train himself, in voice, in intonation, in
emphasis, so as to speak simply, and without attracting attention to any
failure. He thought any man could do this as truly as any man could
acquire a good handwriting. And any one who knew him knows that he
considered this art as easily attained as the arts by which we clean our
faces or our hands.[C]

Starting upon life with this principle, that he would do what had to be
done,--if nobody else appeared to do it,--and that he could do it,
too,--he soon found himself with work enough on his hands. English's
flippant attack on the New Testament Scriptures appeared while Mr.
Everett was minister of Brattle-Street Church. Because it appeared, he
considered it his place to defend the New Testament against that
specific attack; and he did it. The "Defence of Christianity," which he
then published, is of value, chiefly as a piece of controversy belonging
to the history of opinion in this neighborhood at that moment.
Controversy has long since taken other grounds. For that purpose, at
that moment, the book did its work completely. It exhausted the points
which Mr. English raised, and exhausted them in a way which required
very patient study. Mr. Everett once said that to compile the chapter on
the quotations of the Old Testament by the New Testament writers, he
went through the whole of the Mischna in the edition of Surenhusius, in
six volumes folio. This chapter, I may say in passing, is the chapter of
most permanent value in the "Defence." Now this "Defence," the work of a
boy of twenty years of age, was written in the midst of the demands made
upon the popular preacher in one of the largest parishes in Boston, in a
few months' time,--sent to the printer chapter by chapter. And Mr.
Everett said of it, in after-life, that, if it did not seem like
affectation, he would say that it was relaxation from the work he was
doing in the pulpit. I have no doubt it was. I have no thought that he
was specially fitted for that work. It illustrates rather his moral
force of determination. He thought that particular charge of Mr.
English's ought to be answered. Nobody else answered it. And therefore
he did it himself. He knew he could do it, if it must be done. If he had
not prepared for it, he must prepare for it then.

But the reader will observe, I hope, that he does not in the "Defence"
attempt anything else than the task he had assigned. Here is no general
Apology. It is no discussion of the