And now you tell us, "God did not institute" this! He only
"found it!" He "regulated it!" Come, blow up your trumpet, reverend
Levite! Go, worship the God of whom you feel half ashamed. Do not ask us
to worship and love a Being who is bound by the laws of fate so that he
cannot do otherwise, if he would, than make one of us a slave forever,
while the man who grinds with me at the same mill, goes with his wife
and children, forever free!'"
"Those remarks have the true Boston tone," said Mrs. North.
"Yes," said I, "there were brave men before Agamemnon, Horace tells us.
There is slavery forever," said I, "or the separation of husband and
wife, father and children, unless the man would be a slave forever. What
'partings' there must have been! What struggles in those who concluded
to take the fatal 'awl' through their ears, before they could make up
their minds to be slaves forever. See the hardship of the case. If the
man 'loves his wife and children,' he may be a slave; that love would
make him spend and be spent for them in freedom, in his humble home,
amid the sweets of liberty; but no; if he loves his wife he must take
the bitter draught of slavery with his love.
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