mself of the weak and the conquered,
and enslave him for his own use, shunting the toil and burden of life
upon his bowed shoulders. Through long ages he had to work out this
wrong premiss in disaster to empires through the laziness and
worthlessness of their ruling classes engendered by slave labor, in the
dumb suffering and bitter wrongs of millions of enslaved men and women.
Through centuries the Church protested against these wrongs in vain,
since the evil root, in the face of all protests, will go on bearing
the evil fruit. England, herself the mother of free peoples, was stained
with the guilt of being one of the first to originate the worst form of
slavery that the world has ever seen, the African slave-trade, her great
Queen Elizabeth not scorning to enrich her royal coffers out of the
profits of slave-raiding expeditions conducted by her sea-captains. It
needed the horrors of this latest development of the principle of
slavery, the horrors of the middle passage, of whole regions of Africa
decimated to supply the slave market, of mothers torn from their
children, or, worse still, compelled to bear them to their slave
masters, only to see them in their turn sold to some far-off station; of
the degradation of men and women brought up in heathen ignorance lest
they should use their knowledge to rebel--it needed all this weight of
evil and disaster at last to rouse the conscience of Europe to recognize
that slavery was wrong in itself and to cast out the evil premiss on
which it rested. By the mere force of moral revulsion in England, by the
throes of a great civil war engendered by slavery in America, at last
the true nature of a moral personality got itself recognized,--the
inviolability of personal responsibility, the sanctity of the
individual, the sacredness of freedom,--those great principles on which
the whole of our public and political life are founded. And I make bold
to say that these principles were gained as a heritage for all time, not
by the preaching of abstract justice, not by any consideration of the
moral beauty of liberty, but mainly by a remorseful passion over the
wrongs and the degradation of the slave. These great principles were
sown in weakness and dishonor, to be raised in honor and in the power of
an endless life.

When, therefore, the Church of the living God awakes, as she is just
beginning to do, and closes in a life and death struggle with this far
deeper and more pervasive evil of th