An Eloquent Puritan

Tlie reputation ot Rev. Gunsaulus always assures him a good sized audience and Friday night was no exception to the rule. His striking metaphors never tailed topleaseand his short sentences, pregnant with thought, made lasting impressions. The speaker began by tracing the spirit of Puritanism from the time when Moses wrote the law on Sinai, own to the present. Puritanism was eloquent in the great hours of Greece; it branched forth from aul when he stood in Athens; it ived in Chrysostom, "The Golden Vlouthed," in Savonarola when he ïeld the conscience of the future nd wrought the wonder of the eformation before Luther had utered a word. In the civil wars of ïngland, it shone forth brighter lan the gleam of CromwelPs sword. t will continue to shine; for it is ie assertion of the soul in the )resence of revered traditions. It nspires men to higher ideas and ives out the thought that man is jreater than institutions. When Edmund Burke was forging lis thunderbolts of eloquence in the -louse of Commons, he was was but eechoing the Puntanism caught up n the Mayflower. Puritanism gave ut its brightest lustre in our late ivil war when the chains of the laves were melted. It was Purianism which put the flash in the ye of Webster when on Bunker riill he painted that glorious picure that will live forever. Wendell Phillips possessed every element of Puritanism. He breathed it in the air. He had it in his pirit which made eloquence his natural utterance. No man had uch a background of history, the vhole meaning of which to him, was the emancipation of the mind rom prejudice. The speaker then painted the picure of Phillips, seeing the mob running along the street with a rope ntended for the neck of Lloyd Garrison, and of how Phillips had at ast found his cliënt - humanity. ( He thereupon related how Phillips n New York had won all Irish learts for the cause of freedom by telling how O'Connell refused to accept a large sum for Ireland from a slave planter, because of his abhorrence of slavery. Every great revolution produces an agitator, a statesman and a prophet. The revolution of the present century found its agitator in Phillips, its statesman in Sumner, and its prophet in Beecher. No man ever contributed so much ripe scholarship to American politics as did Sumner. Conscience entered the senate in the person of Sumner, as compromise in the person of Clay, -was going out. There was never a more eloquent act than that of Massachusetts, in leaving the seat of Sumner vacant for over a a year after he had fallen maimed and bleeding on the floor of the senate, from the attack of Brooks. The most critical point of our civil war was when Beecher set sail for England. Point to a flner chapter of statesmanship than Beecher's eloquent appeals for freedom, which finally won the whole of England to our cause. Phillips was the Grecian, Sumner the firm old Roman, while Beecher held in his mind all the richness of the oriënt, its grandeur and beauty. More effective than Chicamauga or Mission Ridge, were the burning appeal of these powerful orators, who wrought the conscience of thought which was the emancipator of the slave.