But this is no hour for apologies. This is no time for grown-up men to be dodging and hiding, and evading a great duty, under words and phrases. Political! what if I am political? what if every pulpit in the land should be ringing in these days with political events? God knows there is need. We should be lost to the ordinary feelings of men, if we could remain silent when political events are arresting and absorbing public attention, and threatening to rouse all the passions of the human heart, and to shake the earth out of its place. This present time, in which we are living, is no holiday, when a man can throw himself down in the shade, and dream his soul away. The fires, that are kindling on the earth, flash their portentous light into the inmost retirement of private life. The world is resounding with great events. And cold indeed must be our hearts, we are not worthy to live at so momentous, so unprecedented a period, if we refuse to be reminded of those indissoluble ties of a common nature and a common interest, which the course of things is laying bare to all men's view. As you are men, human beings, your hearts must beat with a new and stirring sympathy for the great Public of Christendom, of which you are each an inseparable portion, when you see the second great nation of Europe, after all the terrible experience of the last three-quarters of a century, again falling prostrate in the dust beneath the blow of a base usurper, with no great exploits at his back to extenuate the insolence of the brutal deed; again laid low beneath a despot's feet by that vulgar instrument of power, a standing army. I think there can hardly be found in modern history any parallel to this outrage upon truth, freedom, and humanity--to this implied contempt for human rights and human nature. A robber-hand has seized the great French nation, and flung it down into the dust to be trampled upon at pleasure. At such startling tidings, what man is there so humble or so weak, who can repress the solemn appeal to God, which must rise instinctively from every heart of flesh? Who can help having his attention arrested and engrossed? Who does not long to be saying something, doing something, or suffering something, for the outraged rights, the imperilled interests of our Common Humanity, our One Nature?