Farewell to the First Congregational Church in Norwalk, Conn. (bound with other addresses)

So spake the royal Hebrew, — expressing thus the chief theme and theatre of the minister of religion in all ages and lands. He is to preach " righteousness." He is to preach it " in the great congregation." The subject is given him as that pre-eminently of his sphere ; his sphere, for the sake pre-eminently of the subject. He stands as the servant of a righteous God, in the midst of an unrighteous world ; *and his mission is, first and foremost, to show the one its departure from the other, — the evil and the guilt of it, — and to persuade to repentance and return. Let the pulpit regard its purpose as less than this, and by what could it justify its existence 1 Let it preach unrighteous- ness ; or, what is in effect the same, let it be silent before the practised unrighteousness in the life around it ; the frauds and inhumanities ; the individual, the social, the legalized injustice ; the ways and instances innumerable in which men are violating the plainest of God's commandments, treasuring up thereby, for and within themselves, though they know it not, in a growing obliquity and depravity of the moral nature, a deeper evil than they can inflict on others : let it see all this, see it in the light of that righteous law intrusted to it to proclaim, and give no audible report of what it sees, pass no judgment, utter no protest ; or let it proclaim the law in its abstract- ness only, refraining from that direct and especial application of it which alone can reach the evil and amend the wrong, — and what claim would it have on men's respect or toleration 1 nay, what less would it be, in the sight of Heaven and all holy men, than an impertinence and an oifence 1 If the minister of religion cannot adopt the asseveration of the text, in its fullest and most uncompromising sense, as expres- sive at least of his determination and endeavor, he had better find for himself, forthwith, another occupa- tion, where Ijis dishonesty will be less mischievous. " I am to preach righteousness," do his most solemn obligations compel him to affirm. " It is imperative upon me. Whatever is questionable, this is not. I am to soothe the sorrowing, to encourage the disheart- ened, to strengthen the wavering, to re-assure the doubting, to meet and minister to the various needs of the human spirit ; I am to exhort to gentleness, patience, submisgion, trust, — each passive virtue, each spiritual affection, each lovely grace; I am to shovr forth the love and mercy of the infinite Father, the hopes and promises that irradiate his word ; this, and more: but with all, and as the beginning and end of all, I am to preach righteousness. I am to set forth that eternal law which congcience enforces in every breast ; which inheres in the nature of God ; and by which he will judge, and is continually judging, the universe of souls. I am to show — not vaguely, but clearly — the actual violations of it ; not those of another place and period, but those of the living world around me." Are there any limitations to the obligation thus affirmed? any considerations which excuse a minister of religion from preaching righteousness 1 which jus- tify him in withholding his condemning protest — not his, but the Being's whom he serves — against the iniquity he sees around him 1 Where and what are they ■? Will any one dare to bring them — except under cover of some specious sophism — from the regions of the politic, the prudential, the expedient? Will any one suggest that a distinction is to be observed by the pulpit, in this regard, between the several forms of unrighteousness around it, and that certain some are to be exempted from the directness df its rebuke ? those, for instance, which have connec- tion with the State, which are under the protection of law, which have the sanction of the multitude, which are upholden by the wealth and station of society, which favor the increase of a material prosperity, which have become associated with political organiza- tions, which are an exciting and disagreeable topic to some of a congregation. Will any one aver, that these consideratioBS, one or all, constitute a ^reason, valid and worthy, for ignoring the existence, or pal- liating the enormity, of the unrighteousness to which they pertain 1 But let us come directly to the point we have all in mind. Here, within the national domain, is a large number of our fellow-beings forcibly withheld from the exercise and enjoyment of some of the dearest and most sacred of human rights, — rights bestowed by their Creator, and thus naturally and inalienably theirs, — ■ and which we, as a people, have confessed to be so, on the forefront of the document which pro- claims our nationality ; withheld, in and by this fact, from all power to realize any worthy development of their intelligent and immortal natures, any worthy enjoyment and use of life ; held and regarded and used as brute property, as human merchandise, as living mechanism ; subjected, without the means of resistance or redress, to the capricious tempers, the excited pas- sions, the selfish and irresponsible wills, of those that claim them ; degraded to the rank of plantation " stock," and valued and used as such for other and viler purposes than labor ; with no accorded right to call themselves their own; with no power to make good their claim to the breathing and pulsing, the thinking and feeling, life which God has given them ; with nothing that deserves the name of home ; pub- licly bought and sold, and separated one from another in utter disregard of the ties of nature and affection. Here is no exaggerated picture, but a calm and sober statement of what all must admit as facts. Am I told of here and there exceptions to its general truth; of alleviations, of compensations, through the huma- nity of man, and the overrulings of a gracious Provi- dence 1 Of course there are these ; we should know there were beforehand ; for everywhere are human hearts that soften towards their kind, and God has gilded every lot with some gleams of brightness and of hope. But, substantially, the statement is one of facts ; and of facts not which incidentally adhere to the system, but which essentially inhere within it, — its necessary and inseparable constituents. I heap upon the system no condemnatory epithets. I refrain from all intensified expression of my own deep abhorrence of it. I simply put it to your own moral judgments, whether it be, or not, a system of unrighteousness ; whether it be, or not, in violation of God's law and Christ's commandments. And, further- more, I ask, why, in the name of all that is just and sacred, the pulpit s\iO\M. not declare it such, and echo 10 alike Heaven's verdict and the vporld's, — vrhy it should not preach '■'■ righteousness" directly and dis- tinctly, to the upholders of it, to the connivers at it, to the apologists for it, — ay, preach it " in the great congregation." There are answers to this question ; I hear them all around me; and circumstances, of which you are all aware, authorize, if they do not demand of, me to investigate before you their claim to our regard. I shall do it freely, but not, I trust, uncandidly ■ and I shall adduce, let me say, such only as have recently been addressed to me personally, and by implication reproachfully, by some among you. It is said, and continually and everywhere reite- rated, "The subject is a political one; and, as such, should be excluded from the pulpit." Would it not be better, because truer, to say, it is a great moral and religious subject, having political bearings and rela- tions % The system of American slavery, as has now been shown, is most eminently and emphatically an unrighteous one ; a direct infraction of the plainest commandments of the Almighty ; a manifest violation of the precepts and spirit of the religion of Jesus ; the offspring of selfish and sordid lusts, and the parent of evils, the least in whose lengthened train are those which fall upon the physical and dying man, — evils which attach to the moral and immortal nature, as 11 experienced both by its helpless victims and their lordly claimants. And, being this, its discussion belongs, most strictly and legitimately, to the pulpit, — yea, is bound upon it by Heaven-woven obligations. Say, if you will, that, in its political connections, it is unwise for the pulpit to attempt the treatment of it. It is saying what no one, so far as I know, is at all disposed, by word or practice, to contradict. What- ever may be true of other pulpits, I can speak confi- dently at least of one. And it becomes me to affirm, that in this, by its present occupant, however differ- ent an excited mind may apprehend the fact to be, the subject has ever been discussed in its broadest ground, with a direct reference of it to the great law of equity and mercy. All, I suppose, agree that politi- cal preaching ■ — that which takes sides with a political party as such, and advocates its measures and course on political grounds and considerations — is to be deprecated and condemned. All agree that the preacher has a separate and peculiar, a higher and holier, work; namely, the enunciation and enforce- ment of eternal principles, with a showing forth of their practical relations to individuals and communi- ties. But if, in doing this, it so happen that his views are coincident with those of a party, is he justly chargeable with preaching " politics," in any opprobri- ous and unworthy sense ] Would to God the prin- ciples and policy of political parties were so in unison 12 with the absolute right, that, in preaching the latter, one might seem to be pleading for the former ! No : a false issue is presented, ignorantly or knowingly, with regard to this matter. The issue is not, whether political preaching is bad and wrong ; whether party spirit in the pulpit, in relation to this as to qvery other subject, is bad and wrong. There is no contro- versy here. But ?Ais is the issue : whether the preach- ing of the pulpit is to have nothing to do with a great moral and religious subject, because it has come to have political bearings and associations. In other words. Is the preacher to ignore this evil of which we speak, — this crime against humanity and God ; to go on, from month to month and year to year, as though it were not ; to stand in his place, and see its porten- tous cloud spreading and darkening on his country's sky, with the rumble of distant thunder in its deepening folds ; to see increasing millions — those whom God loves, those for whom Christ died — robbed by it of their birthright, neglected, despised, degraded ; to see its corrupting influence upon those afar who cherish and those around who extenuate and defend it, — the gradual but sure debauchment of the public con- science, — the suppression in its favor, even in youth- ful breasts, of the holy instincts of freedom and the dear sympathies of humanity ; to see the kingdom of heaven hindered in its advancement, more than by aught else, by its presence and power, — is he to see 13