The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 4 of 4American Anti-Slavery Society
Philosophy
The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 4 of 4
American Anti-Slavery Society
Antislavery movements -- United States -- Periodicals; Slavery -- United States -- Periodicals
In passing by the worst forms of slavery, with which he every where
came in contact among the Jews, the Savior must have been
inconsistent with himself. He was commissioned to preach glad
tidings to the poor; to heal the broken-hearted; to preach
deliverance to the captives; to set at liberty them that are bruised;
to preach the year of Jubilee. In accordance with this commission,
he bound himself, from the earliest date of his incarnation, to the
poor, by the strongest ties; himself "had not where to lay his head;"
he exposed himself to misrepresentation and abuse for his
affectionate intercourse with the outcasts of society; he stood up
as the advocate of the widow, denouncing and dooming the heartless
ecclesiastics, who had made her bereavement a source of gain; and in
describing the scenes of the final judgment, he selected the very
personification of poverty, disease and oppression, as the test by
which our regard for him should be determined. To the poor and
wretched; to the degraded and despised, his arms were ever open.
They had his tenderest sympathies. They had his warmest love. His
heart's blood he poured out upon the ground for the human family,
reduced to the deepest degradation, and exposed to the heaviest
inflictions, as the slaves of the grand usurper. And yet, according
to our ecclesiastics, that class of sufferers who had been reduced
immeasurably below every other shape and form of degradation and
distress; who had been most rudely thrust out of the family of Adam,
and forced to herd with swine; who, without the slightest offence,
had been made the footstool of the worst criminals; whose "tears
were their meat night and day," while, under nameless insults and
killing injuries they were continually crying, O Lord, O Lord:--this
class of sufferers, and this alone, our biblical expositors,
occupying the high places of sacred literature, would make us
believe the compassionate Savior coldly overlooked. Not an emotion
of pity; not a look of sympathy; not a word of consolation, did his
gracious heart prompt him to bestow upon them! He denounces
damnation upon the devourer of the widow's house. But the monster,
whose trade it is to make widows and devour them and their babes, he
can calmly endure! O Savior, when wilt thou stop the mouths of such
blasphemers!
"IT IS THE SPIRIT THAT QUICKENETH."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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