Little by little the controversy spread. I shall not trace it. I am giving you simply the atmosphere in which he sprang into being and into power. His career was a career of thirty or forty years of undiminished eagerness. He never quailed nor flinched, nor did he ever at any time go back one step or turn in the slightest degree to the right or left. He gloried in his cause, and in that particular aspect of it which had selected him; for he was one that was called rather than one that chose. He stood on this platform. It is a part of the sweet and pleasant memories of my comparative youth here, that when the mob refused to let him speak in the Broadway Tabernacle before it moved up-town--the old Tabernacle--William A. Hall, now dead, a fervent friend and Abolitionist, had secured the Graham Institute wherein to hold a meeting where Mr. Phillips should be heard. I had agreed to pray at the opening of the meeting. On the morning of the day on which it was to have taken place, I was visited by the committee of that Institute--excellent gentlemen, whose feelings will not be hurt now, because they are all now ashamed of it; they are in heaven. They visited me to say that in consequence of the great peril that attended a meeting at the Institute, they had withdrawn the liberty to use it, and paid back the money, and that they called simply to say that it was out of no disrespect to me, but from fidelity to their supposed trust. Well, it was a bitter thing. LIBERTY OF SPEECH AND THOUGHT.