Starting upon life with this principle, that he would do what had to be done,--if nobody else appeared to do it,--and that he could do it, too,--he soon found himself with work enough on his hands. English's flippant attack on the New Testament Scriptures appeared while Mr. Everett was minister of Brattle-Street Church. Because it appeared, he considered it his place to defend the New Testament against that specific attack; and he did it. The "Defence of Christianity," which he then published, is of value, chiefly as a piece of controversy belonging to the history of opinion in this neighborhood at that moment. Controversy has long since taken other grounds. For that purpose, at that moment, the book did its work completely. It exhausted the points which Mr. English raised, and exhausted them in a way which required very patient study. Mr. Everett once said that to compile the chapter on the quotations of the Old Testament by the New Testament writers, he went through the whole of the Mischna in the edition of Surenhusius, in six volumes folio. This chapter, I may say in passing, is the chapter of most permanent value in the "Defence." Now this "Defence," the work of a boy of twenty years of age, was written in the midst of the demands made upon the popular preacher in one of the largest parishes in Boston, in a few months' time,--sent to the printer chapter by chapter. And Mr. Everett said of it, in after-life, that, if it did not seem like affectation, he would say that it was relaxation from the work he was doing in the pulpit. I have no doubt it was. I have no thought that he was specially fitted for that work. It illustrates rather his moral force of determination. He thought that particular charge of Mr. English's ought to be answered. Nobody else answered it. And therefore he did it himself. He knew he could do it, if it must be done. If he had not prepared for it, he must prepare for it then. But the reader will observe, I hope, that he does not in the "Defence" attempt anything else than the task he had assigned. Here is no general Apology. It is no discussion of the Evidences. It is a specific duty,--which he had assigned to himself,--cleanly, neatly, and thoroughly done. He knew what he was going to do, when he began; and he knew, when he had finished what he could do. His victories, his life through, will all be found, I think, to illustrate that sort of steady, but determined resolution,--determined, in the sense that, before he began, the bounds were established for the work which was to be done.