expended in our awful civil war to preserve. Mr. Parker was not indeed left alone to fight the battle of the Lord. Rev. Dr. Storrs, of Brooklyn, N. Y., Rev. G. W. Perkins, of Guilford, Conn., Rev. J. G. Forman, of West Bridgewater, Rev. Charles Beecher, Rev. William C. Whitcomb, of Stoneham, Rev. Nathaniel West, of Pittsburg, each spoke and wrote words of sound truth and great power, as well as those whose services I have acknowledged in another place, and others no doubt whose names have escaped my memory. But of the thirty thousand ministers of all the denominations in the United States, I believe not one in a hundred ever raised his voice