But are you, Jonah-like, on this account to wrap yourselves up in the mantle of insensibility, caring nothing for the nations smarting under oppression? stretching forth no hand for their deliverance, not even so much as to protest against a conspiracy of evil doers, and give an alms to aid deliverance from them?  Are you to hide your national talent in a napkin, or lend it at usury?  Read the Saviour’s maxim: 

“Do unto others as ye would that others do unto you!” This is the Saviour’s golden rule, applicable to nations as well as to individuals.  Suppose when the United States were struggling for their independence, the Spanish Government had interfered to prevent its achievement —­sending an armament to bombard your cities and murder your inhabitants.  What would your forefathers have thought—­how felt?  Precisely as Hungary thought and felt when the Russian bear put down his overslaughtering paw upon her.  They would have invoked high heaven to avenge the interference—­and had there been a people on the face of the earth to protest against it, that people would have shown out, like an eminent star in the hemisphere of nations—­and to this day you would call it blessed.  What you would have others do unto you, do so likewise unto them.

And though you met no foreign interference, yet you met far more than a protest in your favour; you met substantial aid:  thirty-eight vessels of war, nineteen millions of money, 24,000 muskets, 4,000 soldiers, and the whole political weight of France engaged in your cause.  I ask not so much, by far not so much, for oppressed Europe from you.

It is a gospel maxim “Be not partaker of other men’s sins.” It is alike applicable to individuals and nations.  If you of the United States see the great law of humanity outraged by another nation, and see it silently, raising no warning voice against it, you virtually become a party to the offence; as you do not reprove it, you embolden the offender to add iniquity unto iniquity.

Let not one nation be partaker of another nation’s sins.  When you see the great law of humanity, the law upon which your national existence rests, the law enacted in the Declaration of your Independence, outraged and profaned, will you sit quietly by?  If so (excuse me for saying) part of the guilt is upon you, and while individuals receive their reward in the eternal world, nations are sure to receive it here.  There is connection of cause and effect in a nation’s destiny.

A nation should not be a mere lake, a glassy expanse, only reflecting foreign, light around—­but a river, carrying its rich treasures from the fountain to distant regions of the earth.

A nation should not be a mere light-house, a stationary beacon, erected upon the coast to warn voyagers of their danger—­but a moving life-boat, carrying treasures of freedom to the doors of thousands and millions in their lands.