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a brighter dispensation, and thus the cause of liberty required a Sumner—a man like Bonaparte with iron nerves, and a will as defiant as the Word of God—a man whose erudition none could gainsay, but whoso gigantic intellect towered above them all. God always raises up great heroes when there is great work to be done, for duty and responsibility must correspond. One of the best evidences of human affairs remaining in statue quo, at least for a time, is to see little men coming to the surface. God never places third rate officers to man his vessels when a fearful gale and angry billows are just ahead.
When Mr Sumner was called from the ranks of the private citizen to the Senate without having to serve an apprenticeship in the lower house of Congress, or in the executive chair of his State, any one familiar with the history of nations and kingdoms might have known it was portentous of a gathering storm.
True, the friends of liberty had able representatives in the persons of Mr. Hale and the late Chief Justice of the United States, but they lacked the dash, the vim, the snap, the dare, the popular defiance, and sledge hammer and battle axe ability, and power, commensurate to the emergency of the times, though great men as they undoubtedly were. But in Mr. Sumner all these characteristics and qualities happily blended, and made him the match of all the learned sophists, of all the time serving political weather-cocks, of all the blatten mouth braggarts and bombastic blusterers, of all the wiry tongue rhetoricians and pseudo-logicians, that this or any other country could produce, of all the fabricated fiction, or labyrinthine mazes with which the sharpers of tyranny could festoon their theories. Too noble to do wrong, too great to be mean, too wise to make a blunder too high to contenance a low act, too solid to be a trickster too pure to be a politican, too just to be partial, too brave to cower before men or devils, too spotless to be slandered in the most calumnious age the world ever witnessed, armed with the helmet of right, and panoplied with a code of principles, as irreversible as the flowing current of the Mississippi river, he stood out as grand and as majestic before the world as thundering Sinai did, when the shuddering hosts of Israel trembled at its base. A vital amazement, an intellectual human prodigy, a creature with super-human traits, such was Sumner, the man of
