despise the African, was his neighbor, are we prompted
in like manner to ask, ‘Who are the lambs
of Christ?’ Who are His lambs? Behold
that great multitude, more than three millions of
men and feeble women and children, wandering on
our soil; no not wandering, but chained down,
not allowed to stir a step at their own free will,
crushed and hunted with all the power of one of the
mightiest nations that the world has yet seen, wielded
to keep them down in the depths of the deepest
degradation into which human beings can be plunged.
These, then that we despise, are our neighbors,
the poor, stricken lambs of Christ.
To cast one thought towards them, may
well cause us to bow down our heads in the very
dust with shame. No wonder that professing to
love Christ and his religion, we do not like to hear
them spoken of; for so far from feeding the lambs
of Christ, we are exciting the whole associated
power of this land, to keep them from being fed.
‘Feed my lambs,’ We might feed them with
fraternal sympathy, with hope, with freedom, the
imperishable bread of Heaven. We might lead
them into green pastures and still waters, into
the glorious liberty wherewith Christ died to make
all men free, the liberty of the children of God.
We might secure to them the exercise of every
sacred affection and faculty, wherewith the Creator
has endowed them. But we do none of those
things. We suffer this great flock of the Lord
Jesus to be treated as chattels, bought and sold,
like beasts of burden, hunted and lacerated by
dogs and wolves. I say we, we of these Free
Northern communities, because it is by our allowance,
signified as effectually by silence, as by active
co-operation, that such things are. They
could continue so, scarcely an hour, were not
the whole moral, religious and physical power of the
North pledged to their support. Are we not
in closest league and union with those who claim
and use the right to buy and sell human beings,
God’s poor, the lambs of Christ, a union, which
we imagine brings us in as much silver and gold
as compensates for the sacrifice of our humanity
and manhood? Nay, are we not under a law
to do the base work of bloodhounds, hunting the panting
fugitives for freedom? I utter no word of
denunciation. There is no need. For
facts that have occurred only within the last week,
transcend all denunciation. Only a few hours
ago, there was a man with his two sons, hurried
back into the inhuman bondage, from which they
had just escaped, and that man, the brother, and those
two sons, the nephews of a colored clergyman of New
York, of such eminence in the New School Presbyterian
Church, that he has received the honors of a European
University, and has acted as Moderator in one
of the Presbyteries of the same Church, when held
in the city where he resides. Almost at the very
moment the poor fugitive with his children, were
dragged through our city, the General Assembly
of that very branch of the Presbyterian Church,
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