sympathy or applause, and, with a full and keen appreciation of the
value of all which they are called to sacrifice, confront danger and
death in unselfish devotion to duty. Fox, preaching through his prison-
gates or rebuking Oliver Cromwell in the midst of his soldier-court
Henry Vane beneath the axe of the headsman; Mary Dyer on the scaffold at
Boston; Luther closing his speech at Worms with the sublime emphasis of
his "Here stand I; I cannot otherwise; God help me;" William Penn
defending the rights of Englishmen from the baledock of the Fleet
prison; Clarkson climbing the decks of Liverpool slaveships; Howard
penetrating to infected dungeons; meek Sisters of Charity breathing
contagion in thronged hospitals,--all these, and such as these, now help
me to form the loftier ideal of Christian heroism.

Blind Milton approaches nearly to my conception of a true hero. What a
picture have we of that sublime old man, as sick, poor, blind, and
abandoned of friends, he still held fast his heroic integrity, rebuking
with his unbending republicanism the treachery, cowardice, and servility
of his old associates! He had outlived the hopes and beatific visions
of his youth; he had seen the loudmouthed advocates of liberty throwing
down a nation's freedom at the feet of the shameless, debauched, and
perjured Charles II., crouching to the harlot-thronged court of the
tyrant, and forswearing at once their religion and their republicanism.
The executioner's axe had been busy among his friends. Vane and Hampden
slept in their bloody graves. Cromwell's ashes had been dragged from
their resting-place; for even in death the effeminate monarch hated and
feared the conquerer of Naseby and Marston Moor. He was left alone, in
age, and penury, and blindness, oppressed with the knowledge that all
which his free soul abhorred had returned upon his beloved country. Yet
the spirit of the stern old republican remained to the last unbroken,
realizing the truth of the language of his own Samson Agonistes:--