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

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“ [249] nothing that I had heard,” --to such a church the language of the Lord is, “Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you: they make you vain; they speak a vision of their own heart; they steal every one words from his neighbor. Is not my word like as a fire? saith the Lord: and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?”

The other side of the picture is found in such passages as this,--“Think not I am come to send peace on the earth: I am not come to send peace, but a sword.” I stand, if with one exception, then only one, in the only Christian church in the city. I stand in the pulpit from which, 1 verily think, the ear of God has listened to more Christian truth, within a dozen years, than from any or all of the pulpits of Boston put together. I stand in the place of one whose great offence was that he practised what he preached. He dared to take his torch, and flare it in the face of the public and recognized creeds. He differed but little, at the outset, from the faith of the Unitarians that he saw around him; but he pronounced the word “Liberty” --and Unitarianism vanished with a shriek! He found himself alone, with God's sky above him, and the world for an audience. They said, “He is a reckless man, he tells all he knows. He is a rash man, he utters all he thinks.” If he were, I should say with the old divine, when divinity meant something, “Thank God for a rash man once in a quarter of a century!” They said, “He shall not have the sounding-board of Brattle Street, nor the walls of Chauncy Place for an audience;” and when they denied him these, they gave him the Rocky Mountains for a sounding-board, and the heart of every hopeful and oppressed man for an audience.

You and I are called “infidels,” which means, merely, that we do not submit our necks to yokes. But, men