n speaking of himself, said, "The spirit of the Lord God is upon me;
because he hath sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim
liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that
are bound; to comfort all that mourn; to give them a garland for
ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the
spirit of heaviness;"--these professed followers of this wonderfully
glorious Christ, instead of standing back of the poor Negro in the
earnest, desperate struggle which he is making against this damnable
race-prejudice, which curses him because he is down, branding him with
vile epithets, calling him low, degraded, ignorant, besotted; and yet
putting its heel upon his neck so as to prevent him from rising;
despising him because he is down, and hating him when he manifests any
disposition to throw off his ignorance and degradation and show
himself a man;--in this struggle, I say, against this damnable
race-prejudice, these professing Christians are often his worst
enemies, his most malignant haters and traducers.

In saying that the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ is in this land,
I do not therefore, base my assertion upon the fact, that there are
135,667 ministers in it, and 187,075 churches, and 26,100,884
professing Christians. No. The American Church as such is only an
apology for a church. It is an apostate church, utterly unworthy of
the name which it bears. Its spirit is a mean and cowardly and
despicable spirit. "One shall chase a thousand," we are told in the
good Book--and "two shall put ten thousand to flight." And yet with
135,667 preachers, and more than 2,000,000 church members in this
land, this awful, black record of murder and lawlessness against a
weak and defenseless race, still goes on. In the presence of this
appalling fact, I can well understand the spirit which moved Theodore
Parker--that pulpit Jupiter of his day--when in his great sermon on
"The True Idea of a Christian Church," he said, "In the midst of all
these wrongs and sins--the crimes of men, society and the state--amid
popular ignorance, pauperism, crime and war, and slavery, too--is the
church, to say nothing, do nothing; nothing for the good of such as
feel the wrong, nothing to save them who do the wrong? Men tell us so,
in word and deed; that way alone is safe! If I thought so, I would
never enter the church but once again, and then to bow my shoulders to
their manliest work, to heave down its strong pi