"Where shall I find a parallel with men who will do such a deed,—do it in Boston? I will open the tombs, and bring up most hideous tyrants from the dead. Come, brood of monsters, let me bring you up from the deep damnation of the graves wherein your hated memories continue for all time their never-ending rot. Come, birds of evil omen! come, ravens, vultures, carrion-crows, and see the spectacle! come, see the meeting of congenial souls! I will disturb, disquiet, and bring up the greatest monsters of the human race! Tremble not, women; tremble not, children; tremble not, men! They are all dead! They cannot harm you now! Fear the living, not the dead!
"Come hither, Herod the wicked! Thou that didst seek after that young child's life, and destroyed the Innocents! Let me look on thy face! No; go! Thou wert a heathen! Go, lie with the Innocents thou hast massacred. Thou art too good for this company!
"Come, Nero! Thou awful Roman Emperor! Come up! No; thou wast drunk with power! schooled in Roman depravity. Thou hadst, besides, the example of thy fancied gods! Go, wait another day. I will seek a worser man.
"Come hither, St. Dominic! come, Torquemada!—Fathers of the Inquisition! Merciless monsters, seek your equal here! No; pass by! You are no companions for such men as these! You were the servants of atheistic popes, of cruel kings. Go to, and get you gone. Another time I may have work for you,—not now; lie there and persevere to rot. You are not yet quite wicked and corrupt enough for this comparison. Go, get ye gone, lest the sun turn back at sight of ye!
"Come up, thou heap of wickedness, George Jeffreys!—thy hands deep purple with the blood of thy murdered fellow men! Ah, I know thee! awful and accursed shade! Two hundred years after thy death, men hate thee still, not without cause! Let me look upon thee! I know thy history. Pause and be still, while I tell it to these men.
"Brothers, George Jeffreys 'began in the sedition line.' 'There was no act, however bad, that he would not resort to to get on.' 'He was of a bold aspect, and cared not for the countenance of any man.' 'He became the avowed, unblushing slave of the court, and the bitter persecutor and unappeasable enemy of the principles he had before supported.' 'He was universally insolent and overbearing.' 'As a judge, he did not consider the decencies of his post, nor did he so much as affect to be impartial, as became a judge.' His face and voice were always unamiable. 'All tenderness for the feelings of others, all self-respect were obliterated from his mind.' He had 'a delight in misery, merely as misery,' and 'that temper which tyrants require in their worst instruments.' 'He made haste to sell his forehead of brass and his tongue of venom to the court.' He had 'more impudence than ten carted street-walkers;' and was appropriately set to a work 'which could be trusted to no man who reverenced law, or who was sensible of shame.' He was a 'Commissioner' in 1685. You know of the 'Bloody assizes' which he held, and how he sent to execution three hundred and twenty persons in a single circuit. 'The whole country was strewed with the heads and limbs of his victims.' Yet a man wrote that 'A little more hemp might have been usefully employed.' He was the worst of the English judges. 'There was no measure, however illegal, to the execution of which he did not devotedly and recklessly abandon himself.' 'During the Stuart reigns, England was cursed by a succession of ruffians in ermine, who, for the sake of court favor, wrested the principles of law, the precepts of religion, and the duties of humanity; but they were all greatly outstripped by Jeffreys.' Such is his history.
"Come, shade of a judicial butcher! Two hundred years thy name has been pilloried in face of the world, and thy memory gibbeted before mankind. Let us see how thou wilt compare with those who kidnap men in Boston! Go seek companionship with them! Go claim thy kindred, if such they be! Go tell them that the memory of the wicked shall rot,—that there is a God; an Eternity; ay! and a Judgment too! where the slave may appeal against him that made him a slave, to Him that made him a man.
"What! Dost thou shudder? Thou turn back! These not thy kindred! Why dost thou turn pale, as when the crowd clutched at thy life in London Street? It is true, George Jeffreys, and these are not thy kin. Forgive me that I should send thee on such an errand, or bid thee seek companionship with such—with Boston hunters of the slave! Thou wert not base enough! It was a great bribe that tempted thee! Again I say, pardon me for sending thee to keep company with such men! Thou only struckst at men accused of crime; not at men accused only of their birth! Thou wouldst not send a man into bondage for two pounds! I will not rank thee with men who, in Boston, for ten dollars, would enslave a negro now! Rest still, Herod! Be quiet, Nero! Sleep, St. Dominic, and sleep, O Torquemada! in your fiery jail! Sleep, Jeffreys, underneath 'the altar of the church' which seeks with Christian charity to hide your hated bones."
"Well, my brethren, these are only the beginning of sorrows. There will be other victims yet; this will not settle the question. What shall we do? I think I am a calm man and a cool man, and I have a word or two to say as to what we shall do. Never obey the law. Keep the law of God. Next I say, resist not evil with evil; resist not now with violence. Why do I say this? Will you tell me that I am a coward? Perhaps I am; at least I am not afraid to be called one. Why do I say, then, do not now resist with violence? Because it is not time just yet; it would not succeed. If I had the eloquence that I sometimes dream of, which goes into a crowd of men, and gathers them in its mighty arm, and sways them as the pendent boughs of yonder elm shall be shaken by the summer breeze next June, I would not give that counsel. I would call on men, and lift up my voice like a trumpet through the whole land, until I had gathered millions out of the North and the South, and they should crush slavery for ever, as the ox crushes the spider underneath his feet. But such eloquence is given to no man. It was not given to the ancient Greek who 'shook the arsenal and fulmined over Greece.' He that so often held the nobles and the mob of Rome within his hand, had it not. He that spoke as never man spake, and who has since gathered two hundred millions to his name, had it not. No man has it. The ablest must wait for time! It is idle to resist here and now. It is not the hour. If in 1765 they had attempted to carry out the Revolution by force, they would have failed. Had it failed, we had not been here to-day. There would have been no little monument at Lexington 'sacred to liberty and the rights of mankind' honoring the men who 'fell in the cause of God and their country.' No little monument at Concord; nor that tall pile of eloquent stone at Bunker Hill, to proclaim that 'Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.' Success is due to the discretion, heroism, calmness, and forbearance of our fathers: let us wait our time. It will come—perhaps will need no sacrifice of blood."[215]
Gentlemen, I think Judge Finch could construct a misdemeanor out of these words; you will find in them nothing but the plain speech of a minister of the Christian religion.