The Southern League of States, have been held together by the cohesive power of Common Wrong. Their industry, their policy, their whole interior, vital economy, have been at variance with the apparent principles of their own State Governments, and with the National Institutions under which they exist. They have stood upon a narrow basis, always shaking under them, without general education, without general wealth, without diversified industry. And yet since the year 1800, they have steadily prevailed against Representative New-England and the North. The South, the truest representation of Absolutism under republican forms, is mightier in our National Councils and Policy to-day than New-England, the mother and representative of true republicanism and the whole free North.
And now it has come to pass that, in the good providence of God, another opportunity has been presented to the whole North to reassert her place and her influence, and to fill the institutions of our country with their original and proper blood. I do not desire that she should arise and put on her beautiful garments, because she is my mother, and your mother; not because her hills were the first which my childhood saw, that has never since beheld any half so dear; nor from any sordid ambition, that she should be great in this world's greatness; nor from any profane wish to abstract from the rightful place and influence of any State, or any section of our whole country. But I think that God sent New-England to these shores as his own messenger of mercy to days and ages, that have yet far to come ere they are born! She has not yet told this Continent all that is in her heart. She has sat down like Bunyan's Pilgrim, and slept in the bower by the way, and where she slept she has left her roll—God grant that she hath not lost it there while she slumbered!
By all the love that I bear to the cause of God, and the glory of his Church, by the yearnings which I have for the welfare of the human kind, by all the prophetic expectations which I have of the destiny of this land, God's Almoner of Liberty to the World, I desire to see Old Representative New-England, and the affiliated North, rouse up and do their first works.
Is it my excited ear that hears an airy phantasm whispering? or do I hear a solemn voice crying out, "Arise? Shine? thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is arisen upon thee!"
I am quite aware that the subject of Slavery has been regarded, by many, as sectional; and the agitation of it in the North needless, and injurious to our peace and the country's welfare. Whatever may have been the evils, the agitation has only come through men, not from them. It is of God. It is the underheaving of Providence. Mariners might as well blame you for the swing and toss of their craft when tides troop in or march out of your harbor, as us, for heaving to that tide which God swells under us. Tides in the ocean and in human affairs are from celestial bodies and celestial beings. The conflict which is going on springs from causes as deep as the foundations of our institutions. It will go on to a crisis; its settlement will be an era in the world's history, either of advance or of decline.
I wish to call your patient attention to the real nature of this contest. It is,
The conflict between Northern theories and Southern theories of man and of Society.
There have been, from the earliest period of the world, two different, and oppugnant, doctrines of man—his place, rights, duties and relations. And the theory of man is always the starting point of all other theories, systems, and Governments which divide the world.
Outside of a Divine and Authoritative Revelation, men have had but one way of estimating the value of man. He was to them simply a creature of time, and to be judged in the scientific method, by his phenomena. The Greeks and the Romans had no better way. They did not know enough of his origin, his nature, or his destiny, to bring these into account, in estimating man. Accordingly they could do no better than to study him in his developments and rank him by the power which he manifested. Now if a botanist should describe a biennial plant, whose root and stem belong to one season, whose blossom and fruit belong to another, as if that were the whole of it which the first year produced, he would commit the same mistake which the heathen idea of man commits in measuring and estimating a being whose true life comes hereafter, by the developments which he makes in only this world.
From this earthly side of man springs the most important practical results. For the doctrine of man, simply as he is in this life, logically deduces Absolutism and Aristocracy.