The evils which possess humanity are of a kind which go
not out by their delicate appliances.
The author of the Address under consideration is not of this class. He
has boldly, and at no small cost, grappled with the great social and
political wrong of our country,--chattel slavery. Looking, as we have
seen, hopefully to the future, he is nevertheless one of those who can
respond to the words of a true poet and true man:--
"He is a coward who would borrow
A charm against the present sorrow
From the vague future's promise of delight
As life's alarums nearer roll,
The ancestral buckler calls,
Self-clanging, from the walls
In the high temple of the soul!"
[James Russell Lowell.]
FANATICISM.
THERE are occasionally deeds committed almost too horrible and revolting
for publication. The tongue falters in giving them utterance; the pen
trembles that records them. Such is the ghastly horror of a late tragedy
in Edgecomb, in the State of Maine. A respectable and thriving citizen
and his wife had been for some years very unprofitably engaged in
brooding over the mysteries of the Apocalypse, and in speculations upon
the personal coming of Christ and the temporal reign of the saints on
earth,--a sort of Mahometan paradise, which has as little warrant in
Scripture as in reason.
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