from all else. I do not say the only reliance, but the greatest.

This school of life I regard as the infant-school of eternity. The
pupils, I believe, will go on forever learning. There is solemn
retribution in this system,--the future must forever answer for the
past; I would not have it otherwise. I must fight [126] the battle, if
I would win the prize; and for all failure, for all cowardice, for all
turning aside after ease and indulgence in preference to virtue and
sanctity, I must suffer; I would not have it otherwise. There is help
divine offered to me, there is encouragement wise and gracious; I
welcome it. There is a blessed hereafter opened to prayer and penitence
and faith; I lift my hopes to that immortal life. This view of the
system of things spreads for me a new light over the heavens and the
earth. It is a foundation of peace and strength and happiness more to be
valued, in my account, than the title-deed of all the world.

[127] LETTERS.

THE foregoing pages, selected from many written at intervals between
1857 and 1870, tell nearly all of their writer's story which it can be
of interest to the public to know; and although I have been tempted here
and there to add some explanatory remarks, I have thought it best on the
whole to leave them in their original and sometimes abrupt simplicity.
The author did not intend them for publication, but for his
family alone; and in sharing a part with a larger audience than he
contemplated, we count upon a measure of that responsive sympathy with
which we ourselves read frequently between the Lines, and enter into his
meaning without many words.

But there is one point I cannot leave untouched. There is one subject on
which some of those who nevertheless honor him have scarcely understood
his position.

Twenty-five years ago slavery was a question upon which feeling was not
only strong, but roused, stung, and goaded to a height of passion [128]
where all argument was swept away by the common emotion as futile,
if not base. My father, thinking the system hateful in itself and
productive of nearly unmingled evil, held nevertheless that, like all
great and established wrongs, it must be met with wise and patient
counsel; and that in the highest interest of the slave, of the white
race, of the country, and of constitutional liberty, its abolition
must be gradual. To the uncompromising Abolitionists such views were
intolerable; and by some of those who demanded imme