sed of intellectual advance
only when the moral sympathies have kept equal step. It includes
something beyond an amateur sentiment; in favor of what we favor. If it
does not open the ear to every cry of humanity, struggling up or
slipping back, it is no culture properly so called, but a sham, a mask
of wax, a varnish with cruel glitter; and what a double wrath will be
poured on him who cracks the wax and the varnish, not only because of
the rude awakening, but because the crack shows the sham.

It is impossible for us now to realize what revenge this class dealt to
my father for twenty-five years. Consider their power of revenge. They
could not force a loss of property or of life, it is true; they made no
open assault in the street; their 'delicacy' held itself above common
vituperation. But they wielded a greater power than all these over a man
whose every accomplishment made him their equal, and they used it
without stint. They doomed him to the slow martyrdom of social scorn.
They shut their doors against him. They elbowed him from every position
to which he had a wish or a right, except public respect, and they could
not elbow him from that unless they pushed his character from its poise.
They cut him off from every friendly regard which would else have been
devotedly his, on that level of educated life, and limited him to
'solitary confinement' within himself. They compelled him to walk as if
under a ban or an anathema. Had he been a leper in Syrian deserts, or a
disciple of Jesus among Pharisees, he could not have been more utterly
banished from the region of homes and self-constituted piety. They
showered ineffable contempt upon him in every way consistent with their
littleness and--refinement. Slight, sneer, insult, all the myriad
indignities that only 'good society' can devise, these were what my
father received in return for his love and his work in love.

How little personal relation all this obloquy bore to him, let this
stand as evidence: that he not only continued his work, but daily gave
it more caustic energy and wider scope. As I have hinted, he did not, in
political matters, give in his adherence to that class of abolitionists
who, as he thought, threw away their best chances of success in refusing
to work within constitutional provisions. He was prouder that this
single community should call him "abolitionist," though it spat the word
at him, than if the whole earth should hail him with the kingliest