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| CHARLES D. CLEVELAND.. 733 band, and shaking the city from lethargy into ferment. Men were compelled to take sides, and but one result oould follow, (the result which always follows when human nature is stung and quickened to find its highest instincts,) the Party of Right Bteadily moved to triumph. For a lesson to us in courage, it is worth while to ask, how these Apostles of Freedom stotxl the terrible strain put upon them for so many years. 1 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 thorn 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 the:n 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, / oiis/lit or / wiU, because they never needed to say them. The aun 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 objests 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 storms 1, that it penetrated into every secret recess that mercy casually opened, an;l 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, salf-consecrated, enveloped by the love of God, permeated by the love of mm,—twin Perfect Loves that cast out all dream of fear. And so they walked, calm as if a thousand stabs of personal insult never brought them one of personal pain, passing through all as if nothing but the screnest skies were above them. And, as I have said, right there is one explanation of the anomaly; there were the serenest skies above them— heaven's love perpetually shining. Why should it not shine? all the powers of the men were dedicated to rescuing the image of God on this earth,— |