Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1Stowe, Harriet Beecher
History
Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Europe -- Description and travel
The Rev. Professor then continued. "My Lord Provost, Ladies and
Gentlemen: This cause, to be successful, must be carried on in a
religious spirit, with a deep sense of our dependence on God, and with
that love for our fellow-men which the gospel requires. It is because I
think I have met this spirit since I reached the shores of Great
Britain, in those who have taken an interest in the cause, that I feel
encouraged to hope that the expression of your feeling will be effective
on the hearts of Christians on the other side of the Atlantic. There are
Christians there as sincere, as hearty, and as earnest, as any on the
face of the earth. They have looked at this subject, and been troubled;
they have hardly known what to do, and their hearts have been
discouraged. They have almost turned away their eyes from it, because
they have scarcely dared encounter it, the difficulties appeared to them
so great. Wrong cannot always receive the support of Christians; wrong
must be done away with; and what must be--what God requires to be--that
certainly will be. Now, in this age, man is every where beginning to
regard the sufferings of his fellow-man as his own. There is an interest
felt in man, as man, which was not felt in preceding ages. The
facilities of communication are bringing all nations in contact, and
whatever wrong exists in any part of the world, is every where felt.
There are wrongs and sufferings every where; but those to which we are
accustomed, we look upon with most indifference, because being
accustomed to them, we do not feel their enormity. You feel the
enormity of slavery more than we do, because you are not immediately
interested, and regard it at a distance. We regard some of the wrongs
that exist in the old world with more sensibility than you can regard
them, because we are not accustomed to them, and you are. Therefore, in
the spirit of Christian love, it belongs to Christian men to speak to
each other with great fidelity. It has been said that you know little or
nothing about slavery. O, happy men, that you are ignorant of its
enormities. [Hear, hear!] But you do know something about it. You know
as much about it as you know of the widow-burning in India, or the
cannibalism in the Fejee Islands, or any of those crimes and sorrows of
paganism, that induced you to send forth your missionaries. You know it
is a great wrong, and a terrible obstacle to the progress of the gospel;
and that is enough for you to know to induce you to act. You have as
much knowledge as ever induced a Christian community in any part of the
world to exert an influence in any other part of the world. Slavery is a
relic of paganism, of barbarism; it must be removed by Christianity; and
if the light of Christianity shines on it clearly, it certainly will
remove it. There are thousands of hearts in the United States that
rejoice in your help. Whatever expressions of impatience and petulance
you may hear, be assured that these expressions are not the heart of the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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