That the Apostles could not have made direct attacks on the institutions of the Roman government, but at the expense of their lives, is not to be doubted.  Our Saviour well knew how fatal was the jealousy of that government to the man who was so unhappy as to have excited it; and he accordingly avoided the excitement of it, as far as practicable and consistent.  His ingenious and beautiful disposition of the question, “Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar or not,” is among the instances, in which He studied to shun the displeasure of the civil government.  Pilate gave striking evidence of his unwillingness to excite the jealousy of his government, when, every other expedient to induce him to consent to the Saviour’s death having failed, the bare charge, utterly unproven and groundless, that, the Divine prisoner had put forth pretensions, interfering with Caesar’s rights, availed to procure His death-warrant from the hands of that truth-convicted, but man-fearing governor.  Had it not availed, Pilate would have been exposed to the suspicion of disloyalty to his government; and so perilous was this suspicion, that he was ready, at any expense to his conscience and sense of justice, to avoid incurring it.

A direct attack on Roman slavery, as it would have called in question the rightfulness of war—­the leading policy of the Roman government—­would, of course, have been peculiarly perilous to its presumptuous author.  No person could have made this attack, and lived; or, if possibly he might have escaped the vengeance of the government, do we not know too much of the deadly wrath of slaveholders, to believe that he could have also escaped the summary process of Lynch law?  If it be at the peril of his life that a Northern man travels in the Southern States,—­and that, too, whether he do or do not say a word about slavery, or even whether he be or be not an abolitionist;—­if your leading men publicly declare, that it is your religious duty to put to an immediate death, whenever they come within your power, those who presume to say that slavery is sin (and such a declaration did a South Carolina gentleman make on the floor of congress, respecting the inconsiderable person who is addressing you);—­and, if your professing Christians, not excepting ministers of the gospel, thirst for the blood of abolitionists[A], as I will abundantly show, if you require proof;—­if, in a gospel land, all this be so, then I put it to your candor, whether it can reasonably be supposed that the Apostles would have been allowed to attack slavery in the midst of heathen slaveholders.  Why it is that slaveholders will not allow a word to be breathed against slavery, I cannot, perhaps, correctly judge.  Abolitionists think that this unwillingness denotes that man is unfit for absolute power over his fellow men.  They think as unfavorably of the influence of this power on the slaveholder, as your own Jefferson did.  They think that it tends to make him impatient of contradiction, self-willed, supercilious, cruel, murderous, devilish; and they think that they can establish this opinion, not by the soundest philosophy only, but by the pages of many of your own writers, and by those daily scenes of horrid brutality which make the Southern States, in the sight both of God and man, one of the most frightful and loathsome portions of the world—­of the whole world—­barbarous as well as civilized.