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FEBRUARY, 1861    DOUGLASS'S MONTHLY.    413 
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profaned my holy things: they have put no difference between the holy and profane neither have they showed difference between the unclean and the clean, and have hid their eyes from my Sabbaths, and I am profaned among them. Her princes in the midst there of are like wolves ravening the prey, to shed blood, and to destroy souls, to get dishonest gain. And her prophets have daubed them with untempered mortar, seeing vanity and divining lies unto them, saying, Thus saith the Lord God, when the Lord hath not spoken. The people of the land have used oppression and exercised robbery, and have vexed the poor and needy: yea, they have oppressed the stranger wrongfully.' Need I add that the civil government of this land is the devourer, instead of the protector, of the poor? and that, while continuing to devour them with the Land Monopoly, and Rum, and Slavery, the protection it boastingly lyingly professes and promises is no better than that which the prophet here describes – the protection which wolves give to lambs.

I have said enough to warrant me in asserting,

First: That of all the institutions of earth, civil government is unspeakably the most important.

Second: That religious men only are fit to bear civil rule, and that therefore none other should be chosen for it. This says Reason and this says the Bible, whose religion is the religion of reason. In what sublimely eloquent and commanding language is it said by the Psalmist, when, having reserved it for his last, because most important utterance and admonition, he exclaims: 'The Spirit of the Lord spake by me, and his word was in my tongue. The God of Israel said, The Rock of Israel speak to me: He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God. And he shall be as the light of the morning when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds; as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain.

Surely none but a religious man can answer to the Psalmist's description of a civil ruler. Surely none but a religious man can have the broad, un-deviating justice, the honest, comprehensive care for others, the quick, tender and thorough sympathy with the poor, helpless, and trodden down, which should ever characterize the civil ruler.

Are not religious better than irreligious men? None can doubt it. Why, then, should they not be chosen to fill the most important and responsible places in human affairs? That they are not, dishonors religion and sets reason I thought. If religious men are needed anywhere, it is in the capacity of civil rulers.

My hearers know what I mean by a religious man, and they will not go away saying that I refuse to vote for persons unless they belong to the church. I vote for those who do and for those who do not belong to it. – But I am to vote for religious persons only. Believing in the Bible, and accepting its religion with my whole head and heart, I am shut up to such voting. Other men, and immeasurably better than myself, can vote otherwise. But I cannot. I cannot without severing my connection with this Book of Books, dishonoring and disowning my God-given and God-present reason, debauching my conscience, and sinking myself into atheism.

With me a religious man is simply a just man. Show me a just man, and you show me a religious one. The more just he is, the more religious he is. And when, under the new creating influences of Heaven, he has reached the sublime height of doing in all things as he would be done by, then has he fulfilled the claims of justice and religion, of the Bible and reason, of earth and heaven. – Beliefs in regard to the Trinity, Atonement, Election, &c., &c., have their value. They may favor or hinder religion; but they are no part of it.

Say not that my stress on doing ignores faith. Say not that I forget the Bible 
words, 'The just shall live by faith.' Readily do I admit that our moral and spiritual nature cannot
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live unless it be fed by faith. But in what must this faith be? Must it be, as is generally held, in ecclesiastical dogmas and formulas? No; but in justice and goodness. Must it not be in Christ? Not necessarily in the historic Christ; but it must be in the spirit he breathed, the principles he taught, and the aims he pursued. In the high and essential sense every man has faith in Christ just as far as the spirit, these principles, and these aims become his own, and no farther; or, in other words, to the precise extent that he is like Christ.

And say not that I have omitted from my definition of a religious man love to God. – No one, destitute of this element, can love his brother as he should do. No one can do this without loving God for having made him capable of it. I add, that every one's love to God is proved and measured by his love to man.

The little handful of uncompromising Abolitionists are blamed for refusing to vote at the late Election, for this, that, or the other party ticket. But there were irreligious men upon each – men whose principles and practices proved their disposition to wield government for the destruction instead of the protection of the people. Men there were upon all those tickets, who would license the dram-shop, that great manufactory of paupers and mad men, that great slaughter-house of bodies and souls, that great source of peril to the persons and property of the sober, as well as suffering to the families of drunkards, that great multiplier of our taxes, but for which we should pay only shillings to the tax gatherers were we now pay them dollars, and but for which there would be comparatively little occasion for courts and prisons, and probably none at all for poor-houses. Men there were upon all those tickets, who would re-plunge into the deep pit of slavery the poor trembling ones who have escaped from it; and who would degrade and dishearten millions of their countrymen by excluding them from citizenship and the ballot-box.

How, then, could we vote for any one of these tickets? How could we do so, and still honor the Bible view of religion and civil government? What! vote for men who would worse than murder their innocent brothers and sisters by enslaving them! Impossible, without most deeply dishonoring that view. I said worse than murder – for who would not rather have his child murdered that enslaved? What! vote for men who would use the power we give them to punish complexion with civil and political disabilities! Surely, we could not do so without outraging all our convictions of what the Bible teaches of religion and civil government. All the varieties of the human family are equally dear to Him who 'hath made of one blood all nations of men;' and if the religion of the Bible is both His and hours, then are they equally dear to us also. The recent refusal of the majority of the voters of this State to restore suffrage to the black man proves that majority to be atheists. The contempt which that refusal pours upon human nature is wholly incompatible with true religion. A man may love himself, and this or that branch of the human family; but unless he love all its branches, he is the guilty enemy of human nature, and of the God in whose image it is made.

Some of these Abolitionists are blamed for entertaining, as did their sainted brother, Jas. G. Birney, so small a hope that the voters of our country will bring slavery to a peaceful end through the ballot-box. Their little faith in these voters is construed into evidence of their want of faith into God. But more properly might little faith in such of these voters as love to cast pro-slavery and dram-shop votes be construed into want to faith in the Devil. Our speeches and writings for a quarter of a century show that we look for a speedy termination of American slavery. But our growing fear, in the light of our growing knowledge of American voters, is, that the termination will be violent instead of peaceful. It will come in some way in God's providence,
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and it will come soon. But to say that because we doubt its coming in the bloodless and desired way, we doubt His providence, and have a reduced faith in Himself, is to do us a groundless and a great wrong.

It is very true that our hope of seeing slavery voted to death is small. This is as true as that the facts in the case forbid it to be large. And if I may be allowed to speak for some of these Abolitionists, I will add that not only do they apprehend that a people who receive their religion upon authority, instead of understandingly, will be found inadequate to the task of putting away peaceably a system of slavery so inwoven as is ours with political, ecclesiastical, commercial, social interests, but inadequate also to the maintenance of democratic institutions. The religions of the world, being authority religions, harmonize with monarchies and despotisms. If peoples who are swayed by them can call for democratic forms of government, then do they call for what is far above them – for what they are not yet educated to meet the cost of. – Were the Italians now to put away their authority religion, and now so assert their right to judge for themselves as freely of every page in the Bible as of every page in any other book, and as freely of every proceeding in the church as of every proceeding in any other association, it would not be strange if, fifty years hence, that happily delivered people should look out from the midst of their flourishing democratic institutions upon the ruins of ours.

Some of these Abolitionists hold that the North is particeps criminis in American slavery, and should therefore consent to share with the South in the present loss of emancipation. They hold that here is a case for applying the motto, 'Honor among thievs.' -- Now to charge them, therefore, with recognizing the right of property in man is as unjust as to deduce from their lack of faith in American voters their lack of faith in God.-- But these Abolitionists would buy the slaves! -- all the slaves! Well, let it pass for buying. And, pray, do not their accusers sometimes help buy a slave? Oh, yes! -- but they have never undertaken to buy all the slaves!Nevertheless, does not what they themselves do estop them from complaining of the morality of this undertaking? Morever, would not all their accusers consent to be bought out of slavery were they to fall under its heavy yoke? If they would, then let them first become so self crucifying as to be able to reduce to practice in their own case that sublime morality by which they presume to try and condemn others.

No less is the injustice done to such of these Abolitionists as are charged with consenting to have Governmental action, which shall attend the annexation to each other of nations, or parts of nations, include the sanction and upholding of slavery. With their broad democracy and their immeasurably greater account of the natural rights of people than the conventional claims of the Government, they cannot consistently  withstand the desire of two peoples (bond and free, male and female included) to cast in their lot together. They cannot withstand it, even though the conspirators, who have usurped the name and authority of Civil Government, enact theft, slavery, murder, or whatever else, as the conspirators' terms if the blending. Does it follow, however, from such enactments, that these Abolitionists recognize these conspirators as Civil Government? Not at all. They do, in fact recognize as Civil Government that only which administers the law of God. Such Governments as do not administer it, and especially the pro-slavery Governments of this country, are in their eyes but piracies. Or does it follow that the Abolitionists of whom we are speaking consent to, or are in any wise responsible for, the man-crushing and God-defying terms on which these conspirators condition the blending? Certainly not. No more does it follow that they would have the consociating peoples consent to or be responsible for them.
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