in his thought, but should penetrate
his will or active power. The selfish man suffers more from his
selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important
benefit. What he most wishes is to be lifted to some higher platform,
that he may see beyond his present fear the transalpine good, so that
his fear, his coldness, his custom may be broken up like fragments of
ice, melted and carried away in the great stream of good will. Do
you ask my aid? I also wish to be a benefactor. I wish more to be a
benefactor and servant than you wish to be served by me; and surely the
greatest good fortune that could befall me is precisely to be so moved
by you that I should say, 'Take me and all mine, and use me and mine
freely to your ends'! for I could not say it otherwise than because a
great enlargement had come to my heart and mind, which made me superior
to my fortunes. Here we are paralyzed with fear; we hold on to our
little properties, house and land, office and money, for the bread which
they have in our experience yielded us, although we confess that our
being does not flow through them. We desire to be made great; we desire
to be touched with that fire which shall command this ice to stream, and
make our existence a benefit. If therefore we start objections to your
project, O friend of the slave, or friend of the poor, or of the race,
understand well that it is because we wish to drive you to drive us into
your measures. We wish to hear ourselves confuted. We are haunted with
a belief that you have a secret which it would highliest advantage us to
learn, and we would force you to impart it to us, though it should bring
us to prison, or to worse extremity.

Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover
of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The
entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and
profanation. There is no skepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be
received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet. It has
had a name to live in some dogmatic theology, but each man's innocence
and his real liking of his neighbor have kept it a dead letter. I
remember standing at the polls one day when the anger of the political
contest gave a certain grimness to the faces of the independent
electors, and a good man at my side, looking on the people, remarked, "I
am satisfied that the largest part of these men, on either side, mean to
vote r