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

---

[246] them? No matter for the texts: enough for us to know that on every field where justice has triumphed, the Bible has led the van; that tyrants in every age have hated it; humanity, in every step of its progress, has caught watchwords from its pages. Freedom of thought was won by those who would read it in spite of Popes; freedom of speech by those who would expound it in defiance of Laud. Luther and Savonarola, Howard and Oberlin, Fenelon and Wilberforce, Puritan and Huguenot, Covenanter and Quaker, all hugged it to their breasts. It was to print the Bible that bold men fought for the liberty of the press. When the oppressor hurries to place it in every cottage, when the slave-holder labors that his slave may be able to read it,--then will we begin to believe that Isaiah struggled to rivet “every yoke,” that Paul was opposed to giving every man that which is just and equal, and that the New Testament was written to “strengthen the weak hands and confirm the feeble knees” of tottering iniquities.

But not till then shall a few petty priests shut us out from sympathy with, and confidence in, the noble army of martyrs and the glorious company of the Apostles. Not till then shall the Stuarts and Waylands, with their little black gowns, hide from us the burning light of the great Apostle of the Gentiles. What though, holding up the Book, they cry, “See here and look there, note these specks on the sun;” we know still it is the sun, and astronomy tells us that what is dark there to-day will perhaps be brightness and living light to-morrow. So with the Bible. What though, here and there, there should be isolated texts which look inconsistent with the great spirit which informs the whole; coming years, we know, will show them, like spots on the sun, all bright with the splendid effulgence of Infinite Love. Shall an ambiguous line in Timothy cover up the whole