ABSTRACT
I am well aware, my brethren, that I have been charged with a deviation, a positive departure from the line of duty prescribed to the profession, of which I am an unworthy member, though I trust an upright, a sincere and a devoted one. It is said that I have dishonoured and desecrated the holy office, by neglecting the purely religious and spiritual claims, which the church has made upon the time, the talents and the influence of her ministers; by postponing the discussion of abstract doctrines, the tenets of a metaphysically reasoned system of theology, or the admitted articles of a settled and established orthodoxy; and instead of this, or before this, or along with this, insisting on the obligation the whole christian world is under to carry into actual, visible, immediate practice the plain precepts of that religion, whose first and last and only law on earth is that we should love our neighbour as ourself; doing unto others as we would they should do unto us. It has been my practice, and has been charged upon me as a crime, to apply the rules of God’s commandments to various institutions of the social system, in my own immediate neighbourhood, and in the country at large; to bring the principles and operations of the manufactures, the commerce and the legislation of this professedly christian land to the standard of God’s holy word, the law of the Creator, the witness-bearer of his mind and will to man. I have asked whether merchants, senators and statesmen are amenable to any authority higher than their own will, or whether they are free to do what their own thirst for gold and lust of power may lead them to attempt to execute upon the poor, the weak, the unfriended and defenceless portions of the community. I have asked whether all rights are not reciprocal, all duties relative, all privileges mutual, held together by all in the holy bonds of righteousness and love; whether there be not some given, acknowledged and universally admitted standard of truth and untruth, right and wrong, good and evil; whether that standard be not the written word of God, whether that God, by whom that word was written, be not the One law-giver, the King of kings, the Lord of lords, the only Ruler of princes? If it be so, and that it is so none will gainsay, I have gone on to enquire, whether the practices of the factory system, for instance, are in accordance with the precepts of our most holy religion; whether Christian mill-owners are justified in pursuing a system of manufacture, which has done more to injure the health, impair the constitution, demoralize the character of a vast mass of our population, than any other recorded in history; which has made such a fearful waste of the natural, the social and the moral life of our industrious countrymen, that it has become a question, not only whether the silken chord that should bind society in love, can any longer hold her various members within its soft and peaceful circle; but whether the race itself, the human breed be not so far degenerate as to threaten imbecility, idiotcy or actual extinction to a most extensive and alarming degree? I have asked, especially, whether the principles of our modem political economy can be made to quadrate with the statements of divine revelation; whether it be indeed true that the earth is too small for its inhabitants; whether the beings born into the world are indeed too many, and multiply too fast for its harvests, the production of its husbandry, and the supplies that lie hidden in the mysterious, inexhaustible storehouses of the great Creator of heaven and earth; whether to keep down the population of a christian country be in accordance with the commandments of that Father in heaven, who made man at first in his own likeness, a being of knowledge and righteousness; who loved him from the beginning, and sent his Son to seek the lost and raise the fallen; to whose eye all the springs of action in man were opened and uncovered; and who had not to learn from another what man was and what he was not, what he knew and what he did not know, what he could do and what he could not do, where and how he would settle in his wanderings through this wilderness, where and how he would have to live and move and have his being here upon earth during his progress through the world of men and things seen to the world of beings and of things as yet unseen. […]
