An intense lover of truth, and a like hater of shams, he analyzed mercilessly; not for the sake of opposing, but in search of kernels and the source of things.  If he found the tree was bearing, or destined to bear evil fruit, he would do his utmost that there should be left of it neither root nor branch.  Accepting good in every presented form, if he suspected evil in the garb of good, there was no waiting for a more opportune time than the then present, for such stripping and exposure as his vigorous logic, sarcasm, wit, pathos, and personal presence could produce.  Humble, and exceedingly retiring in ordinary, when the truth was assailed, or wolves in sheeps’ clothing appeared, he became a lion, fierce and towering; and woe betake the man or system that then became the object of his righteous wrath.  Such torrents of invective as fell from his tongue; such flashes as gleamed from his gray eagle-eyes; such scorn as glowed in his thin, pallid lips, made every one tremble—­an avalanche that swept all before it.

To toil, of some character or other, he seemed to be destined.  For no sooner did he find a little rest from the field or herd, than all his Hurculean energy was thrown into some cherished and waiting mental project.  His life is an example of the statement that “genius is the result of labor.”  Neither did he travel in thought alone upon the surface of things.  There were subjects, the philosophy of which no contemporary understood better; and upon the social and organic relations of the religious reformation with which he always stood identified, he was twenty years ahead of his confreres.  He was a veritable Elijah in many things, but he was never known to flee from the face of his enemies.

His was a mighty nature; the soul of honor and the embodiment of truth.

There are two features of his Kansas life, which marked the man, that I wish to portray, viz:  His temperance work, and his religious work.  These were not in any sense divorced, as though they were not always righteously allied; but, as all know, the prohibition question holds a prominent place in the history of this proud young queen, with her “ad astra per aspera,” and from the time she was admitted to a place among the sisterhood of States, up to the date that the comparatively little majority of 8,000 votes placed her squarely in opposition to the saloon, with all its interests and iniquities, he labored, watched, and prayed, for such a consummation.  In this, as in his religious conceptions, he was always in the advance, running new lines and opening broad highways, and inviting fields for the less sturdy but oncoming multitude.  As he had battled to prevent this, his adopted State, from being desecrated by the blot of human slavery, so now he voted, preached, lectured, wrote, that it might be delivered from the body and soul destroying curse of the rum power.