"Let us for a moment look back fifty years. We see a church dead! Not merely blind and palsied, but dead to the sin of slavery. Whatever life it had, there was no pulsation indicating that it realized the sin of slavery. Look back there! What do we see? A great bank of darkness, in which the church lies dead; and as we look, we see a single hand unshrinkingly thrust out from the thickest of that darkness and writing a dozen simple words, little fireside words; writing them so large that they can be seen and read from far. We see those words take on a glow in the midst of the very darkness. We see those letters every one turned to a letter of fire. And what was written there? You have heard them already; you know them by heart: "I am in earnest. I will not equivocate-I will not excuse-I will not retreat a single inch-AND I WILL BE HEARD!" Take the circumstances and conditions of the time in which they were uttered, consider the great soul that propelled them forth, consider that he felt the necessity upon him and a woe unto him if he did not utter them-consider all this, and then tell me whether such words have ever been uttered by other mortal lips! Those words were the passwords of Liberty. They were the keynote, struck by him so loud that they startled the nation. Thank God that there was one man in those times who could utter them; who had a soul large enough, deep enough, strong enough, fired enough, godlike enough, to utter them!"