ART. III.-WENDELL PHILLIPS.

NEVER in the history of the race have events been more crowded, imposing, and influential than within the compass of the past half-century. Moral forces have changed the face of civilization. Individuals have figured as the exponents of such forces. The twain are identified in popular estimation. Wendell Phillips and the "irrepressible conflict" are inseparable. He was one of its most distinguished captains, the "Admirable Crichton" of social progress, the unique creator of public sentiment. As such he was in closest touch with clergymen, editors, teachers, and statesmen-"a leader of the leaders."

What Wendell Phillips was and said and did is vividly set forth by the Rev. Dr. Carlos Martyn, with pen dipped in his own heart. The biography is worthy of the subject. In outward form of classic mold the great agitator had the proportions of the Greek Apollo. Suppleness and grace in every motion, ruddiness of complexion, sanguino-nervous temperament, and radiancy of aspect commanded attention. Broadshouldered, deep-chested, with finely poised head, wide and high brow, masterful chin, resolute lips, aquiline nose, piercing blue eyes, and hair of

The golden treasure nature showers down

On those foredoomed to wear Fame's golden crown,

"no nobler physique," it is said, "ever confronted an audience." His patrician air was at once natural and conciliatory. His eloquence was equal to his personal appearance.

To the growth of this bright consummate flower many elements contributed. The Puritan blood was one. This organized and transmitted the mental and moral aptitudes of cultured ancestors, beginning with the Rev. George Phillips, one of the immortal exiles for conscience' sake from England in the year 1630, and one of the earliest advocates in America of the Congregational order and discipline. Home training was another. In Beacon street, Boston, he first saw the light on November 29, 1811. Eighth in a family of nine children, his domestic environment was that of lofty thought and holy living. "Men are what their mothers make them," is an apothegin of the Sage of Concord. Mrs. John Phillips, his mother, was profoundly

religious, solicitous for his moral and bodily welfare, and gifted with the power of compressing ethics within narrowest available limits. "Wendell," she would say, "be good and do good; this is my whole desire for you. Add other things if you may -these are central."

Schooling of the youth by locality, tradition, and public seminary was forceful and scientific. Motley, Appleton, and Sumner were his companions. He loved gymnastics, and excelled as boxer, marksman, fencer, oarsman, and equestrian. At Harvard College he stood near the head of his class. While there, after listening to a sermon from Dr. Lyman Beecher, he devoted himself to God. In the solitude of his room he prayed:

O God, I belong to thee, take what is thine own. I ask this, that whenever a thing be wrong it may have no power of temptation over me: whenever a thing be right, it may take no courage to do it.

Thus the most powerful of all forces, re-enforcing all beneficent influences, added to kindly generous manner and brilliancy of intellect the purity and the sense of obligation to keep himself good and upright for which he was ever remarkable. His Bible was always open on the center-table. Its contents—read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested—prepared its handsome, aristocratic, and idolized student for the Harvard Law School, in which he diligently profited by the instructions of the peerless Judge Story. Coke's affirmance, that "reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason," deeply impressed him. Blackstone became his familiar. Admission to the bar was prophetic of fame, distinction, opulence, and power. Large and increasing practice justified prediction ; but stirring events, undreamed of by the rising lawyer, imparted new direction to his energies and led to issues of which he had not the least forecast.

The radically antagonistic elements of slavery and freedom in actual collision stimulated his development. The zealots— gentlemen of property and standing," his associates of Beacon Hill-who, on the 21st of October, 1835, mobbed the antislavery office in Washington Street, Boston, grossly insulted the noble women therein assembled, and outraged the person of William Lloyd Garrison for exercising the dearest right of liberty-free speech-convinced him that an unpopular minor

ity had no right which the State would respect, and that law was not worth the parchment on which it was written when opposed to popular prejudice. Slavery was held to be a compréhensive necessity, except by the few who were exposed to the violence of lawless passion. These held it to be wrong per se, always, every-where, and under all circumstances. And they were right. The clergy for the most part held it to be wrong in the abstract, but refused to condemn it in the concrete. The minor portion twaddled about Abraham, Moses, and Onesimus in its defense, and ignored the golden rule and the law of love.

Among the lady abolitionists affronted by the Beacon Street mob was Miss Ann Terry Greene, a lady of singular beauty, accomplishments, and heroism, the romantic Jeanne d'Arc to whose call for aid Phillips, like another chivalric Dunois, gallantly responded. Acquaintance ripened into love, and love was consummated in matrimony. "My wife," he remarked," made an out-and-out abolitionist of me, and she always preceded me in the adoption of the various causes I have advocated." "Marriage makes or mars the man." 'It made Wendell Phillips one of the nineteenth century colossi. In the spirit of Moses he cast in his lot with the enslaved. Blue-blooded aristocracy declared it to be "suicide-political, professional, and social suicide." Events proved the wisdom of his choice.

Foreign travel-an education in itself—yielded ripest fruits of culture to Wendell and Ann Phillips. Their observation was keen, study exhaustive, experience beneficent. To Europe he went as representative of the New England Antislavery Society, on June 6, 1839, in the spirit of that enthusiasm which the Germans call "Schwärmerei," as if its origin were amid a swarm or assembly of people. "Let us," said he, "rather keep to the old Greek definition-the God within us-and go hence to work as earnestly as we have felt in this crowded convention."

Domesticity was one conspicuous quality of Wendell Phillips. No. 26 Essex Street, a tiny brick house of the English basement pattern, was the haven in which love, peace, cheeriness, and laughter always greeted and enveloped the doughty champion of human rights. There he indulged his taste for practical mechanics, consulted his chronically ailing Egeria, conversed habitually in the language of Molière, commended

Cobbett, the English economist, for insisting that "the seat of civilization is the stomach," and improved on his aphorism by adding thereto, "an easy conscience, and a pillow steeped in poppy juice." Of children, whom they passionately loved, the devoted couple had none of their own, but supplied the lack with those of their friends. Each was to the other in lieu of offspring. Mesmerism was prescribed for the invalid wife, whose pathetically humorous, "So the poor devoted Wendell is caught one hour of his busy day, and seated down to hold my thumbs. I grow sicker every year, Wendell lovelier; I more desponding, he always cheery," reveals his conjugal love and deep respect for womanhood. She was a fitful sleeper, and often roused him a dozen times in the night, and this for more than forty-six years without evoking from him one murmur.

Wendell Phillips clearly saw the distinction between real and nominal Christianity. To him the first was Christianity, the second Churchianity. Colleagues, failing to perceive the difference, fell into religious errors. He clung to the old faith. Leaving the communion of his own Church because of its complicity with slave-holders, he did not abandon communion with Christ and the faithful. He felt the need of oneness with the divine Liberator, and on Sundays met with men and women like-minded in private houses to partake, after apostolic example, of the Lord's Supper. The supply of the Spirit of Christ Jesus gave strength for service and for sacrifice. This was the permanent element of his greatness. Faith in Christ was absolute. When dying of angina pectoris he quoted the words of Hupfeld, the eminent Semitic scholar and critic:

I find the whole history of humanity before Him [Christ] and after Him points to Him, and finds in Him its center and its solution. His whole conduct, His deeds, His words have a supernatural character, being altogether inexplicable from human relations and human means. I feel that here there is something more

than man.

Of a future life he said, "I am as sure of it as I am that there will be a to-morrow." Christ to him was the infallible Teacher and the all-sufficient Saviour.

Heart and soul, energy and resource, were unsparingly devoted to the destruction of intrenched iniquity and the deliverance of the oppressed. His creed was, that "God gives

manhood but one clew to success-equal and exact justice; that he guarantees shall be always expediency. Deviate one hairbreadth-plant only the tiniest seed of concession-you know not how many and tall branches of mischief shall grow therefrom.'" Creed was embodied in deed. The true Church, he taught, is always and every-where composed of those who are likest and nearest to Christ. In his own heart he set up God's altar and there worshiped. Ideals and methods were derived from Jesus of Nazareth, "in whom lives the moral earnestness of the world." “The men who have learned of him most closely-Paul, Luther, Wesley--have marked their own age and molded for good all after-time."

Such men are unavoidably militant. Where moral suasion fails to induce relinquishment of wrong they logically and rightfully support appeal to physical force. He defended the war for the preservation of the Union because it involved the annihilation of slavery, which to him was abhorrent as piracy and murder. On December 2, 1860, he confronted the fierce sulphureous mob of Boston with imperial courage. His arraignment of their spirit and conduct was terrible, his anathemas blistering and appalling. On February 17, 1862, his persuasive eloquence transformed the rioters into applauding sympathizers. His friends were loyal, his house an arsenal. Had the rioters broken into the latter he quietly declared that he would have shot them, "just as I would shoot a mad dog or a wild bull." Yet there was nothing of the bull-dog in his deCareless and buoyant, for three months he ran unhurt a gauntlet of infuriated mobs. Puritan of the Puritans, with clean-cut deep convictions, and intense longing that others should embrace his opinions, he was a born fighter, joyous in the stress of conflict, bent on victory, and that not for the sake of victory, but for the glory of the great Captain under whose banner he fought.

meanor.

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To say that Wendell Phillips fought fairly is to affirm what might be expected from Saxon ancestry and New England cultHe was a minute, thorough, and exhaustive student of history; subjected its day-dreams and loose conjectures, as well as its authentic facts, to patient, critical examination. He was no Carlyle-" a bundle of sour prejudices." History, in his intellectual crucible, passed through the fiercest fires of criticism, 36-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. VIII.