There is every encouragement for you to labor and pray, my friends, because the abolition of slavery as well as its existence, has been the theme of prophecy.  “Ethiopia (says the Psalmist) shall stretch forth her hands unto God.”  And is she not now doing so?  Are not the Christian negroes of the south lifting their hands in prayer for deliverance, just as the Israelites did when their redemption was drawing nigh?  Are they not sighing and crying by reason of the hard bondage?  And think you, that He, of whom it was said, “and God heard their groaning, and their cry came up unto him by reason of the hard bondage,” think you that his ear is heavy that he cannot now hear the cries of his suffering children?  Or that He who raised up a Moses, an Aaron, and a Miriam, to bring them up out of the land of Egypt from the house of bondage, cannot now, with a high hand and a stretched out arm, rid the poor negroes out of the hands of their masters?  Surely you believe that his arm is not shortened that he cannot save.  And would not such a work of mercy redound to his glory?  But another string of the harp of prophecy vibrates to the song of deliverance:  “But they shall sit every man under his vine, and under his fig-tree, and none shall make them afraid; for the mouth of the Lord of Hosts hath spoken it.”  The slave never can do this as long as he is a slave; whilst he is a “chattel personal” he can own no property; but the time is to come when every man is to sit under his own vine and his own fig-tree, and no domineering driver, or irresponsible master, or irascible mistress, shall make him afraid of the chain or the whip.  Hear, too, the sweet tones of another string:  “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”  Slavery is an insurmountable barrier to the increase of knowledge in every community where it exists; slavery, then, must be abolished before this prediction can be fulfiled.  The last chord I shall touch, will be this, “They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain.”

Slavery, then, must be overthrown before the prophecies can be accomplished, but how are they to be fulfiled?  Will the wheels of the millennial car be rolled onward by miraculous power?  No!  God designs to confer this holy privilege upon man; it is through his instrumentality that the great and glorious work of reforming the world is to be done.  And see you not how the mighty engine of moral power is dragging in its rear the Bible and peace societies, anti-slavery and temperance, sabbath schools, moral reform, and missions? or to adopt another figure, do not these seven philanthropic associations compose the beautiful tints in that bow of promise which spans the arch of our moral heaven?  Who does not believe, that if these societies were broken up, their constitutions burnt, and the vast machinery with which they are laboring to regenerate mankind was stopped, that the black clouds of vengeance would soon burst over our world, and every city would witness the fate of the devoted cities of the plain?  Each one of these societies is walking abroad through the earth scattering the seeds of truth over the wide field of our world, not with the hundred hands of a Briareus, but with a hundred thousand.