d; we cannot hem it within the
limits of Washington or Kansas; sooner or later, it will force itself
into the conscience and sit by the hearthstone of every citizen.

It is not partisanship, it is not fanaticism, that has forced this
matter of Anti-slavery upon the American people; it is the spirit of
Christianity, which appeals from prejudices and predilections to the
moral consciousness of the individual man; that spirit elastic as air,
penetrative as heat, invulnerable as sunshine, against which creed
after creed and institution after institution have measured their
strength and been confounded; that restless spirit which refuses to
crystallize in any sect or form, but persists, a Divinely commissioned
radical and reconstructor, in trying every generation with a new
dilemma between ease and interest on the one hand, and duty on the
other. Shall it be said that its kingdom is not of this world? In one
sense, and that the highest, it certainly is not; but just as certainly
Christ never intended those words to be used as a subterfuge by which
to escape our responsibilities in the life of business and politics.
Let the cross, the sword, and the arena answer, whether the world, that
then was, so understood its first preachers and apostles. Caesar and
Flamen both instinctively dreaded it, not because it aimed at riches or
power, but because it strove to conquer that other world in the moral
nature of mankind, where it could establish a throne against which
wealth and force would be weak and contemptible. No human device has
ever prevailed against it, no array of majorities or respectabilities;
but neither Caesar nor Flamen ever conceived a scheme so cunningly
adapted to neutralize its power as that graceful compromise which
accepts it with the lip and denies it in the life, which marries it at
the altar and divorces it at the church-door.

THE ELECTION IN NOVEMBER

1860

While all of us have been watching, with that admiring sympathy which
never fails to wait on courage and magnanimity, the career of the new
Timoleon in Sicily; while we have been reckoning, with an interest
scarcely less than in some affair of personal concern, the chances and
changes that bear with furtherance or hindrance upon the fortune of
united Italy, we are approaching, with a quietness and composure which
more than anything else mark the essential difference between our own
form of democracy and any other yet known in history, a crisis