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Monday, April 01, 2024

EASTER SUNDAY (31-03-2024; "NON ISPERATE MAI VEDER LO CIELO" (I))

 (Barceló, Divina Comedia)

"E tu che se' costí, anima viva,

partiti da cotesti che son morti

...

Per altra via, per altri porti

...

piú lieve legno convien che ti porti" 


 

 

 

17 June 1854 

Slavery has produced no sweet-scented flower like the water-lily, for its flower must smell like itself. It will be a carrion-flower.1 

 … 

The judges and lawyers, all men of expediency, consider not whether the Fugitive Slave Law2 is right, but whether it is what they call constitutional. They try the merits of the case by a very low and incompetent standard. Pray, is virtue constitutional, or vice? Is equity constitutional, or iniquity? It is as impertinent, in important moral and vital questions like this, to ask whether a law is constitutional or not, as to ask whether it is profitable or not. They persist in being the servants of man, and the worst of men, rather than the servants of God. Sir, the question is not whether you or your grandfather, seventy years ago, entered into an agreement to serve the devil, and that service is not accordingly now due; but whether you will not now, for once and last, serve God — in spite of your own past recreancy or that of your ancestors — and obey that eternal and only just Constitution which he, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your being.3 Is the Constitution a thing to live by? or die by? No, as long as we are alive we forget it, and when we die we have done with it. At most it is only to swear by. While they are hurrying off Christ to the cross, the ruler decides that he cannot constitutionally interfere to save him. The Christians, now and always, are they who obey the higher law, who discover it to be according to their constitution to interfere. They at least cut of the ears of the police; the others pocket the thirty pieces of silver.4 This was meaner than to crucify Christ, for he could better take care of himself. 

… 

Massachusetts sits waiting his decision, as if the crime were not already committed. The crime consists first of all and chiefly in her permitting an innocent man to be tried for more than his life — for his liberty. They who talk about Mr. Loring’s5 decision, and not about their own and the State’s consenting that he shall be the umpire in such a case, waste time in words and are weak in the head, if not in the heart alone.6 (June 9th, continued.) — The amount of it is, if the majority vote the devil to be God, the minority will live and behave accordingly, and obey the successful candidate, trusting that some time or other, by some Speaker’s casting-vote, they may reinstate God again. Some men act as if they believed that they could safely slide down-hill a little way — or a good way — and would surely come to a place, by and by, whence they could slide up again. This is expediency, or choosing that course which offers the fewest obstacles to the feet (of the slider). But there is no such thing as accomplishing a moral reform by the use of expediency or policy. There is no such thing as sliding up-hill. In morals the only sliders are backsliders.7 

 

HDT (Journal, June 17, 1854)



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