set
the moderate anti-slavery men apart from the Abolitionists of the
extreme type. And up to this time, Lincoln, though hostile to slavery,
had not been especially concerned as to the nation's dealing with it.
But now came the opportunity and call to resist its extension into the
territories, and with the response to that call came the sense that a
great contest was impending between right and wrong, between the good of
the many and the selfishness of the few.

Lincoln had close at hand a friend to spur him on. His law-partner,
William H. Herndon, was an enthusiastic radical in politics and
religion. He was an Abolitionist, and a follower of Theodore Parker. He
had long plied Lincoln with Parker's sermons and with anti-slavery
literature. When in 1856 Herndon and his friends began to organize to
support armed resistance in Kansas, Lincoln remonstrated with them
successfully. Then came the parting of the ways,--Republican, Democrat,
or Know-nothing? The Illinois Abolitionists threw themselves heartily
into the Republican movement. At its first State convention, at
Bloomington, Lincoln was the great figure. The faithful Herndon, his
missionary zeal rewarded at last by such a convert, describes in glowing
language the speech of Lincoln,--which so carried him away that after
trying for fifteen minutes to take notes as usual, he threw away his
pencil. "Heretofore, and up to this moment, he had simply argued the
slavery question on grounds of policy,--on what are called the
statesman's grounds,--never reaching the question of the radical and the
eternal right. Now he was newly baptized and freshly born; he had the
fervor of a new convert; the smothered flame broke out; enthusiasm
unusual to him blazed up; his eyes were aglow with an inspiration; he
felt justice; his heart was alive to the right; his sympathies,
remarkably deep for him, burst forth, and he stood before the throne of
the eternal Right, in presence of his God, and then and there unburdened
his penitential and fired soul. This speech was fresh, new, genuine,
odd, original; filled with fervor not unmixed with a divine enthusiasm;
his head breathing out through his tender heart its truths, its sense of
right, and its feeling of the good and for the good. If Lincoln was six
feet four inches high usually, at Bloomington he was seven feet, and
inspired at that."

But the prairie fire was slow to light. Five days after the convention,
Herndon and Lincoln got up a ra