Such a vigorous treatment of large and vital questions commanded a following; and it was not long before this young minister from the West was recognized as one of the great anti-slavery leaders and had a national reputation. Men at the South began to hate him; men at the North, conservatives whose business interests were wrapped up in the present state of things, whose goods and principles were equally for sale in Southern markets, were horrified and alarmed at his unwise sayings, his blasphemous use of the pulpit for political ends, and his fiery denunciations of the nation’s pet institution. But over against these there was another class, daily growing larger, whose consciences were set free by his clear discrimination of a citizen’s and a Christian’s duty, whose intelligence was broadened and enlarged by his lofty views, and whose hearts were set on fire by his mighty enthusiasm and abounding love. This body daily increased in numbers and came more and more to share the spirit of their leader. Whatever he wrote they read. Whenever he spoke the size of church or hall alone decided the number of hearers. Without ambition, without self-seeking, with a simple, earnest desire to do his work as God revealed it to him, unrasped by hatreds, he had come to a place and leadership as broad and high as there was in the land. With cheek still ruddy with youth, with eyes from which the laughter never died out except when the tears of sympathy filled them or the deep things of God veiled them, with a heart that was in sympathy with all nature round him, and which nature and He who is above nature fed with perennial freshness, with a voice that could interpret every emotion, with that excellent health that makes the body a perfect channel of expression for the mind and a complete instrument for its service, he stands like a David just come from his sheepfolds, free, unencumbered, and singing as he strikes. In the progress of this discussion upon the Compromise measures, which had its centre in Congress, but in which every hamlet, almost every household, in the North had a share, other questions came to the front as parts of the great controversy. Among the earliest of these was the right of free speech—a right utterly unknown where slavery was in power, and always bitterly attacked where it had influence. As may well be expected, it found in Mr. Beecher one of its most strenuous champions. Early in his career he urged all the claims of friendship, risked the safety of his new church building, and defied the New York and Brooklyn mob, then under the control of the notorious Captain Rynders, in its defence. In a sermon preached in 1884 upon the death of Wendell Phillips he gives an account of his experience in this matter: