"Chief among them was Owen Lovejoy; and second to him, if second to any, was William H. Herndon. But the position of this latter gentleman was one of singular embarrassment. According to himself, he was an Abolitionist 'some time before he was born,' and hitherto he had made his 'calling and election sure' by every word and act of a life devoted to political philanthropy and disinterested political labors. While the two great national parties divided the suffrages of the people, North and South, everything in his eyes was dead. He detested the bargains by which those parties were in the habit of composing sectional troubles, and sacrificing the principle of freedom. When the Whig party paid its breath to time, he looked upon its last agonies as but another instance of divine retribution. He had no patience with time-servers, and regarded with indignant contempt the policy which would postpone the natural rights of an enslaved race to the success of parties and politicians. He stood by at the sacrifice of the Whig party in Illinois with the spirit of Paul when he held the clothes of them that stoned Stephen. He believed it was for the best, and hoped to see a new party rise in its place, great in the fervor of its faith, and animated by the spirit of Wilberforce, Garrison, and the Lovejoys. He was a fierce zealot, and gloried proudly in his title of 'fanatic;' for it was his conviction that fanatics were at all times the salt of the earth, with power to save it from the blight that follows the wickedness of men. He believed in a God, but it was the God of Nature--the God of Socrates and Plato, as well as the God of Jacob. He believed in a Bible, but it was the open scroll of the universe; and in a religion clear and well defined, but it was a religion that scorned what he deemed the narrow slavery of verbal inspiration. Hot-blooded, impulsive, brave, morally and physically, careless of consequences when moved by a sense of individual duty, he was the very man to receive into his inmost heart the precepts of Mr. Seward's 'higher law'" (Life of Lincoln, pp. 350, 351). His literary abilities, both as a speaker and as a writer, were of a high order. He had written a meritorious work on Mental Philosophy, and a "Life of Lincoln," which had just been published when he died. In addition to numerous addresses upon historical, economical, and other subjects he prepared and delivered several able and interesting lectures on Lincoln: "Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge," a beautiful and touching representation of that pathetic and romantic love episode which forms one of the saddest chapters in Lincoln's history; "The Analysis of Lincoln's Character," which appears in the "Lincoln Memorial Album," and "Lincoln's Religion," which was published in the _State Register_, of Springfield, Ill.