rong, made no plea for humanity's claims. It went on, this
monstrous abrogation of everything that lends sanctity to man's
relations on earth, till slaves were beasts, with instincts annihilated,
and masters demons, with instincts reversed; Philadelphia made no plea
for the violated rhythm of life on either side. Even the Church betrayed
its mission, and practically aided in stamping out from millions the
spirit that related them to the Divine; still Philadelphia made no plea
for God's love in his humanity. Utterly insensible to the most piercing
appeals that man can make to man, she loved her hardness, clung to it;
and if, now and then, a voice from the North blew down, warningly as a
trumpet, the great city turned sluggishly in her bed of spiritual and
political torpor, and cried: Let be, let be! a little more slumber! a
little more folding of the hands to my moral death-sleep!

This souring of faith, this half-paralysis of the heart's beating, this
blurring of the intuitions that make manhood possible, were what my
father found here in that year of our Lord's grace, 1836. It will be
worth while to watch him move into the fight and bear his part in its
thickest, just to learn how largely history lays her humanitarian
advances on a few willing souls.

The means which lay readiest to his use for rousing the dormant spirit
of the city was his social position. And yet how hard, one would think,
it must have been to make this sacrifice. He came accredited by all the
claims of finished culture, a man consecrated to the scholar's life.[A]
Then, with the sensitiveness that springs from intellectual breeding,
one will look to see him shrink from conflict with the callous condition
of feeling around him. The glamour of book-lore will spread over it, and
hide it from his sight. He has a noble enough mission, at all events: to
raise the standard of educational culture in a city that hardly knows
the meaning of the term; and if any glimpse should come to him of the
lethargic inhumanity around him, he can afford to let it pass as a
glimpse--his look being fixed on the sacred heights which the scholar's
feet must tread.

[Footnote A: All that I here write of my father, I write equally of his
co-laborer in the same sphere of work--Rev. W.H. Furness; and if it is
true of others whom I did not know, then to their memory also I bear
this record of the two whose labors and characters it has been the
deepest privilege of my life to know