speaker had aroused them.”  “It was there,” says Mr. Herndon in one of his lectures, “that Lincoln was baptized and joined our church.  He made a speech to us.  I have heard or read all of Mr. Lincoln’s great speeches; and I give it as my opinion that the Bloomington speech was the grand effort of his life.  Heretofore, and up to this moment, he had simply argued the slavery question on grounds of policy,—­on what are called the statesman’s grounds,—­never reaching the question of the radical and eternal right.  Now he was newly baptized and freshly born; he had the fervor of a new convert; the smothered flame broke out; enthusiasm unusual to him blazed up; his eyes were aglow with inspiration; he felt a new and more vital justice; his heart was alive to the right; his sympathies burst forth; and he stood before the throne of the eternal Right, in presence of his God, and then and there unburdened his penitential and fired soul.  This speech was fresh, new, genuine, odd, original; filled with fervor not unmixed with a divine enthusiasm; his head breathing out through his tender heart its truths, its sense of right, and its feeling of the good and for the good.  This speech was full of fire and energy and force; it was logic; it was pathos; it was enthusiasm; it was justice, equity, truth, right, and good, set ablaze by the divine fires of a soul maddened by wrong; it was hard, heavy, knotty, gnarly, edged, and heated.  I attempted for about fifteen minutes, as was usual with me then, to take notes; but at the end of that time I threw pen and paper to the dogs, and lived only in the inspiration of the hour.  If Mr. Lincoln was six feet four inches high usually, at Bloomington he was seven feet, and inspired at that.  From that day to the day of his death, he stood firm on the right.  He felt his great cross, had his great idea, nursed it, kept it, taught it to others, and in his fidelity bore witness of it to his death, and finally sealed it with his precious blood.”

The committee on resolutions at the convention found themselves, after hours of discussion, unable to agree; and at last they sent for Lincoln.  He suggested that all could unite on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and hostility to the extension of slavery.  “Let us,” said he, “in building our new party make our cornerstone the Declaration of Independence; let us build on this rock, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against us.”  The problem was mastered, and the convention adopted the following: 

Resolved, That we hold, in accordance with the opinions and practices of all the great statesmen of all parties for the first sixty years of the administration of the government, that under the Constitution Congress possesses full power to prohibit slavery in the territories; and that while we will maintain all constitutional rights of the South, we also hold that justice, humanity, the principles of freedom, as expressed