“If it’s nobody’s system but mine, the world won’t lose much, if it never be published; but if it be God’s system, nothing can hinder its appearing.  Besides, Mr. Brown, I ought not to be one man alone.  I count on your help.  I hold it as a special providence, Mr. Brown, that in our own church an opportunity will be given to testify to the reality of disinterested benevolence.  How glorious the opportunity for a man to come out and testify by sacrificing his worldly living and business!  If you, Mr. Brown, will at once, at whatever sacrifice, quit all connection with this detestable and diabolical slave-trade, you will exhibit a spectacle over which angels will rejoice, and which will strengthen and encourage me to preach and write and testify.”

Mr. Simeon Brown’s usual demeanor was that of the most leathery imperturbability.  In calm theological reasoning, he could demonstrate, in the dryest tone, that, if the eternal torment of six bodies and souls were absolutely the necessary means for preserving the eternal blessedness of thirty-six, benevolence would require us to rejoice in it, not in itself considered, but in view of greater good.  And when he spoke, not a nerve quivered; the great mysterious sorrow with which the creation groaneth and travaileth, the sorrow from which angels veil their faces, never had touched one vibrating chord either of body or soul; and he laid down the obligations of man to unconditional submission in a style which would have affected a person of delicate sensibility much like being mentally sawn in sunder.  Benevolence, when Simeon Brown spoke of it, seemed the grimmest and unloveliest of Gorgons; for his mind seemed to resemble those fountains which petrify everything that falls into them.  But the hardest-shelled animals have a vital and sensitive part, though only so large as the point of a needle; and the Doctor’s innocent proposition to Simeon, to abandon his whole worldly estate for his principles, touched this spot.

When benevolence required but the acquiescence in certain possible things which might be supposed to happen to his soul, which, after all, he was comfortably certain never would happen, or the acquiescence in certain supposititious sacrifices for the good of that most intangible of all abstractions, Being in general, it was a dry, calm subject.  But when it concerned the immediate giving-up of his slave-ships and a transfer of business, attended with all that confusion and loss which he foresaw at a glance, then he felt, and felt too much to see clearly.  His swarthy face flushed, his little blue eye kindled, he walked up to the Doctor and began speaking in the short, energetic sentences of a man thoroughly awake to what he is talking about.