“However, there are some difficulties involved in this question. Colonel Ellsworth, who has just been murdered by one of these ‘miscreants’ of whom you speak, I knew well. I was thinking of my own sensations when I walked over from New York after hearing the sad news. Why, I was forty feet high! I was scared, I grew so fast. I walked so lordly that every step seemed to have the weight of a mountain; yet I did not feel the touch of the earth. For one hour I think I had enough volume of feeling to have swept away a continent. I was almost frightened at the turbulent and swelling tide within me, and I said: ‘Suppose my Master should come and say: My child, what are you doing with such feelings? Where is My teaching? What are you taking on yourself My supreme attribute for? “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.”’ Is it not charming how these texts will exorcise the devil? I put that passage on my head as a crown, and I have felt as peaceful as a lamb ever since. And although it was very base and wicked for that man to murder Colonel Ellsworth as he did, I can say that had he not expiated his crime, and had the victim been my brother, I could still have forgiven him and prayed for him. “Now, my brethren, I am going to fight this battle right straight through from beginning to end, and not lose my Christian feelings either. I am going to stick close to my Saviour. And, with regard to the past, I am not sorry for one sermon that I have preached among you, or that I have preached during the last twenty years of my life. If the question were put to me to-night, ‘When you look back upon your public life and see what you have done to bring about the present issue, are you not sorry for the ground you have taken?’ I would say, _No_. I bless God for every word I have spoken and every influence I have exerted in that direction. Knowing all that was to be, I would do over again all that I have done if the same state of things existed, only my little finger should be as heavy as my loins have been.