t is a pity you should not be
blessed with the theology of despotism; listen therefore to the
"Thanksgiving Sermon" of Rev. Dr. Wadsworth, which Hon. Mr. Cooper
read to the Jury in Independence Hall.

"For passing by all other causes of irritation as just now
secondary and subordinate, look for a moment, at the
influence which the Gospel of Christ would have in this
great sectional controversy about slavery.

"First, It would say to the Northern fanatic, who _vapors
about man-stealing_ as if there were no other evil under the
sun but this one evil of Slavery--it would say to him,
Emulate the spirit of your blessed Master and his apostles,
_who, against this very evil_ [man-stealing] in their own
times, _brought no railing accusation_; but in one instance
at least, _sent back a fugitive_ from the household of
Philemon.

"In treating Southern _Christian slaveholders_ with
Christian courtesy, and _sending back their fugitives_ when
apprehended among you, you neither indorse the system nor
partake of its evil; you are only performing in good faith
the agreement, and redeeming the pledges of your
forefathers, and leaving to each man for himself to answer
for his own acts at the judgment-seat of Jesus. It would
tear away from the man, as the foulest cloak of hypocrisy,
that pretence of a religious principle in this whole matter
of political abolitionism.

"Religious principle! Oh my God! That religious principle,
that for the sake of _an abstract right_ whose very exercise
were disastrous to the unprepared bondmen who inherit it,
would tear this blest confederacy in pieces, and deluge
these smiling plains in fraternal blood, and barter the
loftiest freedom that the world ever saw, for the armed
despotism of a great civil warfare! That religious principle
which, in disaster to man's last great experiment, would
fling the whole race back into the gloom of an older
barbarism--rearing out of the ruin of these free homes, the
thrones of a more adamantine despotism--freedom's beacons
all extinguished, and the whole race slaves. That religious
principle through which, losing sight of God's great purpose
of evangelizing the nations, [by American Slavery,] would
shatter the mightiest wheel in the mechanism of salvation,
and palsy the wing o