has been to lift him from the
position of one of the most popular preachers and lecturers, to that of
one of the most popular men in the country. Those who hate his
philanthropy admire his courage. Those who disagree with him in theology
recognize him as having a claim to the title of Apostle quite as good as
that of John Eliot, whom Christian England sent to heathen America two
centuries ago, and who, in spite of the singularly stupid questionings
of the natives, and the violent opposition of the sachems and powwows,
or priests, succeeded in reclaiming large numbers of the copper-colored
aborigines.

The change of opinion wrought by Mr. Beecher in England is far less easy
to estimate; indeed, we shall never have the means of determining what
it may have been. The organs of opinion which have been against us will
continue their assaults, and those which have been our friends will
continue to defend us. The public men who have committed themselves will
be consistent in the right or in the wrong, as they may have chosen at
first. To know what Mr. Beecher has effected, we must not go to Exeter
Hall and follow its enthusiastic audience as they are swayed hither and
thither by his arguments and appeals; we must not count the crowd of
admiring friends and sympathizers whom he, like all personages of note,
draws around him: the fire-fly calls other fire-flies about him, but
the great community of beetles goes blundering round in the dark as
before. Mr. Cobden has given us the test in a letter quoted by Mr.
Beecher in the course of his speech at the Brooklyn Academy. "You will
carry back," he says, "an intimate acquaintance with a state of feeling
in this country among what, for [want of] a better name, I call the
ruling class. Their sympathy is undoubtedly strongly for the South, with
the instinctive satisfaction at the prospect of the disruption of the
great Republic. It is natural enough." "But," he says, "our masses have
an instinctive feeling that their cause is bound up in the prosperity of
the States,--the United States. It is true that they have not a particle
of power in the direct form of a vote; but when millions in this country
are led by the religious middle class, they can go and prevent the
governing class from pursuing a policy hostile to their sympathies."

This power of the non-voting classes is an idea that gives us pause. It
is one of those suggestions, like Lord Brougham's of the "unknown
public," which, i