called,) may not tolerate. Recollect the Slave Trade, which, with the
magnitude of a national concern, continued its abominations while one
generation after another of Englishmen passed away; their intelligence,
conscience, humanity, and refinement, as quietly accommodated to it, as if
one portion of the race had possessed an express warrant from Heaven to
capture, buy, sell, and drive another. This is but one of many mortifying
illustrations how much the constitution of our moral sentiments resembles
a Manichaean creation, how much of them is formed in passive submission to
the evil principle, acting through prevailing custom; which determines
that it shall but very partially depend on the real and most manifest
qualities of things present to us, whether we shall have any right
perception of their characters of good and evil. The agency which works
this malformation in our sentiments needs no greater triumph, than that
the true nature of things should be disguised to us by the very effect of
their being constantly kept in our sight. Could any malignant enchanter
wish for more than this,--to make us insensible to the odious quality of
things not only _though_ they stand constantly and directly in our view,
but _because_ they do so? And while they do so, there may also stand as
obviously in our view, and close by them, the truths which _expose_ their
real nature, and might be expected to make us instantly revolt from them;
and these truths shall be no other than some of the plainest principles of
reason and religion. It shall be as if men of wicked designs could be
compelled to wear labels on their breasts wherever they go, to announce
their character in conspicuous letters; or nightly assassins could be
forced to carry torches before them, to reveal the murder in their
visages; or, as if, according to a vulgar superstition, evil spirits could
not help betraying their dangerous presence by a tinge of brimstone in the
flame of the lamps. Thus evident, by the light of reason and religion,
shall have been the true nature of certain important facts in the policy
of a Christian nation; and nevertheless, even the cultivated part of that