The men who wrote those words grasped the real exigency as they who spoke loudest about exigencies and impossibilities did not. They foresaw, moreover, with the intuition of true wisdom, the danger of resorting to the temporary expedient that had been proposed. For, in truth, all history proves that such expedients and makeshifts always exhibit a tendency to become permanent, and very soon challenge for themselves a character, as legitimate and ultimate, which is not claimed for them when they are adopted. Then that thing, whatever it may be, to which they profess to lead men up, drops out of sight, and they themselves fill the field of vision. Had the plan of the Philadelphia pamphlet been adopted, such I fully believe, such the clergy of Woodbury believed, must inevitably have been the result. That it was not adopted, that the dangers inherent in it were avoided, was largely owing to the action of the day which we commemorate. In what simplicity and godly sincerity of heart they took the step that lay right before them, met the difficulty from which others shrank, did "the next thing," and, therefore, wrought for a marvellous future! Says a thoughtful writer: [Footnote: Aubrey de Vere, _Sketches in Greece and Turkey_.] "Men of ambitious imaginations retire into their study and devise some _magnum opus_ which, like the world itself, is to be created out of nothing, and to hang self-balanced on its own centre; after much puffing, however, the world which they produce is apt to turn out but a well-sized bubble. Men of another order labor but to provide for some practical need; and their work, humble, perhaps occasional, in its design, is found to contain the elements that make human toils indestructible."