"First, It would say to the Northern fanatic, who _vapors about man-stealing_ as if there were no other evil under the sun but this one evil of Slavery--it would say to him, Emulate the spirit of your blessed Master and his apostles, _who, against this very evil_ [man-stealing] in their own times, _brought no railing accusation_; but in one instance at least, _sent back a fugitive_ from the household of Philemon. "In treating Southern _Christian slaveholders_ with Christian courtesy, and _sending back their fugitives_ when apprehended among you, you neither indorse the system nor partake of its evil; you are only performing in good faith the agreement, and redeeming the pledges of your forefathers, and leaving to each man for himself to answer for his own acts at the judgment-seat of Jesus. It would tear away from the man, as the foulest cloak of hypocrisy, that pretence of a religious principle in this whole matter of political abolitionism. "Religious principle! Oh my God! That religious principle, that for the sake of _an abstract right_ whose very exercise were disastrous to the unprepared bondmen who inherit it, would tear this blest confederacy in pieces, and deluge these smiling plains in fraternal blood, and barter the loftiest freedom that the world ever saw, for the armed despotism of a great civil warfare! That religious principle which, in disaster to man's last great experiment, would fling the whole race back into the gloom of an older barbarism--rearing out of the ruin of these free homes, the thrones of a more adamantine despotism--freedom's beacons all extinguished, and the whole race slaves. That religious principle through which, losing sight of God's great purpose of evangelizing the nations, [by American Slavery,] would shatter the mightiest wheel in the mechanism of salvation, and palsy the wing of God's preaching angel in its flight through the skies. "Alas--alas! ye that count as little this bond of blessed brotherhood, wrought by our fathers' mighty hands and bleeding hearts--we tell you, sorrowing and in tears, that your pretence is foul hypocrisy. Ye have reversed the first precept of the gospel, for your wisdom is a dove's, and your harmlessness a serpent's. _Ye have not the first principle within you either of religion or philanthropy, or common human benevolence._ Your principle is the principle of Judas Iscariot, and with the doom of the traitor ye shall go to your own place." "No, Sir--no, Sir," concludes the Senator thirsting for his constituent's blood, "'There is no gospel in all this treasonable fanaticism--for treason to my country is rebellion to my God.'"