It is stated that "when Herndon was very young--probably before Mr. Lincoln made his first protest in the Legislature of the State in behalf of liberty--Lincoln once said to him: 'I cannot see what makes your convictions so decided as regards the future of slavery. What tells you the thing must be rooted out?' 'I feel it in my bones,' was Herndon's emphatic answer. 'This continent is not broad enough to endure the contest between freedom and slavery!' It was almost in these very words that Lincoln afterwards opened the great contest with Douglas. From this time forward he submitted all public questions to what he called 'the test of Bill Herndon's _bone philosophy_'; and their arguments were close and protracted." Lincoln's attitude on slavery aroused formidable opposition among his friends, and even in his own family. Mrs. Lincoln was decidedly pro-slavery in her views. Once while riding with a friend she said: "If my husband dies, his spirit will never find me residing outside the limits of a slave State." But opposition, whether from without or within, could never swerve him from a course to which conscience and reason clearly impelled him. Long before Mr. Herndon published the call for the Bloomington convention, he had said to a deputation of men from Chicago, in answer to the inquiry whether Lincoln could be trusted for freedom: "Can you trust yourselves? If you can, you can trust Lincoln forever." The convention met at Bloomington, May 29, 1856. One of its chief incidents was a speech by Lincoln. This speech was one of the great efforts of his life, and had a powerful influence on the convention. "Never," says one of the delegates, "was an audience more completely electrified by human eloquence. Again and again his hearers sprang to their feet, and by long continued cheers expressed how deeply the speaker had aroused them." "It was there," says Mr. Herndon in one of his lectures, "that Lincoln was baptized and joined our church. He made a speech to us. I have heard or read all of Mr. Lincoln's great speeches; and I give it as my opinion that the Bloomington speech was the grand effort of his life. Heretofore, and up to this moment, he had simply argued the slavery question on grounds of policy,--on what are called the _statesman's_ grounds,--never reaching the question of the radical and eternal right. Now he was newly baptized and freshly born; he had the fervor of a new convert; the smothered flame broke out; enthusiasm unusual to him blazed up; his eyes were aglow with inspiration; he felt a new and more vital justice; his heart was alive to the right; his sympathies burst forth; and he stood before the throne of the eternal Right, in presence of his God, and then and there unburdened his penitential and fired soul. This speech was fresh, new, genuine, odd, original; filled with fervor not unmixed with a divine enthusiasm; his head breathing out through his tender heart its truths,