YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

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WEBSTER AS MAN AND STATESMAN

A SERMON

C. A. BARTOL

IN WEST CHURCH, BOSTON, SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 1S82

BOSTON
PRESS OF GEO. H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET
1882
3*?

I

SERMON.

" If a matter arise too hard for thee betwixt plea and plea, thou shalt come
unto the judge." — Deuteronomy xvii., 8, 9.
Most of us are tried on the spot and at the moment in our
own day and generation, we having, in our bubble-like being
on earth, a domestic and possibly biographic, but no historic
significance, only melting into the immense sea of humanity
or general mass of mankind. But there are mountainous
men, rare as the peaks of the Alps or the Andes, — Moses,
Socrates, Csesar, Bonaparte, — ever standing at the bar of the
human mind ; and, among ringing celebrations and contradic
tions, the image formed of any one and all of these giants of
genius and power concerns the virtue of every individual, so
that I need no apology for my attempt at an estimate in the
pulpit of the claim to honor and imitation of an extraor
dinary man of the West, one of the chief Americans, since
Benjamin Franklin in the civil sphere, New England's most
distinguished son, of a permanent fame whose quality it may
take some ages still of reflection to decide, yet our opinion of
whom has an interest for our character now, and to whom
the Scripture figure of a tribunal of judgment to appeal to is
appropriate on account of the diverse and opposite pleas, one
against him, another in his behalf, there never having been
a case in a public career in these United States of a person
iu which plaintiff and defendant alike more required a judge.
It is thought by some that judgment is not to be had or is
an impertinence and offence on the part of us little and
common people for transcendent men. Charlemagne, Peter
the Great, Napoleon, — they are phenomenal, elemental, de
monic, from God and Nature on an errand, in comparison
with which their faults are unnoticeable trifles, they being

a law to themselves to do as they please, or as the power
that hurled them like thunderbolts into the world, or un
capped them as volcanoes of the globe, may will or allow.
When I criticised Goethe for his immoralities, Thackeray
answered, "We cannot judge him, he is too great." But, if
no single Liliput could overcome Gulliver, aU the Lilipu-
tians could and did bind him down ; and, if none of us ordi
nary folk have the privilege of the bench for such an intel
lectual superior as Webster, he must abide the verdict of
time and the moral sense. Nay, in the great court of the
spirit, the humblest conscience may accuse him and the
weakest intelligence be a witness ; and, in the argument or
the sentence on the facts of the record, every honest advo
cate will have weight in that mingled absolution and con
demnation which in their inevitable imperfection the might
iest must meet.
There being then in the case of Mr. Webster the plaintiff,
defendant, and judge, let me remark that, as the usual length
of a whole human life has elapsed since the suit against him
was brought, the passions of either party may be supposed
to have grown cool, as, in many a mortal frame they once
agitated, they have been laid away with his in the dust.
That he was " a man without character " ; that " every drop
of his blood looked downward " ; that he was " Samson shorn
of the Philistines to grind in their mill" ; and "Ichabod," a
glory not only dimmed, but gone, — such rhetoric of poetry
or prose, though provoked by its object's shortcomings, its
authors might not care to repeat as the full tale and measure
of the man's dues; and, if they should, the long annals of
the land and the considerate equity of a loved and delivered
nation, the mercy of God, if not the charity of his children,
would convict the censors as extravagant and unjust. For
this man, Webster, loved his country, if ever man did. No
maligner of him ever loved her more ; and, in her sore ex
tremity, he gave us, restored to us, half-created for us, a
country to love. The country, the Constitution, the Union,
under his appeals, started out from the condition of abstrac
tions, the form of generalities, the paper and ink of the

printed page, into living shape, sensitive reality, as things
to love, live, or die for, that had been drowning in the flood
of custom, but were resuscitated by an aboriginality of treat
ment in speech never surpassed on these shores.
I was in college, a boy of seventeen, when the winds first
blew his name and his reply to Hayne to my eyes and ears i
and I remember the inspiration that swept, as from the
neighboring pine woods, through all the students' hearts and
lips, there being no ambition but to declaim the choice pas
sages from that sublimest Congressional discourse on the
college boards, as I suppose they were spouted with that
young zeal which no manly fervor can exceed, on the stage
of every academy and embryo university throughout the
North. We, the boys, scarce knew we had a country before.
As the Revolutionary War, that of 1812, and, in our own
day, of secession, woke from sleep or apathy the patriotic
consciousness till the parallels and meridians of American
latitude and longitude quivered with the feeling, so this
battle, this victory, on the floor of the Senate, startled us
into citizenship, made our hearts burn within us, uncovered
the graves of our forefathers for a resurrection of their souls,
and raked the live coals from the ashes of our own hearts.
Any flaming affection may sink into cold, inanimate decay
for a time. This man stirred the patriotic embers till they
glowed again on all our hearths, in all our hearts. He
voiced us to that splendid harmony, as an untuned or silent
organ is voiced. He wrought his own temper into us like
leaven ; and thenceforth a child could not be born on the
prairie whom the gracious ferment even in its cradle did not
reach, nor a settler wield his axe in the far-off Western wilds
but the stroke was an echo from the words that shook the
capitol; nor any succeeding generation rid itseK of the
haunting memory fifty years after to this day. Perhaps that
conflict, issuing as it did, nerved us for the one to ensue in
thhty years. That word sharpened the federal sword. He
meant it should prevent and keep it in its sheath. Unity of
"liberty according to law, which he promoted and cemented,
made the victory possible and certain, if it did not stir the

6
strife. He was the only man capable for that service ; and
if, in that senatorial tournament, we had been unhorsed, who
shall say we should, in another succeeding tilt of blood and
carnage, have kept our seat? It is said that Moltke, the
Prussian General who defeated Austria, won the fight with
pins on the map, tracing out his military plans before he won
it by river and plain with guns. And, in the encounters of
the North and South, Webster for the former, Hayne and
Calhoun for the latter, liberty and union were rescued,
slavery and secession, had they in that their hour but known
it, were foredoomed.
Nor let it be said this was but mouth-virtue and a cun
ning, logical farce. I have heard Mr. Webster, by a puny
commentator, called a rhetorician and an actor, as in a
theatre. His words were acts, and, like Luther's, "half-
battles." They were hewn out of the granite of his native
hills, as God hewed him out of the rook. His theatre reached
from gulf to river and river to sea. The thing he said could
not have been said otherwise than he said it, and his saying
was the thing articulated into air, incorporated with every
breeze on our banner, with reverberation never to cease in
the atmosphere or in human hearing to die. He did not,
you say, feel it sincerely? I answer: He feels anything
most who feels so as to best express it and put it into ever
lasting form, as Webster excels and stands head and should
ers, like Saul, above his fellows, in having done. All honor
to Adams and Sumner and Andrews, and a hundred of their
comrades and compeers, in the final crisis mor^e faithful
witliin the constitutional lines, than he. But not one of
them nor all of them put together ever spake like him, or
put love of country, love of liberty, or even hatred of slavery,
into language so lasting and true, like an embodiment and
incarnation, as this calm, continent, and continental orator
did. He struck out the idea as a sculptor does a statue from
the marble block. He ranks with renowned speakers of all
times and lands : with Demosthenes, that doubled-up fist of
Athens against Philip, and Cicero stretching Catiline on the
rack, and Burke placing Warren Hastings in the pillory. If

the Greek pressed his antagonist like a boxer in a straighter
line, if the Roman amplified his theme with a more sumptu
ous-rolling diction, and if the Englishmali pierced his periods
with a more pervasive, poetic, and philosophic light, till his
quotable page was transparent as amber and solid as steel,
not one of them better reconciled the romantic in feeling
with the classic in form. In Homeric simplicity of style,
Webster has in any department no American peer. He was
objective, and had always an object, sat close to reality, never
wandered and seldom sentimentalized, or, like a basket-maker,
wove fancy work. We have had writers and speakers of
more active, if not more vivid, imagination, taking much
pains to gather and cluster their gems of imagery and allu
sion, till our eyes were almost put Out with the glitter, and.
we would have been glad of some blue mental glasses to
keep us from being blinded with the dazzling and elaborate
display. But Webster's is, like that of the old Athenian
sage, " reasoned truth," well so called by the Grecian his
torian, Mr. Grote. It grows, it warms, it convinces, it com
pels. We listened to him, says Judge Story, in the Dart
mouth College case, the first hour with perfect admiration,
the second with perfect astonishment, the third with perfect
delight. Not often does this advocate break bounds into
enthusiastic statement: at once, he is self-recalled. His fire
is not in the air, but in the furnace, driving the engine-
wheels. His style is like that of some great singer, Braham
or Titiens, an easy and necessary and irresistible force. His
argument is the pressure of fate. His eloquence, without
any approach to rivalry in our time, flows like the cataract
of Niagara from the level of his mind with equal and unvary
ing tide, because its supply is from such a broad, unfailing
stretch of waters behind. Those who commonly figure on
the political platform are pygmies to him: I mean not in
their fidelity of intent, but in the manner and port and
strain of their discourse. And I say this, not for invidious
contrast, but to recommend the perusal of these master
pieces of conception and composition, left like headlands the
ocean has withdrawn from. Let us study them in our homes

8
and seminaries and schools, among all men and all women
who would, in their emancipation and new prerogatives,
comprehend the nature of our government and vitally con
ceive the country, not as so much territory, but as our
common mother, organic, living, undying, and dear to filial
hearts. For this same Webster talk to his peers, neighbors,
constituents, and friends, in private and in public, is, in this
idea at least of a great, precious, beloved country, consistent
throughout. He has wedded, welded, amalgamated the breath
of his mouth with it beyond any other man, so that many of
his expressions seem the great dumb Parent's own utterance,
as though her rivers and plains and hills at last were ani
mate, spoke, and found their tongue. Surely, Massachusetts
opened her mouth in him, once her true representative and
uncrowned king! Bunker Hill Monument on Bunker Hill
will not outlast the orations that commenced and completed
the granite obelisk over the martyr-blood. The vibration
will never stop, of the Constitution by him expounded, and
still more of the Union defended in congressional halls, unless
the pillars of both Union and Constitution with those marble
columns shall sink. The eulogy on Adams and Jefferson
cannot be forgotten while they are remembered in the world ;
for it is, after their own deeds, their best remembrance.
And, as the struggles and achievements of their eulogist
were, in the same civil arena, equal to their own in impor
tance, they will scarce be of inferior fame.
"No one man," says the Latin motto, "can do every sort
of thing " ; and, great as was Mr. Webster's reserved power,
and though he had in him more music than he ever made,
yet his big heart went so into this one purpose to preserve
and unite the nation there seemed not blood enough left for
that humanity which is the larger aim. He was American,
not cosmopolitan. His spiritual circulation was imperfect.
With all his Olympian, transcendent, and overtopping front,
there was a hole in his head, so heavy we wondered how
he could carry it through the street. " He was a walking
cathedral," said Thomas Carlyle ; but, as at Cologne until
lately, the spire was left out. " No man can be as wise as

7

Webster looks," said Sydney Smith; yet in the end his
wisdom failed. The Spartan messenger, with his news from
the field of triumph, delivered his message and fell dead at
the city gate. Did Mr. Webster's strength suffice only for
his athletic race, — not to announce success in war, but to
hinder and postpone the conflict he apprehended and fore
saw, and to avoid which he was willing the rights of millions
should be made the dismal and iniquitous price? I must
fain with reluctant sorrow own that, as to his part in the
Fugitive Slave Bill, History, sitting associate justice on the
bench now for a long average period of the length of human
life, gives sentence against him without appeal. I know
that, as respondent in his own case, he asked with what face
we could demand fidelity in the South to the tariff and
revenue laws, and ourselves not obey the requisition to re
turn those miserable wretches running to the pole-star to
escape from their bonds. But I submit that the cases were
not parallel. It was measuring life and liberty against a
property tax ; and, to use his own language in the famous
Salem Knapp case, it was weighing " so many ounces of
blood against so many ounces of gold." Besides, though
we were shut up to the Constitution, we were not thereby
bound under any oath, human or divine, to the special
legislation of inference and prudence and compromise and
commercial calculation which included the infamous bill.
That capitulation the strictest construction did not com
mand. In a former and worthier mood, he had told the
South slavery existed a local institution by local law ; but
the procedure he at last consented to would have universal
ized it in the land. To make us, in the free latitudes, slave-
catchers, was to reduce the principle of obedience to govern
ment to the moral absurd. Like Napoleon, in a different
way, he attacked that moral sentiment which is a foe, as
one says, " not subject to casualty " ; and he went down
before its sentence, as Hayne and Calhoun fell beneath his
lance, when put in test for its behoof. Far away from the
spirit or any binding letter in the Constitution had he roved
or travelled indeed, when he ridiculed the Higher Law as

10
above the Blue Hills or AUeghanies or an eagle's flight.
But the thunderbolt and aerolite stay not in the firmament.
They descend to the ground ; and safety bids us stand from
under a meteoric stone when we see it come ! An impious
hand attracts the lightning which it defies ; and Webster
was killed by the conscience he provoked. He committed
suicide, or something in him broke.
Yet consider his apology. He said or thought, and had
persuaded himself, there was no other way to forestall dis
union and civil war. " Over that precipice full of blood and
darkness," he did not wish to hang. Beyond the veil of a
united country, he could not bear to look. From the tre
mendous many-bladed surgery of civil war, as from the worst
woe, he shrank. He had not — and who had? — the prophet's
eye to see, after a five years' war and the sacrifice of five
hundred thousand lives, a country rising from the appalling
atonement of blood, — a phoenix out of ashes, a Lazarus from
the sepulchre, without a bondman in all its bounds. Can he
not be forgiven for recoiling from the red sea whose farther
shore he could not behold ?
Yet what an opportunity he had, and missed ! It was as
if a star fell. In his argument at the trial of Judge Pres-
cott, he said he was willing to speak not only as a lawyer,
but as a man. Would he had so spoken in his great place
for four millions of men, women, and children! But his
seventh of March speech was the rehearsing of a funeral
oration over the grave of a nation in imagination disunited
and dead, his faith even in the country not being strong
enough. It was a sad, disheartened, and depressing utter
ance, low-toned and in that minor key which faith and
oouxage never use. True things rather than pleasant —
"vera pro gratis" — was his dedication of the speech to
this Commonwealth. But they were pleasant to tyrants,
disagreeable to republicans, true to none. His maintaining
the right of petition to abolish slavery in the District of
Columbia was nobler than his submitting to it in all our
borders as our political doom and the " immedicable
wound" of the social system, as he said by some it was

11
called. It must be confessed, in the morals of statesman
ship he took the utilitarian ground, that we must be gov
erned by visible or probable consequences, and that there
is no absolute place in our nature to stand on and hold the
fort against plain corruption, invading wrong and shame.
He thought — and how many of the clerical cloth con
curred in the view ! — that it were better some human
beings should be forced back to unpaid work in the cotton-
field or rice-swamp than that the federal bond should be
weakened or a State secede. Yet, if an American citizen
is oppressed in Egypt, or emissaries of the Southern Con
federacy seized on board a British ship, England or the
United States covers him, on sea or land, with the flag;
and, if they be not surrendered, will go to war against the
power that would hurt a hair of their head. And where
fore? Because it is expedient or right? But pursue, per
secute, seize, hale away the black ! He has no friends !
Has Providence a grudge against perfection in any man,
that the biggest brain among us should have been so flawed
that even by his own platform — to say nothing of the basis
of rectitude — he cannot be sustained ?
I do not join with those who charge him with consciously
bad motives for his course, with throwing in his soul in
Satan's game, as a bid for the Presidency, which no doubt
he wanted, and should, without any auction, have had.
Who does not know that not typhus, but Presidential, is
the fever, worse than the Potomac malaria, in Washington?
All the prominent politicians — Clay, Calhoun, Seward,
Greeley — wanted to be President. Mr. Sumner, the incor
ruptible, to whose hands never stuck one grain of the
treasury gold, it is said, wanted to be President. Was he
therefore to blame? But that Mr. Webster sold himself
outright for any promissory note of the presidential chair
there, is no proof, and with me no belief. It was said his vote
was bought, too, by the cotton lords of the North. But he
was no miser, was careless in collecting his dues and in
paying his debts, as he understood better the legal than the
moral rights of property; but, had he been avaricious, he

12
might have had a hoard from his profession a hundred-fold
beyond all the manufacturers lent or gave. In his nature, he
gravitated to the truth, "could not argue a bad cause
even comparatively well," - as everybody in court knew at
once, in five minutes, said his associate, whether Abraham
Lincoln considered his case good.
But was not Webster intemperate and profligate, incorrect
in private life, "a drunkard at the helm" of the Ship of
State ? His works, so constant and vast, were not — never
could have been — those of an habitual sot. Was he a show
figure? Did he wear a blue coat with bright buttons? I
saw him many times, and I remember his presence and his
accent better than his costume.
It was the most impressive figure I ever did behold.
People turned to look at him in the street. He had the
gait of a Titan, the poise of a planet. Aught trivial, out
of place, he could not abide. "May it please your Honor, I
should like to know how long is the United States Court to
be entertained with the buffoonery of this witness?" he
inquired of the Bench, which was smiling while spectators
laughed at an Irish wit. At once, on the whole company
fell gravity like the grave. He is said to have looked an
uncomfortable witness out of the court room, pursuing him
with his eyes. An inveterate punster having annoyed him
in the car, he remarked, " The smallest faculty with which it
has pleased God to endow his creatures is that of letting off
these little jokes." A member of the bar, who had been
undermining him for remaining in Tyler's cabinet, yet pre
tended to be a friend, obsequiously entering his office, he
turned from his desk with a glance, not very god-like, that
sent the untimely and unwelcome visitor to the door ; while
he, Webster, quietly continued his writing, with the word
"puppy," which some one happened to overhear. The con
versation at a dinner-party proving to be tedious and dull,
he early left the table and told his host he considered it
a protracted Methodist meeting, and unless something of
real concern were to be discussed it was the last time he
should appear. " A Daniel coihe to judgment," was Justice

13
Story's greeting, as he entered a company in debate. If the
Whig party breaks up, what is to become of me, he asked,
where I was one of thousands to hear in Fane nil Hall.
What a question of room for that overshadowing form, larger
than the party ! He was unaware of his own magnificence ;
and when, in a circle of which I was one, a connoisseur of
eloquence reminded him of that famous passage, the close of
his Plymouth action, he said, "I do not remember it," lifting
his hand to his brow. George Ticknor said his head swelled
almost to bursting . under the battery of that address ; and
a lady still living tells me she sat in the blaze of his eyes,
while he made to the clergy in the house his tremendous
adjuration for a joint crusade against the slave-trade. But
the grandeur to him was past, and he could forget it in
new tasks. He would scarce have coveted even the highest
office, had he known it could not " add one cubit to his
stature " ; but, in over-craving it, his natural dimensions must
crouch. I saw Mr. Webster first in Brunswick, Me., on his way to
court in Topsham across the Androscoggin. The students,
of whom I was one, flocked, as to a supernatural spectacle,
to watch him get out of his chaise, rub his forehead, take his
horse to the stable, and shake the dust from his dress, which
had, I recollect, the tawny color of his cheeks. A simple,
unaffected, homespun man he seemed, without airs, absorbed
in thought, scarce obserAdng what was about him, insensibly
surpassing all. I heard him afterwards in the court room, in
the Representatives' Chamber yonder for certain Remon
strants, in Faneuil Hall once and again, in the Railway
Chamber for Kossuth, at Bunker Hill, in the lecture room at
Providence, and in private talk ; and my recollection is that
he could be moderate and interesting too. No man could so
make a hstener tremble, or kindle with easy effort and a level
speech. He would not, he said, " strain himself to kill a fly."
His voice was both clear and deep. There ran through the
audience a shiver and a glow. His presence was influence ;
and, as said Edward Everett, himself a master only second in
rank, "His words were always words of fire." Yet the

14
lines in him, if large, were well defined. He was the pyramid
or Parthenon, not a Gothic monster, and never will be a myth.
He was English while American, — a firm-set summit with a
base of flame, tropic and temperate too, the spirit come back
among us of that Burke, whom, for his speeches on concilia
tion with and taxation of America, we must ever gratefully
honor and admire, and borrowing from him to improve upon
it that fine figure of the British power, which, as we are
familiar with Webster's version of it, I will" from the original
quote : " By such management, by the operation of feeble
councils, so paltry a sum as • threepence in the eyes of a
financier, so insignificant an article as tea in the eyes of a
philosopher, have shaken the pillars of a commercial empire
that circled the whole globe." Webster adds : " the morning
drum-beat, keeping company with the hours and circling the
earth daily with one continuous and unbroken strain of the
martial airs of England." In his grain and method was mag
nanimity unexampled, worthy of imitation. If music may
afford an illustration, modern eloquence is an organ with
many stops, the vox humana being chief, the ancient is a
cymbal or trumpet and harp.
Beyond any contemporary, Webster had, with vast compass
of theme, the clarion voice, on which, however, less than with
any other orator, his record in our letters depends. In his
matchless words, eloquent without gesture or tone, he " still
lives " and will liye. Like a huge, smoky crystal is his great,
if clouded, name. But what gem is perfect in clearness,
color, and weight, and needs not to be cut? Even the
Kohinoor has lost half its size. Can we not praise the anti-
slavery virtue, without altogether blaming the politic counsels
that regulated its heat ? Has any of our political goodness
been without spot? Had not our righteousness an alloy of
self-righteousness? Were not some of our philanthropists
vainglorious egoists? I have seen an end of all human
perfection. Does not the moral sentiment, parting company
with love, degenerate into hatred and spite? But for their
jealousy, quarrelsomeness, and conceit, some of our spokes
men for freedom had been immaculate. Then there were

15
loud and able-bodied persons who slunk from the ordeal of
battle they precipitated, and were never seen at the fi^ont.
It has been said of Mr. Webster, two of whose sons died in
the service, — one in Mexican, the other in our Civil War, —
he halted for a time between two opinions. Was it wrong to
hesitate at the dread alternative, and was it holy to be head
long ? Channing hesitated, Lincoln hesitated, wanted to save
the country with or without slavery, knowing that the nation
only could protect black and white, and, therefore, nation
ality and humanity must be reconciled, go together, and be
come one ! Was he the recreant, and was Fremont the saint ?
Of two possible explanations for any man's course, shall we
choose the worst? If you insist that in Webster's purpose
there was no patriotism, but only office-seeking, little and
vile, was his sole, settled, and rooted aim, all we can say is.
May the charitable consideration you deny to him never from
God or man be lacking to you ! Who of us will ever enter
heaven, unless mercy opens the door ? If any one think, as
no doubt many do even now, the purchase of emancipation
was too dear, I shall not agree with him, nor shall I pro
nounce whether, in wishing for delay and hoping for peaceful
methods, he were Christian or infidel, philosopher or fool;
and, if judgment without grace is to be passed on us all ac
cording to our deserts, the sufferers will not be on any one
side. They will be both accusers and arraigned. Mr. Web
ster honestly shrank from the heroic treatment which our
sick and wounded body politic required. But to his country
he never meant to be false. " He loveth our nation," said
the Jewish elders, respecting a pagan Roman centurion, to
the author of the Christian faith. It might be inscribed
on the tomb of the man in whose eloquence, as fit to our con
dition now as it was half a century ago, this nation is en
shrined ; and, for the sake of whose succor in our need, let
us condone, while we deplore, his faults or defects. In his
page, our nationality is enlivened, not embalmed. We may,
unlike him, have been guilty of no outbreaks of passion.
Are the inward chambers of our imagery pure? Is our
benevolence a doctrine or a fact? It is on the register of

16
the old church in Franklin, as it was in the profession of all
his life, that he was a Christian in belief. I should l«;
ashamed, he said, of a Saviour I could comjjveliend.
So for the uccasimi I speak. The final judgment is yet
to be rendered. The jury, divided, has not brought sentence
in, and history pauses over her pen. Eulogy, apology, and
charge mix and contend. Individual impressions are still
in order, and every one who has had opportunity for (.>]jserva-
tion may not immodestly give his own. I shall say, then,
Jt)aniel Webster was of a nature essentially noble and good.
(/But, for a great man, in the hour of temptation, he proved
in the end to be weak, with a bias of ambition that swerved
him unawares ; not perfidious, but the prey of his own logic,
till he substituted argument for intuitive reason and right.
Yet his defection was of less moment than they who indict
him suppose. /The controversy between liberty and slavery
had gone too far to be checked ; the old and new centuries
clashed. The opposing thunder-clouds from North and
South, civilization and barbarism must meet. Even his
hand, however well put forth, could no longer have held
the whirlwind back. He died disappointed, broken-hearted.
In the carcass of this lion was found the honey-comb,
much sweetness, and none of the venom and revenge
which even conscience, enraged and outraged, sometimes
contracts. Through purgatory, he has reached paradise ;
and perhaps some of us would rather meet him there than
his sharpest assailants, upright as they felt, and not guilty
of his particular sins. Harsh condemnation is loud profes
sion. From both may we be kept !