Page:Sermons preached in the African Protestant Episcopal Church of St. Thomas', Philadelphia.djvu/131

the Jews, all stand upon the historian's page, as indisputable evidences of the truth that He will not at all acquit the finally impenitent. Now, as nations can exist as such in this world only, and as God is unchangeably the same, when they become involved in national guilt, nothing but a timely repentance can avert a national punishment. Avarice, pride and ambition might be expatiated upon as sins of which this nation stands guilty before Godj but the great master sin of the nation is, that of sanctioning that svstem of outrage, which allows man to hold property in his fellow-man, the system, that blots out the moral image traced upon the soul by the hand of God, and writes thereupon— 'it is a thing.' It requires no labored attempt to show that the nation is verily guilty in this matter. In whatever department we look, whether legislative, literary, civil or religious, we find in the general spirit and conduct of each, a determined opposition to the