This reflection should remind us that such light as we are fain to cast upon past times in our impatience of their blindness, is the same as duty binds us to communicate to our own. When we observe the importance of small things in the world’s history; it should point us to the cheerful discharge of so lowly a duty as to record those in which we have been engaged. Let us not deem any of them so unimportant as to refuse to draw from them lessons of wisdom, nor strive to persuade ourselves that aught _can_ be trifling, which is wrought into the great page of the past. “To serve the nineteenth century we must _know_ the nineteenth century:” therefore, nothing is without consequence which helps to illustrate our times. Facts, warnings, rebuke, encouragement, consolation, advice, labor,--whatever the times demand, let us give as we have power and opportunity, and we shall soon be made to know _what it was_ that kept so great a distance between the words of lonely warning that have risen prophet-like upon the past; and _why_, at some periods, there could be no “open vision” or corresponding energy, but only the feebleness and incertitude of ignorance and fear. Custom is never, by her nature, the handmaid of freedom; and therefore in a struggle for the extinction of slavery, if we speak only according to custom, we shall lose the unhesitating distinctness which the occasions of the cause demand. The occasion now demands, in an especial manner, the plain directness of the very palace of truth. Let us, however, avoid the mistake of supposing that we can find in the past, the exact parallel of the present, in any other than a spiritual sense. Truth--Love--Freedom--are ever the same; but the outward signs of their presence, and the manner of their workings upon society, will, at different times, be far unlike. The problems they present, may be wrought out by different processes, though the results are the same. This reflection will enlighten us as to the causes of the convulsive terror now manifested by the body of the ministry and their dupes--the clerical politicians. We shall learn how it came to pass that the latter were desirous of disjoining themselves from the abolition host, while they yet claimed the name of abolitionists. We shall see on what temptations they have “fallen away Like water from us, never found again, But where they mean to sink us.”