d, calm as if a thousand stabs of personal insult never
brought them one of personal pain, passing through all as if nothing but
the serenest skies were above them. And, as I have said, right there is
one explanation of the anomaly; there _were_ the serenest skies above
them--heaven's love perpetually shining. Why should it not shine? all
the powers of the men were dedicated to rescuing the image of God on
this earth,--not man as he suffered physically, but the moral instinct
threatened with annihilation. It was sacred to them, this soul so sacred
to redeeming love, but too brutalized to find its way to it. Nor merely
the slave. Their love embraced, with yet more pitying fervor, the master
compelling his spiritual nature into death, and the northern apologist
letting his die; and this overmastering love of saving spiritual
integrity, was one power that made them and heart-ease hold unfailing
friends through the obloquy of those days; the other must be found in
the fact mentioned,--that neither resolve nor impulse was their spur,
but personal character moving from its depths.

From such a motive-power as this can come no parade of results. The
nature that works, proceeds from the necessary laws and forces of its
being, and is as simple and unconscious as any other natural law or
force. Hence there are no startling epochs to record in my father's
history, no supreme efforts; in filling the measure of daily opportunity
lay his chief work. I cannot measure it by our ten fingers' counting. I
can only show a life unfolding, and, by the essential laws of its
growth, embracing the noblest cause of its time. But if action means
vivifying public sentiment decaying under insidious poison; if it
includes the doing of this amid a storm of odium that would quickly have
shattered any soul irresolute for an instant; if it means incessant toil
quietly performed, vast sums collected and disbursed, time sacrificed,
strength spent; if it means holding up a great iniquity to loathing by a
powerful pen, and nailing moral cowardice where-ever it showed; if it be
risking livelihood by introducing the cause of the slave into every
literary work, and by mingling the school-culture of fifty future
mothers, year by year, with hatred of the sin; if it means one's life in
one's hand, friendships yielded, society defied, and position in it
cheerfully renounced; above all, if action means a wealth of goodness
overliving all scorns, compelling respect f