Seeing that the conscience of the North was smothered and mute by reason of the supposed obligations to the compromises of the Constitution, Garrison declared that the compromises of the Constitution were covenants with hell, and that no man was bound to observe them.  This extreme ground Mr. Phillips also took,—­immediate, unconditional, universal emancipation, at any cost whatsoever.  That is Garrisonism; that is Wendell Phillipsism; and it would seem as though the Lord rather leaned that way, too.

I shall not discuss the merits of Mr. Garrison or Mr. Phillips in every direction.  I shall say that while the duty of immediate emancipation without conditions was unquestionably the right ground, yet in the providence of God even that could not be brought to pass except through the mediation of very many events.  It is a remarkable thing that Mr. Phillips and Mr. Garrison both renounced the Union and denounced the Union in the hope of destroying slavery; whereas the providence of God brought about the love of the Union when it was assailed by the South, and made the love of the Union the enthusiasm that carried the great war of emancipation through.  It was the very antithesis of the ground which they took.  Like John Brown, Mr. Garrison; like John Brown, Mr. Phillips; of a heroic spirit, seeking the great and noble, but by measures not well adapted to secure the end.

Little by little the controversy spread.  I shall not trace it.  I am giving you simply the atmosphere in which he sprang into being and into power.  His career was a career of thirty or forty years of undiminished eagerness.  He never quailed nor flinched, nor did he ever at any time go back one step or turn in the slightest degree to the right or left.  He gloried in his cause, and in that particular aspect of it which had selected him; for he was one that was called rather than one that chose.  He stood on this platform.  It is a part of the sweet and pleasant memories of my comparative youth here, that when the mob refused to let him speak in the Broadway Tabernacle before it moved up-town—­the old Tabernacle—­William A. Hall, now dead, a fervent friend and Abolitionist, had secured the Graham Institute wherein to hold a meeting where Mr. Phillips should be heard.  I had agreed to pray at the opening of the meeting.  On the morning of the day on which it was to have taken place, I was visited by the committee of that Institute—­excellent gentlemen, whose feelings will not be hurt now, because they are all now ashamed of it; they are in heaven.  They visited me to say that in consequence of the great peril that attended a meeting at the Institute, they had withdrawn the liberty to use it, and paid back the money, and that they called simply to say that it was out of no disrespect to me, but from fidelity to their supposed trust.  Well, it was a bitter thing.

LIBERTY OF SPEECH AND THOUGHT.