; and how easily it is all done, once
it is resolved to be done; how simple his language! there is a logic and
an eloquence in it that few with human feelings can resist. They cannot
say that he desires a union of Church and State, for he is not a church
member; they cannot say he is vain of hearing himself speak, for his
whole demeanor shows he would gladly avoid speaking at all; they cannot
say he speaks for pay, for he receives none, and asks for none. Nor can
his sincerity in any way be doubted, or his sympathy for those he would
persuade to imitate his example be denied.

In my judgment, it is to the battles of this new class of champions
that our late success is greatly, perhaps chiefly, owing. But, had the
old-school champions themselves been of the most wise selecting, was
their system of tactics the most judicious? It seems to me it was
not. Too much denunciation against dram-sellers and dram-drinkers
was indulged in. This I think was both impolitic and unjust. It was
impolitic, because it is not much in the nature of man to be driven to
anything; still less to be driven about that which is exclusively his
own business; and least of all where such driving is to be submitted
to at the expense of pecuniary interest or burning appetite. When the
dram-seller and drinker were incessantly told not in accents of entreaty
and persuasion, diffidently addressed by erring man to an erring
brother, but in the thundering tones of anathema and denunciation with
which the lordly judge often groups together all the crimes of the
felon's life, and thrusts them in his face just ere he passes sentence
of death upon him that they were the authors of all the vice and misery
and crime in the land; that they were the manufacturers and material of
all the thieves and robbers and murderers that infest the earth; that
their houses were the workshops of the devil; and that their persons
should be shunned by all the good and virtuous, as moral pestilences--I
say, when they were told all this, and in this way, it is not wonderful
that they were slow to acknowledge the truth of such denunciations,
and to join the ranks of their denouncers in a hue and cry against
themselves.

To have expected them to do otherwise than they did to have expected
them not to meet denunciation with denunciation, crimination with
crimination, and anathema with anathema--was to expect a reversal of
human nature, which is God's decree and can never be reversed.