What claim has Slavery to immunity from discussion? We are told that
discussion is dangerous. Dangerous to what? Truth invites it, courts the
point of the Ithuriel-spear, whose touch can but reveal more clearly the
grace and grandeur of her angelic proportions. The advocates of Slavery
have taken refuge in the last covert of desperate sophism, and affirm that
their institution is of Divine ordination, that its bases are laid in the
nature of man. Is anything, then, of God's contriving endangered by
inquiry? Was it the system of the universe, or the monks, that trembled at
the telescope of Galileo? Did the circulation of the firmament stop in
terror because Newton laid his daring finger on its pulse? But it is idle
to discuss a proposition so monstrous. There is no right of sanctuary for
a crime against humanity, and they who drag an unclean thing to the horns
of the altar bring it to vengeance and not to safety.

Even granting that Slavery were all that its apologists assume it to be,
and that the relation of master and slave were of God's appointing, would
not its abuses be just the thing which it was the duty of Christian men to
protest against, and, as far as might be, to root out? Would our courts
feel themselves debarred from interfering to rescue a daughter from a
parent who wished to make merchandise of her purity, or a wife from a
husband who was brutal to her, by the plea that parental authority and
marriage were of Divine ordinance? Would a police-justice discharge a
drunkard who pleaded the patriarchal precedent of Noah? or would he not
rather give him another month in the House of Correction for his
impudence?

The Antislavery question is not one which the Tract Society can exclude by
triumphant majorities, nor put to shame by a comparison of
respectabilities. Mixed though it has been with politics, it is in no
sense political, and springing naturally from the principles of that
religion which traces its human pedigree to a manger, and whose first
apostles were twelve poor men against the whole world, it can dispense
with numbers and earthly respect. The clergyman may ignore it in the
pulpit, but it confronts him in his study; the church-member, who has
suppressed it in parish-meeting, opens it with the pages of his Testament;
the merchant, who has shut it out of his house and his heart, finds it
lying in wait for him, a gaunt fugitive, in the hold of his ship; the
lawyer, who has declared that it is no conc