as to the right to build.  And doubtless a great many Jews said to him, ’Unless we establish the right in the first place, it will surely be taken from us utterly.  This is a providential opportunity to preach truth in the very camp of the enemy.’  But who got it up, God or the devil?...  Look over the history of the world, and in nine cases out of ten we shall find that Satan, after being foiled in his arts to stop a great moral enterprise, has finally succeeded by diverting the reformers from the main point to a collateral, and that too just at the moment when such diversion brought ruin.  Now, even if this opportunity made it the duty of somebody to take up the subject (which is not proved by the fact of the opportunity), why should you give your views, and with your name?  Others as able might be found, and as familiar with the subject.  But you say, others ’are driven off the field, and cannot answer the objections.’  I answer, your names do not answer the objections....  How very easy to have helped a third person to the argument.  By publicly making an onset in your own names, in a widely-circulated periodical, upon a doctrine cherished as the apple of their eye (I don’t say really believed) by nine tenths of the church and the world; what was it but a formal challenge to the whole community for a regular set-to?”

He proceeds to speak of such a “set to” and debate as “producing alienation wide-spread in our own ranks, and introducing confusion and every evil work.”  He urges the necessity of vindicating a right “by exercising it,” instead of simply arguing for it.

Of ministers he says:  “True, there is a pretty large class of ministers who are fierce about it, and will fight, but a still larger class that will come over if they first witness the successful practice rather than meet it in the shape of a doctrine to be swallowed.  Now, if instead of blowing a blast through the newspapers, sounding the onset, and summoning the ministers and churches to surrender, you had without any introductory flourish just gone right among them and lectured, when and where and as you could find opportunity, and paid no attention to criticism, but pushed right on, without making any ado about ‘attacks,’ and ‘invasions,’ and ‘opposition,’ and have let the barkers bark their bark out,—­within one year you might have practically brought over five hundred thousand persons, of the very moral elite of New England.  You may rely upon it....  No moral enterprise, when prosecuted with ability and any sort of energy, ever failed under heaven so long as its conductors pushed the main principle, and did not strike off until they reached the summit level.  On the other hand, every reform that ever foundered in mid-sea, was capsized by one of these gusty side-winds.  Nothing more utterly amazes me than the fact that the conduct of a great, a pre-eminently great moral enterprise, should exhibit so little of a wise, far-sighted, comprehensive plan.  Surely it is about plain enough to be called self-evident, that the only common-sense method of conducting a great moral enterprise is to start with a fundamental, plain principle, so fundamental as not to involve side-relations, and so plain, that it cannot be denied.”