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February, 1861.     DOUGLASS' MONTHLY.     403
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could have followed his own glorious teachings in the present instance!

Mr. SEWARD has done more than any other public man of the North to teach the people the utter worthlessness of all compromises with slaveholders.  Long ago he answered, from his place in the Senate, that such temporary agreements were at an end; that the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was a glaring breach of faith, putting an end to the confidence hitherto reposed in the South; and yet now we have him, under the pressure of the present rebellious attempt to overthrow the Government entirely, offering new guarantees to slavery, by so changing the organic law of the land that slaveholding, which is now nowhere mentioned in the instrument, shall be made a fundamental part of it, by forever putting it out of the power of Congress to interfere in any circumstances with slavery.  Our only hope for Mr. SEWARD, and for the North, is in the unreasonableness of the South in rejecting all conciliation and concessions.  The head strong policy of the seceding States, which may involve the destruction of slavery, may, at the same time, save Northern conscience from a new demoralization, and Northern self-respect from a new humiliation.  But when Mr. SEWARD and CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS swerve, there is not much hope that the Republican party will be able to hold its ground.
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REV. J. B. SHAW, D. D.---SERMON ON THE CRISIS.
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We have long since ceased to look for either honesty or humanity from American Doctors of Divinity.  About the only use of which, as a class, they are capable, is to help us to an understanding of the execrable characteristics of their ancient prototypes, the Scribes and Pharisees, men who devoured widows houses, and for a pretense made long prayers, sleek and orderly without, whited sepulchres, full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness within.  As a class they have been the deadliest enemies with which the cause of the slave has had to meet.  When that most inhuman and odious statute, the Fugitive Slave Bill, was passed, and the humanity of the country was shuddering at the barbarous enormity, this class of modern Pharisees came forward with their loathsome sermons, to prove that Jesus Christ sanctioned kidnapping; that the Epistle to Philemon is a Fugitive Slave Bill; that the Apostle Paul was in favor of catching runaway negroes, and of returning them to slavery; and that to enslave men is eminently a Scriptural institution.  We never see one of this tribe of canting panderers to popular wickedness, without having to curb our temper and repress our indignation.  We should like to tear off the sheep's clothing, and expose the veritable wolf in all his cowardly meanness and blood-thirsty atrocity.

The sermon now before us, preached in Rochester a few days ago, by Rev. J. B. SHAW, D. D., has done very little towards increasing our respect for the honesty, purity and humanity of the class.  His sermon shows him no nondescript.  We could classify him with our eyes shut.  His moral features, though somewhat softened by the times, and by the latitude of his location, are sufficiently marked and striking to leave no doubt of his species.  Where such a man reads the Bible, preaches and prays, the slaveholder will always
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be more safe than the slave, the oppressor more welcome than the oppressed.  He has religion that happily adjusts its sympathies to the rich and the powerful, and is seldom on the side of the poor and the defenceless.  We have seen many sorrow-stricken, hunted men and women fleeing from the house of bondage, during our residence in Rochester, but we have never heard of a crust of bread or a cup of cold water given to them by this reverend representative of Jesus Christ on earth, who spent his life among the lowly, and had not where to lay his head.

Dr. Shaw, in his sermon, attempts to prove, what it needed no ghost to tell us, that the present is [[italicized]] 'a day of evil.' [[/italicized]] Through many labored paragraphs and well turned periods, he sets forth what he professes to be the evidence of the [[italicized]] 'evil day.' [[/italicized]] Among these are, first--the money stealing propensities of Mr. FLOYD, and other high officials at Washington.  Upon this he dwells with much emphasis--laments that there is so little conscience amongst us concerning public trusts.  All well enough; but the arrow of the Doctor is given to the air.  He aims at nothing, and hits at everything.  What right has he to expect honesty of men-stealers, fidelity to man from those who have broken faith with human nature, and trampled upon every principle of justice.  FLOYD and his swindling companions very naturally learn their respect for the rights of property, in the school of contempt for the right of personality.  The greater includes the lesser.  Slaveholding includes every other villainy.  Having dwelt at tedious and dolorous length on this money-stealing element of our popular character, with the usual vagueness and comprehensive emptiness which distinguishes the efforts of his class, he proceeds to say:

'If any man doubts whether this is a day of evil, let him think of that most uncharitable spirit which prevails everywhere in the land that spirit which is the very opposite of the one described by the Apostle, which, instead of thinking no evil, thinketh nothing but evil, and instead of not being easily provoked, is as combustible as a walking magazine.  We can have no stronger proof of the uncharitable spirit of the day, than the fact that the extreme men of the North and the South, are regarded as the representative men.  We have radical men at the North, and these are the only men they hear anything about at the South.'

And why are they the only men heard of?  Simply because they are not cowardly sneaks.  They are in earnest, say what they mean, and mean what they say, and have not learned the detestable art of paltering in a double sense.  Ten thousand times over give us an out-and-out slaveholding Divine, who will openly proclaim slavery of divine appointment, and is every where to preach and pray for it as an holy thing, to the puling, neither-hot-nor-cold stuff which comes from Northern pulpits, like those of Dr. SHAW'S   If there is a devil in such teaching and preaching, he does not come to us as an angel of light, and therefore deceives nobody.  Of the same hit-nobody description as the foregoing, is the following:

'If any man doubts that this is a day of evil let him consider the unwillingness everywhere manifested to take our share of the sin and blame.

'I hearkened, and heard, saith the Lord, by the mouth of the Prophet.  I hearkened and heard but they spake not aright: no man repented him of his wickedness, saying, what have I done."  And has not this evil day come round again?  Is there not a disposition to search everywhere for sin but at home?  Some would charge it all to the South--some would charge it all to the North--some hold the Democratic party aloneresponsible [sic]
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--some thiuk [[sic]]that the black Republicans, as they are pleased to call them, are the only sinners.  Scarcely any one is looking at his own skirts, to see if the blood stain be not there.'

Now, what Republican, or what Democrat could possibly take offence at a rebuke so blindly searching and so sharply pointless.--How impartially is the word of life divided between Democrats and Republicans.  Under such skillful blame each may feel himself praised, and go home delighted with the eloquent and appropriate sermon of the preacher.

About one class of sinners Dr. SHAW holds no doubtful language.  The Radical Abolitionists are handled with a directness almost rude, and with harshness of judgment remarkably free from the trammels of that charity which, in another part of his discourse, the Doctor so highly commends.  The reason for this unusual directness is explained by the alleged insignificance of the party attacked.-- We give his views at length here:

'But let us not flatter ourselves that the blame is all with the South.  There are men among us to whom I have already alluded, who spend all their breath in reviling the institutions of the South--men who seem to be a strange combination of philanthropy and malignity--men who worship neither the gentle Jesus, nor that loving Father who has room in his heart for all, but their own deified opinions.  Some, mere abstraction; some, ghost of a God, on whose bloody altar they would offer up all that is dear, and sacred, and holy.  It is true, these men, the Radical Abolitionists, constitute but an insignificant faction, and have little influence out of their own restricted circle.  Still they live at the North, and all that they speak or write is caught up and sent to every reading man in the slaveholding States.  Is it not true, also, that some of our influential presses have seized with avidity and spread out and magnified all the evils connected with slavery, while they have kept their readers in profound ignorance of all mitigating circumstances and qualifying good things.  Have we not practically proceeded, on the assumption that there is but one sin in America--slavery--and but one sinner, the slaveholder.  The North can afford to deal generously with the South.  Growing so rapidly in population and wealth and power; gaining every census upon them, and delivered from that evil, which unless removed must prove their ruin.  We ought to have exercised the magnanimity which is an essential element of true greatness; what fearful problems are pressing on them for solution--what terrible questions are knocking, this day, at their door for an answer.  What shall they do with those people?  Shall they free them--if so, shall it be done immediately or gradually?  Once done, shall they keep them where they are, or send them away?  Shall they teach them to read and write--open the doors of their colleges to them and give them what we denied our free blacks, the right of suffrage?  Shall they abolish the traffic in flesh and blood--restore in all its sanctity the marriage relation and keep them on the soil where they were born, until they shall have eaten the very land up?  Who is prepared to answer these questions?  Some we might answer quite readily, but who is ready to answer all?  Who is prepared to solve these problems? and since we cannot give our brother at the South the light which he needs, shall we not bear with him--shall we not leave the matter with him and his God?  Ah! you say we might bear with them if they sincerely desired deliverance.  But they believe that it is a blessing, and as such, their duty to perpetuate it, and bequeath it to their children.  And does not this constitute a still stronger claim on our sympathy??  Alas! alas! they have been left to believe in a bad thing--been left to love a bad thing.  They are clinging with both hands to the mill-stone, as if afraid that it will go to the bottom without them.  I pity them the more on that account.

'Have not some at the North shut their pulpits, and fenced the table of the Lord against ministers and church members from the South?  And is not this a just ground of complaint?  I do contend that it is a far greater wrong and outrage, to deprive a man of his spiritual, than his civil rights, far better drive him from your door, than deny him a seat at the table of the Lord.  Beloved in Christ, have we not all been to blame?  Can any man say, my record is clear, and I am ready to meet the master and slave before the dread tribunal?
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