"Nowhere in the world is there a people so orderly, so much attached to law, as the people of these Northern States. But one law is an exception. The people of the North hate the fugitive slave law, as they have never hated any law since the stamp act. I know there are men in the Northern States who like it,--who would have invented slavery, had it not existed long before. But the mass of the Northern people hate this law, because it is hostile to the purpose of all just human law, hostile to the purpose of society, hostile to the purpose of individual life; because it is hostile to the law of God,--bids the wrong, forbids the right. We disobey that, for the same reason that we keep other laws: because we reverence the law of God. Why should we keep that odious law which makes us hated wherever justice is loved? Because we must sometimes do a disagreeable deed to accomplish an agreeable purpose? The purpose of that law is to enable three hundred thousand slaveholders to retake on our soil the men they once stole on other soil! Most of the city churches of the North seem to think that is a good thing. Very well; is it worth while for fifteen million freemen to transgress the plainest of natural laws, the most obvious instincts of the human heart, and the plainest duties of Christianity, for that purpose? The price to pay is the religious integrity of fifteen million men; the thing to buy is a privilege for three hundred thousand slaveholders to use the North as a hunting field whereon to kidnap men at our cost. Judge you of that bargain." "I adjure you to reverence a government that is right, statutes that are right, officers that are right; but to disobey every thing that is wrong. I intreat you by your love for your country, by the memory of your fathers, by your reverence for Jesus Christ, yea, by the deep and holy love of God which Jesus taught, and you now feel."[216] [Footnote 216: 2 Parker's Occasional Sermons, p. 392-394.] You will say all this is but indispensable duty; but the judge who hanged a man for treason because he promised to make his son "heir to the Crown"--meaning the "Crown Tavern" that he lived in--would doubtless find treason in my words also. On the 12th of April, 1852, I delivered an address to commemorate the first anniversary of the Kidnapping of Thomas Sims, and said:-- "But when the rulers have inverted their function, and enacted wickedness into a law which treads down the unalienable rights of man to such a degree as this, then I know no ruler but God, no law but natural Justice. I tear the hateful statute of kidnappers to shivers; I trample it underneath my feet. I do it in the name of all law; in the name of Justice and of Man; in the name of the dear God."