While working thus by voice and pen, he was incessantly busy in personal rescue of the slave.  Especially was this the case when it became the duty of every lover of his kind to defy the Fugitive Slave Law.  How eagerly he then sprang to aid the escape of those against whom a law of the land impotently tried to bar the law of our common humanity!  During the years that followed the passage of this infamous bill, the position he had attained here was of particular service.  Recognized as one, who, being a sort of standing sacrifice, might as well continue to battle in the front; trusted implicitly even by his bitterest foes; with such a broad philanthropy to back his appeals; pushing straight into every breach where work was needed; blind to everything but his one light of moral instinct;—­he became an organ for the charities of those whose softer natures longingly whispered the cry, but could not do the cut and thrust work, of deliverance.  Dr. Furness held the same position, and others who, like him, refused to be enrolled in the ’Underground Committee,’ or in any definite Anti-Slavery organization.  These men knew that they were of greater service to the cause by being its body-guard, by standing between it and the public, by making the appeals and taking the blows, and by affording access, pecuniary and other, of each to each.

Thus the times moved on—­growing hotter, more difficult and dangerous, but always working these two results:  redoubling the labors of this noble band, and shaking the city from lethargy into ferment.  Men were compelled to take sides, and but one result could follow, (the result which always follows when human nature is stung and quickened to find its highest instincts,) the Party of Right steadily moved to triumph.

* * * * *

For a lesson to us in courage, it is worth while to ask, how these Apostles of Freedom stood the terrible strain put upon them for so many years.  I can answer for the two of whom I write, and do not doubt that the answer is true of the rest:  This self-forgetfulness was made easy by a love that filled and overfilled all their moral energies—­the simple love of man, as God’s highest creation, and of his natural rights, as God’s best gift.  Their work was not a mere result of will, not an outcome of faculty, not an unsupported impulse of heart.  It was character living itself out, an utterance of its entire unity, something drawn from the solemn depths of those life-convictions which all the personal and impersonal powers of a man, aglow and welded, unite in producing.  Hence, their work was not apart from them, even so far as to be called ahead of them; nor parallel with them; it was one with them by a necessary spiritual inclusion.  Will and Duty ceased to be separate powers; they were transfused through the whole breadth of their human sympathies, adding to their warmth a fixity of purpose that bore them without a falter, through thirty years of such