What, in describing the scenes of the final judgment, does our Savior teach us? By what standard must our character be estimated, and the retributions of eternity be awarded?  A standard, which both the righteous and the wicked will be surprised to see erected.  From the “offscouring of all things,” the meanest specimen of humanity will be selected—­a “stranger” in the hands of the oppressor, naked, hungry, sickly; and this stranger, placed in the midst of the assembled universe, by the side of the sovereign Judge, will be openly acknowledged as his representative.  “Glory, honor, and immortality,” will be the reward of those who had recognized and cheered their Lord through his outraged poor.  And tribulation, anguish, and despair, will seize on “every soul of man” who had neglected or despised them.  But whom, within the limits of our country, are we to regard especially as the representatives of our final Judge?  Every feature of the Savior’s picture finds its appropriate original in our enslaved countrymen.

  1.  They are the LEAST of his brethren.

  2.  They are subject to thirst and hunger, unable to command a cup
     of water or a crumb of bread.

  3.  They are exposed to wasting sickness, without the ability to
     procure a nurse or employ a physician.

  4.  They are emphatically “in prison,” restrained by chains, goaded
     with whips, tasked, and under keepers.  Not a wretch groans in any
     cell of the prisons of our country, who is exposed to a confinement
     so vigorous and heartbreaking as the law allows theirs to be
     continually and permanently.

  5.  And then they are emphatically, and peculiarly, and exclusively,
     STRANGERS—­strangers in the land which gave them birth.  Whom
     else do we constrain to remain aliens in the midst of our free
     institutions?  The Welch, the Swiss, the Irish?  The Jews even? 
     Alas, it is the negro only, who may not strike his roots into
     our soil.  Every where we have conspired to treat him as a
     stranger—­every where he is forced to feel himself a stranger.  In
     the stage and steamboat, in the parlor and at our tables, in the
     scenes of business and in the scenes of amusement—­even in the
     church of God and at the communion table, he is regarded as a
     stranger.  The intelligent and religious are generally disgusted
     and horror-struck at the thought of his becoming identified with
     the citizens of our republic—­so much so, that thousands of them
     have entered into a conspiracy to send him off “out of sight,” to
     find a home on a foreign shore!—­and justify themselves by openly
     alleging, that a “single drop” of his blood, in the veins of any
     human creature, must make him hateful to his fellow
     citizens!—­That nothing but banishment from “our coasts,” can
     redeem him from the scorn and contempt to which his “stranger”
     blood has reduced him among his own mother’s children!