acted with the growth of a thousand
years, unthinned and unreclaimed by a single stroke of the woodman's
axe. Few and far between might be found inconsiderable openings, where
the ignorant native erected his rude habitation, or savage as his
patrimonial wilderness, celebrated his bloody rites, and presented his
votive gifts to demons. The rainy season--that terrible ordeal of
foreign constitutions--was about setting in; the lurid lightning shot
its fiery bolts into the forest around them, the thunder muttered its
angry tones over their head, and the frail tenements, the best which
their circumstances could afford, to shield them from a scorching sun by
day and drenching rains at night, had not yet been completed. To suppose
that at this time, when all things above and around them seemed to
combine their influence against them; to suppose they did not perceive
the full danger and magnitude of the enterprise they had embarked in,
would be to suppose, not that they were heroes, but that they had lost
the sensibility of men. True courage is equally remote from blind
recklessness and unmanning timidity; and true heroism does not consist
in insensibility to danger. He is a hero who calmly meets, and
fearlessly grapples with the dangers which duty and honor forbid him to
decline. The pilgrims rose to a full perception of all the circumstances
of their condition. But when they looked back to that country from
which they had come, and remembered the degradations in that house of
bondage out of which they had been so fortunate as to escape, they
bethought themselves; and, recollecting the high satisfaction with which
they knew success would gladden their hearts, the rich inheritance they
would entail upon their children, and the powerful aid it would lend to
the cause of universal humanity, they yielded to the noble inspiration
and girded them to the battle either for doing or for suffering.

Let it not be supposed, because I have laid universal humanity under a
tribute of gratitude to the founders of Liberia, that I have attached to
their humble achievements too important an influence in that grand
system of agencies which is now at work, renovating human society, and
purifying and enlarging the sources of its enjoyment. In the system of
that Almighty Being, without whose notice not a sparrow falls to the
ground,

"Who sees, with equal eye as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin