The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics by Various
page 33 of 279 (11%)
page 33 of 279 (11%)
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or inferred the supernatural from false premises, why then let us grieve
for his delusion, and wait patiently for the phenomena which led him astray to be explained. He went abroad for a time, while pastor of the Hollis Street Church, and visited the Holy Land, in devout pilgrimage; and though he lost his first wife, the mother of all his children, and a most worthy gentlewoman, but the other day, and married another superior woman after a brief widowhood, his last days have been, I should say, most emphatically his best days; for he has lectured through the length and breadth of the land on Temperance, and, after enduring all sorts of persecution as one of the anti-slavery leaders, he lived to see the whole system against which they had been warring so long, and with so little apparent effect, utterly overthrown throughout the land, and the great God of heaven and earth acknowledged as the God of the black man. Thousands and thousands of miles he travelled, not only after having passed the meridian of his life, but after he had reached the allotted term, when life begins to be a heaviness for most, as a laborer in the cause of truth,--often of unacknowledged truth; and if mistaken, as a theologian, or as a Spiritualist, or as a man,--being what he was,--let us remember that he was never false to his convictions, never a hypocrite nor a deceiver, and that he died with his harness on, having been occupied for the last five years of his life in digesting the treasury decisions, often contradictory, and always inaccessible, for there was no index, until he took them in hand, going back thirty years, I believe, and reducing the whole to a system which need be no longer unintelligible to the Department. One word more. Among the scores of letters I had from him in the day of his bitterest trials and sorest temptations, there was one which he sent |
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