Without doubt, the murder of Lovejoy and similar incidents drew the mind of Lincoln to the discussion of the subject of the preservation of our institutions. For Herndon has left valuable testimony as to the influence of like events on his own opinions. The cruel and uncalled-for murder aroused anti-slavery sentiments, penetrating the college at Jacksonville where he was attending, and both faculty and students were unrestrained in their denunciation. Herndon's father, believing that the college was too strongly permeated with the virus of Abolitionism, forced him to withdraw from the institution. But Herndon declares that it was too late; that the murder of Lovejoy filled him with more desperation than the slave scene in New Orleans did Lincoln. For while the latter believed in non-interference with slavery, as long as the Constitution authorized its existence, Herndon, although acting nominally with the Whig party up to 1853, struck out for Abolitionism pure and simple.[125] [125] Herndon, 1, 178-9. In the fall of 1837, Lincoln addressed the Young Men's Lyceum at Springfield, Illinois, in a formal discourse bearing traces of considerable preparation. The style is fulsome and fanciful, and unlike his own crisp utterance of previous or subsequent periods. For a time he wandered from his natural self and followed the glitter of what he doubtless deemed a more cultivated form of expression. Thus it begins: "In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American people, find our account running under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us."[126] [126] Lincoln's Speeches, 1, 9.