my
brethren?"

As you understand a man, just in that degree are you related to him.
There is a great joy in discovering kinship--for in that moment you
discover yourself, and life consists in getting acquainted with
yourself. We see ourselves mirrored in the soul of another--that is what
love is, or pretty nearly so.

If you like what I write, it is because I express for you the things you
already know; we are akin, our heads are in the same stratum--we are
breathing the same atmosphere. To the degree that you comprehend the
character of Wendell Phillips you are akin to him. I once thought great
men were all ten feet high, but since I have met a few, both in astral
form and in the flesh, I have found out differently.

What kind of a man was Wendell Phillips?

Very much like you and me, Blessed, very much like you and me.

I think well of great people, I think well of myself, and I think well
of you. We are all God's children--all parts of the Whole--akin to
Divinity.

Phillips never thought he was doing much--never took any great pride in
past performances. When what you have done in the past looks large to
you, you have not done much today. His hopes were so high that there
crept into his life a tinge of disappointment--some have called it
bitterness, but that is not the word--just a touch of sadness because he
was unable to do more. This was a matter of temperament, perhaps, but it
reveals the humanity as well as the divinity of the man. There is
nothing worse than self-complacency--smugosity is sin.

Phillips was not supremely great--if he were, how could we comprehend
him?

And now if you will open those folding doors--there! that will do--thank
you.

* * * * *

When was he born? Ah, I'll tell you--it was in his twenty-fifth
year--about three in the afternoon, by the clock, October Twenty-first,
Eighteen Hundred Thirty-five. The day was Indian summer, warm and balmy.
He sat there reading in the window of his office on Court Street,
Boston, a spick-span new law-office, with four shelves of law-books
bound in sheep, a green-covered table in the center, three armchairs,
and on the wall a steel engraving of "Washington Crossing the Delaware."

He was a handsome fellow, was this Wendell Phillips--it would a' been
worth your while just to run up the stairs and put your head in the door
to look at him. "Can I do anything for you?" he would have asked.

"No, we just wanted to