temptation to extract a few of its forcible utterances on some very
important points.

Permanent popular liberties have their only sure foundation in
sound moral conditions practically universal. We must secure
these among those to whom we have given the ballot, and who are
to be henceforth citizens with ourselves. Otherwise, we are
building our splendid political house on the edges of the
pestilential swamp from which fatal miasmatic odors are rising
all the time. Yes, we are building our house on piles driven into
the thick ooze and mud of the pestilential swamp itself. We are
building our cities, which we think are so splendid, and which
are so in fact, as men built Herculaneum and Pompeii, on a shore
which ever and anon trembled with earthquake, over which was hung
the black flag of Vesuvius, and down upon which rolled, in time,
the lava floods that burned and buried them.

We have got to meet this immense problem, which is not far off,
but right at hand; which is not a problem of theory, or of
distant history, but of practice and fact; and which concerns
not the well-being alone, but the very life of the nation. Noble
men and women at the South are engaged in it already, with all
their hearts; and we must help, mightily! It would be the
craziest folly of the age for us to be indifferent to it.

Some men may say, perhaps, "But this is a work that cannot be
done. It is too radical and vast to be hopefully attempted."
Nonsense! There is no work for the kingdom of God and the glory
of His name, which cannot be done! With the Gospel in our hand,
we can do everything.