"Is it possible that a stimulus can be wanting? Forbid it, the example of a dying, bleeding, crucified Savior! Forbid it, the precepts of a risen, ascended, glorified Immanuel! _Do unto us in fetters, in bonds, in dungeons, in danger of the pestilence, as ye yourselves would wish to be done unto. Lift up your voices like a trumpet; cry aloud in the cause of humanity, benevolence, philosophy; eloquence can never be directed to a nobler purpose; religion never employed in a more glorious cause; charity never meditate a more exalted flight._ O that a live coal from the burning altar of celestial beneficence might warm the hearts of the sacred order, and impassion the feelings of the attentive hearer! "_Gentlemen of the Clergy in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia_,-- "Your most zealous exertions, your unremitting assiduities, are pathetically invoked. Those States in which you minister unto the Church of God gave us birth. We are as aliens from the commonwealth of America. We are strangers to the temples of our God. The strong arm of infidelity hath bound us with two chains; the iron one of slavery and the sword of death are entering our very souls. _Arise, ye ministers of the Most High, Christians of every denomination, awake unto charity! Let a brief, setting forth our situation, be published throughout the continent. Be it read in every house of worship, on Sunday, the 8th of February. Command a preparatory discourse to be delivered on Sunday, the 15th of February, in all churches whithersoever this petition or the brief may come; and on Thursday, the 19th of February, complete the godlike work._ It is a day which assembles a continent to thanksgiving. It is a day which calls an empire to praise. God grant that this may be the day which emancipates the forlorn captive, and may the best blessings of those who are ready to perish be your abiding portion forever! Thus prays a small remnant who are still alive; thus pray your fellow-citizens, chained to the galleys of the impostor Mahomet. "Signed for and in behalf of his fellow-sufferers, by "RICHARD O'BRIEN, "In the tenth year of his captivity." [Footnote 94: History of the War with Tripoli, pp. 69-71.] The cause in which this document was written will indispose the candid reader to any criticism of its somewhat exuberant language. Like the drama of Cervantes, setting forth the horrors of the galleys of Algiers, "it was not drawn from the imagination, but was born far from the regions of fiction, in the very heart of truth." Its earnest appeals were calculated to touch the soul, and to make the very name of slavery and slave dealer detestable.