dage, resorting to evasion or to violence, according to their
conditions or temperaments, but in every case deriving the sanction
for their unlawful action from the mandate of their personal
conscience.

And let it be carefully kept in mind that it is not the absolute right
or wrong of the particular act, as seen in the clearer light of a
later day, that justified men, whether in the particular instances
cited, or in other noteworthy incidents in the long series of steps by
which the English-speaking races have ascended to their present
political development. It is not the demonstrable rightfulness of a
particular action, as seen in the dispassionate light of the arbiter,
posterity, that has chiefly constituted the merit of the individual
rebel against the law in which he beheld iniquity; the saving salt,
which has preserved the healthfulness of the body politic, has been
the fidelity to Conscience, to the faithful, if passionate, arbiter of
the moment, whose glorious predominance in the individual or in the
nation gives a better assurance of the highest life than does the
clearest intellectual perception of the rightfulness, or of the
expediency, of a particular course. One may now see, or think that he
sees, as does the writer, with Lincoln, that if slavery is not wrong,
nothing is wrong. It was not so clear half a century ago; and while no
honor is too great for those early heroes, who for this sublime
conviction withstood obloquy and persecution, legal and illegal, it
should be never forgotten that the then slave States, in their
resolute determination to maintain, by arms, if need be, and against
superior force, that which they believed to be their constitutional
political right, made no small contribution to the record of fidelity
to conscience and to duty, which is the highest title of a nation to
honor. Be it by action or be it by submission, by action positive or
by action negative, whatsoever is not of faith--of conviction--is sin.

The just and necessary exaltation of the law as the guarantee of true
liberty, with the consequent accepted submission of the individual to
it, and the recognized presumption in favor of such submission, have
tended to blind us to the fact that the individual, in our highest
consciousness, has never surrendered his moral freedom,--his
independence of conscience. No human law overbears that supreme
appeal, which carries the matter from the tribunal of man into the
presence of God;