their master, but teacher, friend, brother, and strive like him to practice all they pray; to incarnate and make real the Word of God, these men I honor far more than the saints of old....  Racks and fagots soon waft the soul to God, stern messengers, but swift.  A boy could bear that passage,—­the martyrdom of death.  But the temptation of a long life of neglect, and scorn, and obloquy, and shame, and want, and desertion by false friends; to live blameless though blamed, cut off from human sympathy, that is the martyrdom of to-day.  I shed no tears for such martyrs.  I shout when I see one; I take courage and thank God for the real saints, prophets and heroes of to-day....  Yea, though now men would steal the rusty sword from underneath the bones of a saint or hero long deceased, to smite off therewith the head of a new prophet, that ancient hero’s son; though they would gladly crush the heart out of him with the tombstones they piled up for great men, dead and honored now; yet in some future day, that mob penitent, baptized with a new spirit, like drunken men returned to sanity once more, shall search through all this land for marble white enough to build a monument to that prophet whom their fathers slew; they shall seek through all the world for gold of fineness fit to chronicle such names.  I cannot wait; but I will honor such men now, not adjourn the warning of their voice, and the glory of their example, till another age!  The church may cast out such men; burn them with the torments of an age too refined in its cruelty to use coarse fagots and the vulgar axe!  It is no loss to these men; but the ruin of the church.  I say the Christian church of the nineteenth century must honor such men, if it would do a church’s work; must take pains to make such men as these, or it is a dead church, with no claim on us, except that we bury it.  A true church will always be the church of martyrs.  The ancients commenced every great work with a victim!  We do not call it so; but the sacrifice is demanded, got ready, and offered by unconscious priests long ere the enterprise succeeds.  Did not Christianity begin with a martyrdom?

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From “Historic Americans.”

=_170._= CHARACTER OF FRANKLIN.

His was the morality of a strong, experienced person, who had seen the folly of wise men, the meanness of proud men, the baseness of honorable men, and the littleness of great men, and made liberal allowances for the failures of all men.  If the final end to be reached were just, he did not always inquire about the provisional means which led thither.  He knew that the right line is the shortest distance between two points, in morals as in mathematics, but yet did not quarrel with such as attained the point by a crooked line.  Such is the habit of politicians, diplomatists, statesmen, who look on all men as a commander looks on his soldiers, and does not ask them to join the church or keep their hands clean, but to stand to their guns and win the battle.