discredit to the great mayor - let no one tear a leaf from his well-earned laurels! but it was the mechanics of Boston that threw tea into the dock; it was the mechanics of Boston that held up the hands of Sam Adams; it was the mechanics of Boston, Paul Revere one of them, that made the Green Dragon immortal, and I would take that eighteen thousand dollars and add fifty thousand more, and let the city preserve this building as a Mechanics' Exchange for all time. The merchants have their gilded room, fit gathering place for consultations; but the men that carried us through the Revolution,caulkers! why, some men think we borrowed caucus from their name!-the men that carried us through the Revolution were the mechanics of Boston. Where do they gather to-day? On the sidewalks and pavements of Court Street, in the open air! We owe them a debt, in memory of what this grand movement, in its cradle, owed to them. I would ally the Green Dragon Tavern and the Sons of Liberty with the Old South, the grandsons, and great grandsons, and representatives of the men who made the bulk of that meeting before which Hutchinson quailed, and Colonel Dalrymple put on his hat and left the Council Chamber.

It was the message of the mechanics of Boston that Sam Adams carried to the governor and to Congress. They sent him to Salem and Philadelphia; they lifted and held him up till even purblind George III. could distinguish his ablest opposer, and learned to hate with discrimination.

Shelter them under this roof; consecrate it in its original form to a grand public use for the common run of the people, the bone and muscle. It will be the normal school of politics. It will be the best civil-service reform agency that the Republican party can adopt and use to-day.

The influence of these old walls will prevent men, if anything can, from becoming the tools of corruption or tyranny. "Recall every day one good thought, read one fine line," says the German Shakspeare. Yes; let every man's daily walk catch one ray of golden light, and his pulse throb once each day nobly, as he passes these walls! No gold, no greed, can canker the heart of such a people. Once in their hands, neither need, greed, nor the clamor for wider streets will ever desecrate what Adams and Warren and Otis made sacred to the liberties of man!

THE BIBLE AND THE CHURCH.

I.

Address at the New England Antislavery Convention at the Melodeon, Boston, May 28-30, 1850. A clergyman by the name of Corliss having expressed his fears that some of the advocates of the slaves were lacking in a due appreciation of the Bible, and were therefore tending toward infidelity, Mr. Phillips rose and said:

I

WISH to say one word in regard to the remarks which have been addressed to us, in order that the Antislavery enterprise may stand aright before this audience. It might be judged from the tone of the last speaker, that the Abolitionists see an enemy and an obstacle in the Bible. He has been entreating us to have greater regard for the Bible. He has been endeavoring to impress upon us reverence for that book. You might draw the inference that we needed such entreaties.

Now, in behalf of the Abolitionists, let me say, we have nothing to do with the Bible in regard to its merits or its faults, except in one point: does it sustain or rebuke slavery? If any speaker wanders beyond that, he speaks on his own responsibility; he speaks that for which this. society is not amenable. Perhaps it may be impossible for him to avoid expressing his private opinion of the Bible as to other points, in the course of illustrating some Antislavery topic. Yet you are to take them as. illustrations. And when my friend Foster introduced.

some speculations of his own, on other points than slavery, he had no right to do it otherwise than as illustrations.

Now, the friend who has just spoken will, I think, grant us this, that no speaker, unless it be Mr. Foster, has wandered beyond the just limits of Antislavery discussion; that our Antislavery speakers have never yet allowed that the Bible sustained slavery; that we have felt no need, therefore, to throw it overboard. And al though we may put the question like my friend Wright, What would you do in certain circumstances? let it be remembered that the Antislavery enterprise puts such circumstances as merely fictitious, hypothetical, — and claims the Bible on its own side. [Prolonged applause.]

Remember, that although we feel there is enough in mere humanity, without the Bible, to condemn slavery; that the verdict against it is so self-evident as to destroy the title of any book to be thought inspired which sanctions such a system,- still we, so far from bringing any such accusation against the Bible, have always claimed it in behalf of justice and liberty. It is from Moses Stuart, it is from Daniel Webster, it is from the Church and the politicians, that this attack on the Bible comes, and not from us. [Loud cheers.] I know I am repeating things abundantly well known to all our friends; but it is often the result of such speeches as we have just heard, that the audience go away under a wrong impression. I contend that everything that has been said, that the principles of these resolutions, that the substratum of all that has been spoken, all claim the Bible as a basis; and that, confident the Bible is on our side, we will not be forced into any position of seeming hostility to it. We have issues enough with this community.

Because the clergy of our little day and neighborhood pervert the Scriptures, shall that make us disbelieve

them? No matter for the texts: enough for us to know that on every field where justice has triumphed, the Bible has led the van; that tyrants in every age have hated it; humanity, in every step of its progress, has caught watchwords from its pages. Freedom of thought was won by those who would read it in spite of Popes; freedom of speech by those who would expound it in defiance of Laud. Luther and Savonarola, Howard and Oberlin, Fénelon and Wilberforce, Puritan and Huguenot, Covenanter and Quaker, all hugged it to their breasts. It was to print the Bible that bold men fought for the liberty of the press. When the oppressor hurries to place it in every cottage, when the slave-holder labors that his slave may be able to read it, then will we begin to believe that Isaiah struggled to rivet "every yoke," that Paul was opposed to giving every man that which is just and equal, and that the New Testament was written to "strengthen the weak hands and confirm the feeble knees" of tottering iniquities.

But not till then shall a few petty priests shut us out from sympathy with, and confidence in, the noble army of martyrs and the glorious company of the Apostles. Not till then shall the Stuarts and Waylands, with their little black gowns, hide from us the burning light of the great Apostle of the Gentiles. What though, holding up the Book, they cry, " See here and look there, note these specks on the sun;" we know still it is the sun, and astronomy tells us that what is dark there to-day will perhaps be brightness and living light to-morrow. So with the Bible. What though, here and there, there should be isolated texts which look inconsistent with the great spirit which informs the whole; coming years, we know, will show them, like spots on the sun, all bright with the splendid effulgence of Infinite Love. Shall an ambiguous line in Timothy cover up the whole