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| 734 THE UNDERGROUND RAIL ROAD. not man as he suffered physically, bat the moral instinct threatened •with annihilation. It was sacred to them, this soul so sacred to redeeming love, but too brutalized to find its way to it. Nor merely the slave. Their love embraced, with yet more pitying fervor, the master compelling his spiritual nature into death, and the northern apologist letting his die; and this overmastering love of saving spiritual integrity, -was one power that made them and heart-ease hold unfailing friends through the obloquy of those days; the other must be found in the /act mentioned,—that neither resolve nor impulse was their spur, but personal character moving from its depths. From such a motive-power as this can come no parade of results. The nature that works, proceeds from the necessary laws and forces of its being, and is as simple and unconscious as any other natural law or force. Hence there are no startling epochs to record in my father's history, no supreme efforts; in filling the measure of daily opportuuity lay his chief work. I cannot measure it by our ten fingers' counting. I can only show a life unfolding, and, by the essential laws of its growth, embracing the noblest cause of its time. But if action rneaus vivifying public sentiment decaying under insidious poison; if it includes the doing of this amid a storm of odium that would quickly have shattered any soul irresolute for an instant; if it means incessant toil quietly performed, vast sums collected and disbursed, time sacrificed, strength spent; if it means holding up a great iniquity to loathing by a powerful pen, and nailing moral cowardice where-ever it showed ; if it be risking livelihood by introducing the cause of the slave into every literary work, and by mingling the school-culture of fifty-future mothers, year by year, with hatred of the sin ; if it means one's life in one's hand, friendships yielded, society defied, and position in it cheer-folly renounced; above all, if action means a •wealth of goodness overliving all scorns, compelling respect from a community rebuked, fellowship from a Church charged with ungodliness, and acknowledgment of unstained repute from a public eager to blacken with scandal; if to do thus, and bear thus, and live thus, is action, then ray lather did act to the full purpose of life in the struggle that freed the slave. S. M. C. |