“Come, then, men of Pennsylvania, come and join us in this good work.  Join us, to use such moral means as to correct public sentiment throughout the region where slavery exists, and to impress upon the people of the Free states a manly sense of their own rights.  Join us, to place “just men” in all our public offices; men whose example a whole people may safely imitate.  Join us to free our General Government from the ignominious reproach of slavery; to restore to our country those principles which our fathers so labored to establish; and to hand these principles down afresh to successive generations.  It is the cause of truth, of humanity, and of God, to which we invite your aid.  It is a cause of which you never need be ashamed.  Living, you may be thankful, and dying, you may be thankful, for having labored in it.  We have, as co-laborers with us, the noblest allies that man can wish.  Within, we have the deepest convictions of conscience, the clearest deductions of reason; and, all over the world, wherever man is found, the first, the most ardent longings of the human soul.  Without, we have the happiness of nearly three millions of the human race; the honor, as well as the best interests of our whole country; and the universal consent of all good men whose moral vision is not obscured by the mist of a low, misguided selfishness:  while we seem to hear, as it were, the voices of the great and the good, the patriot and the philanthropist, of a past generation, calling to us and cheering us on.  But, above all these, and beyond all these, we have with us the highest attributes of God, Justice and Mercy.  With such allies, and in such a cause, who can doubt on which side the victory will ultimately rest.

“May He who guides the destinies of nations, and without whose aid ‘they labor in vain that build,’ so incline your hearts to exert your whole influence to place in all our public offices just and good men, that our country may be preserved, her best interests advanced, and her institutions, free in reality as in name, handed down to the latest posterity.”

Is not the love of God and man ingrained in every line of this writing?  Yet let us see how it was received by the most Christian (?) body in this city.

I need hardly say that my father’s mind had been largely impressed, from earliest manhood, with the highest subject human thought can touch.  His library records his wide religious reading; but he could not see an honest path towards the profession of any definite views till 1836.  The change wrought in him then, can best be gathered from his own simple words (under date, 1842) written in a fly-leaf of “The Unitarian Miscellany:”  “Though I humbly trust that God made my trials in 1836 the means of bringing me to true repentance, yet I have kept these books as monuments of what I once was, and to remind me how grateful I should be to Him for having snatched me as a ‘brand from the burning,’”