so well.]

Ah, how his course, so different, proves to us that the true scholar is
always a scholar of truth. No matter what element of the public
sentiment he met--the listlessness of pampered wealth; the brutal
prejudice of some voting savage; the refined sneer of lettered
dilettanteism; the purposed aversion of trade or pulpit fearing
disturbed markets or pews;--he beat lustily and incessantly at all the
parts of the iron image of wrong sitting stolidly here with close-shut
eyes. No matter when it was, on holiday or working-day or Sabbath; at
home and abroad; in the parlor, the street, the counting-room; in his
school and in the Church;--he bore down on this apathy and its brood of
scorns like a west wind that sweeps through a city dying under weight of
miasma. And the wind might as well cease blowing yet not cease to be
wind, as my father's influence stop and himself live. It scattered the
good seed everywhere. How often have I heard him say, "I know nothing of
what the harvest will be; I am responsible only for the sowing." And
bravely went the sowing on, with the broadcast largesse of love. There
was no breeze of talk that did not carry the seeds;--to the wayside, for
from those that even chance upon the truth the fowls of the air cannot
take it all; to thin soil and among thorns, for no heart so feeble or
choked that will not find in a single day's growth of truth germination
for eternity; to stony places, for no cranny in the rocks that can hold
a seed but can be a home for riving roots;--"And other fell on good
ground and did bring forth fruit."

Thus it was primarily to rouse those of his own class that he labored,
to gall them into seeing (though they should turn again and rend him)
that moral supineness is moral decay, that the soul shrivels into
nothingness when wrong is acquiesced in, as surely as it is torn and
scattered by the furies let loose within it, when wrong is done. But
just there lay the difficulty and pain of his mission: that, from his
acknowledged standing in the literary world, and as a leader in the
interests of higher education, his path brought him into contact mainly
with the cultured, and it was among these that the pro-slavery spirit
ruled with its bitterest stringency. Not cultured: let us unsay the
word; rather, with the gloss and hard polish which reading and wealth
and the finer appointments of living can throw over spiritual arrest or
decay. Culture is a holy word, and dare be u