[247] Sermon on the Mount? No! we still claim the Bible; and, bad as the American Church is, it will take all its cunning and craft to make us doubt the purity of Jesus or the humanity of Paul.
Let those lock up the Bible who fear it; our prayer is, May it find its way into the hovel of every slave and into the heart of every legislator in the land! Our original attempt was this,--to show that the Bible and Christianity repudiate slavery. For a long time, in one unbroken phalanx, the so-called Christian Church denounced such a statement as infidelity; and from Maine to Georgia, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, we had the unbroken testimony of the Church that the Bible was proslavery. Now the Church is divided. We have Henry Ward Beecher against Moses Stuart; we have Albert Barnes against Leonard Woods.
The time was when the Recorder, and the religious press, claimed, with the New York Observer, that until you could mend the Constitution, you must mind it. We have urged our principles until we have scared up William H. Seward, and pitted him against Daniel Webster. [Great applause.] We have found persons who are willing “to bewray not him that wandereth.” And therefore it can never be often enough repeated, that when the question comes as to Christianity itself, not to American Christianity; to the Bible itself, not to the Bible in the glass of Moses Stuart,--that the Abolitionist holds on to the Bible as his, with his right hand and with his left hand. And I wish you to go away with that conviction, spite of the remonstrances which I think have been unnecessarily, however sincerely, made to us.
