It is the pulpit and press, clerical robes and the prohibiting of free speech, that cradles and covers the sins of the world, — all unmitigated systems of crime; and it requires the enlightenment of these worthies, through civil and religious reform, to blot out all inhuman codes. It was the Southern pulpit and press that influenced the people to wrench from man both human and divine rights, in order to subserve the interests of wealth, religious caste, civil and political power. And the pulpit had to be purged of that sin by human gore, — when the love of Christ would have washed it divinely away in Christian Science!
The cry of the colored slave has scarcely been heard and hushed, when from another direction there comes another sharp cry of oppression. Another form of inhumanity lifts its hydra head to forge anew the old fetters; to shackle conscience, stop free speech, slander, vilify; to invite its prey, then turn and refuse the victim a solitary vindication in this most unprecedented warfare.
A conflict more terrible than the battle of Gettysburg awaits the crouching wrong that refused to yield its prey the peace of a desert, when a voice was heard crying in the wilderness, — the spiritual famine of 1866, — “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make His paths straight.”
Shall religious intolerance, arrayed against the rights of man, again deluge the earth in blood? The question at issue with mankind is: Shall we have a spiritual Christianity and a spiritual healing, or a materialistic religion and a materia medica?
The advancing faith and hope of Christianity, the earnest seeking after practical truth that shall cast out
