Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2

I would not have so many pulpits. “I'm not going to inflict a sermon on you,” says your generously considerate friend. What a testimony! You should go to church when you absolutely need a message; you should go as the old Christian did, who went to pray and then off to his work. The existence of a poor class in a Christian community is an evidence that it is not a Christian community. There ought to be no permanently poor class in a Christian community. “Bear ye one another's burdens.” Who shall so slander society as to say that there is not enough wealth to lift up its poverty? We never look at our duty in this respect. Christianity goes round amid the institutions of the world and stamps each as sin. Fashion cries, No; wealth says, It shall not be; and churches work to prevent it,--but by and by the whole crashes down. Christianity marked slavery as sin one hundred years ago. You may go to England and find blue-books that might be piled up as high as Bunker Hill, which were written by intelligent committees, set to inquire whether it is safe to do right. The principle of truth was there carried out, however, and culminated with Wilberforce, as he carried up eight hundred thousand broken fetters to God.

[Mr. Phillips read an extract from an article in one of the most religious of our daily papers, in 1861, in which it was stated that the struggle between the North and the South might go on with such bitterness that we should be obliged to emancipate the slaves. The article said: “The ordeal was one in which hypocritical philanthropists and bigoted religionists might exult, but from which genuine Christianity would pray most earnestly that the nation might be saved.” ]

Every man in political life now will say that he knew for years that slavery was wrong, but he did n't think it best to say so. Christianity says, “Whatever God tells ”