TO SUCH DEGRADATION IT IS SINFUL IN THE EXTREME FOR YOU TO MAKE VOLUNTARY SUBMISSION.  The divine commandments, you are in duty bound to reverence, and obey.  If you do not obey them you will surely meet with the displeasure of the Almighty.  He requires you to love him supremely, and your neighbor as yourself—­to keep the Sabbath day holy—­to search the Scriptures—­and bring up your children with respect for his laws, and to worship no other God but him.  But slavery sets all these at naught and hurls defiance in the face of Jehovah.  The forlorn condition in which you are placed does not destroy your moral obligation to God.  You are not certain of Heaven, because you suffer yourselves to remain in a state of slavery, where you cannot obey the commandments of the Sovereign of the universe.  If the ignorance of slavery is a passport to heaven, then it is a blessing, and no curse, and you should rather desire its perpetuity than its abolition.  God will not receive slavery, nor ignorance, nor any other state of mind, for love, and obedience to him.  Your condition does not absolve you from your moral obligation.  The diabolical injustice by which your liberties are cloven down, NEITHER GOD, NOR ANGELS, OR JUST MEN, COMMAND YOU TO SUFFER FOR A SINGLE MOMENT.  THEREFORE IT IS YOUR SOLEMN AND IMPERATIVE DUTY TO USE EVERY MEANS, BOTH MORAL, INTELLECTUAL, AND PHYSICAL, THAT PROMISE SUCCESS.  If a band of heathen men should attempt to enslave a race of Christians, and to place their children under the influence of some false religion, surely, heaven would frown upon the men who would not resist such aggression, even to death.  If, on the other hand, a band of Christians should attempt to enslave a race of heathen men and to entail slavery upon them, and to keep them in heathenism in the midst of Christianity, the God of heaven would smile upon every effort which the injured might make to disenthral themselves.

Brethren, it is as wrong for your lordly oppressors to keep you in slavery, as it was for the man thief to steal our ancestors from the coast of Africa.  You should therefore now use the same manner of resistance, as would have been just in our ancestors, when the bloody foot prints of the first remorseless soul thief was placed upon the shores of our fatherland.  The humblest peasant is as free in the sight of God, as the proudest monarch that ever swayed a sceptre.  Liberty is a spirit sent out from God, and like its great Author, is no respecter of persons.

Brethren, the time has come when you must act for yourselves.  It is an old and true saying, that “if hereditary bondmen would be free, they must themselves strike the blow.”  You can plead your own cause, and do the work of emancipation better than any others.  The nations of the old world are moving in the great cause of universal freedom, and some of them at least, will ere long, do you justice.  The combined powers of Europe have placed their broad seal of disapprobation upon the African slave trade.