n human nature is stung and quickened to find
its highest instincts,) the Party of Right steadily moved to triumph.

* * * * *

For a lesson to us in courage, it is worth while to ask, how these
Apostles of Freedom stood the terrible strain put upon them for so many
years. I can answer for the two of whom I write, and do not doubt that
the answer is true of the rest: This self-forgetfulness was made easy by
a love that filled and overfilled all their moral energies--the simple
love of man, as God's highest creation, and of his natural rights, as
God's best gift. Their work was not a mere result of will, not an
outcome of faculty, not an unsupported impulse of heart. It was
character living itself out, an utterance of its entire unity, something
drawn from the solemn depths of those life-convictions which all the
personal and impersonal powers of a man, aglow and welded, unite in
producing. Hence, their work was not apart from them, even so far as to
be called ahead of them; nor parallel with them; it was _one_ with them
by a necessary spiritual inclusion. Will and Duty ceased to be separate
powers; they were transfused through the whole breadth of their human
sympathies, adding to their warmth a fixity of purpose that bore them
without a falter, through thirty years of such bitter obloquy, as, in
these latter days, only the early Anti-Slavery disciples have had to
endure. These men never said, in reference to the Anti-slavery cause, _I
ought_ or _I will_, because they never needed to say them. The sun
shines without them, and life expands without them; and here were souls
as unconsciously beneficent as the one, as spontaneous in growth and
shaping as the other. Theirs was not a force that moved mechanically in
right lines, with limited objects before it. It did, indeed, sweep with
arrowy swiftness of assail on every point that offered; but when I
remember that it more often pleaded than stormed, that it penetrated
into every secret recess that mercy casually opened, and gently stirred
into fuller life those roots of human feeling that can be numbed by
apathy but not killed even by hate, I know that it was persuasive,
diffusive, inbreathing force, an influence vital in others because an
effluence vitalized from themselves.

So they stood, self-consecrated, enveloped by the love of God, permeated
by the love of man,--twin Perfect Loves that cast out all dream of fear.
And so they walke