"I have not in a single instance gone to the speaking halls without all the way breathing to God unutterable desires for inspiration, guidance, success; and I have had no disturbance of _personality_. I have been willing, yea, with eagerness, to be myself contemptible in men's sight if only my disgrace might be to the honor of that cause which is entrusted to our own thrice dear country. I have asked of God nothing but this--and this with uninterrupted heart-flow of yearning request--"Make me worthy to speak for God and man." I never felt my ignorance so painfully, nor the great want of moral purity and nobility of soul, as when approaching my tasks of _defending liberty_ in this her hour of trial. I have an ideal of what a man should be that labors for such a cause, that constantly rebukes my real condition, and makes me feel painfully how little I am. Yet _that_ is hardly painful. There passes before me a view of God's glory, so pure, so serene, uplifted, filling the ages, and more and more to be revealed, that I almost wish to lose my own identity, to be like a drop of dew that falls into the sea, and becomes a part of the sublime whole that glows under every line of latitude, and sounds on every shore! '_That God may be all in all_,'--that is not a prayer only, but a personal _experience_. And in all this time I have not had one unkind feeling toward a single human being. Even those who are opposers, I have pitied with undying compassion, and enemies around me have seemed harmless, and objects of charity rather than potent foes to be destroyed. God be thanked, who giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. "My dear friend, when I sat down to write, I did it under this impulse--that I wanted somebody to know the secret of my life. I am in a noisy spectacle, and seem to thousands as one employing merely worldly implements, and acting under secular motives. But should I die, on sea or land, I wanted to say to you, who have been so near and dear to me, that as God's own very truth, 'the life that I have lived in the flesh, I have lived by faith of the Son of God.' I wanted to leave it with some one to say for me that it was not in natural gifts, nor in great opportunities, nor in personal ambition, that I have been able to endure and labor, but that the secret and spring of my outward life has been an inward, complete, and all-possessing faith of God's truth, and God's own self working in me to will and to do of his own good pleasure! "There, now I feel better!