Page:Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land.pdf/64

50 war, pouring the oil and wine of his Christian sympathy into wounds still bleeding from the rough hands of his countrymen; making the hearts of houseless widows sing for joy at the gifts he brought in his hands and the gracious words he spoke to them out of his eyes for lack of other speech they could understand.

And yet, after all that he felt and did for Freedom and Peace and the brotherhood of nations, the cause of Temperance seemed equally dear to him, and he gave to it an advocacy as earnest and unwearied up to his last day on earth. In the great Anti-Corn-Law movement he was a tower of strength. Not that he made eloquent speeches from the platform, or powerful arguments in the press for the repeal of taxes on the people's bread. His strength did not lie in these intellectual forces; but in the irresistible and all-conquering power of a great principle. Never was a man more distrustful of expediency, of compromise with wrong, of a sliding-scale of obedience to the true and right. If he had seen in his youth what Constantine saw written in letters of fire on a cross planted on the clouds, "Εν τουτο ηικω," In this conquer, he could not have taken hold of a whole principle and carried it into the breach with more unswerving faith and courage. "Total and immediate" was the flag he raised against every great wrong which he attacked. It was this he reared