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prove an additional incentive to hold fast to our liberty and to cultivate it with fresh purity of purpose; if it increase our love of sterling action and disdain of self-praise; if it tend to confirm civil fortitude, that virtue which is acquired by the habit of at once obeying and insisting upon the laws of a free country, and shows itself most elevated when it resists alluring excitement; if, in some measure, it serve to restrain us from exaggeration and judging by plausibility-two faults that are rifer in our age than they have been almost at any other period; if it steady the reader against that enthusiasm which Wesley designates as "the looking to the end without the means;" if it deepen our abhorrence of all absolutism, whether it be individual or collective, called by whatever name, monarchical or democratic, and founded upon whatever theory, whether on the jus divinum of a dynasty or the pretended universal suffrage of a Cæsar, or on the arrogance of a party and of its demagogue; and if it strengthen our conviction of the dignity of man, too feeble to wield unlimited power, and too noble to submit to it; if this book aid, in any degree, in the acknowledgment of St. Paul's great command: "Honor all men," in the wide sphere of political existence-then, indeed, I shall be richly rewarded, and shall not consider myself too bold if I point to you as Epaminondas, in his dying hour, pointed to Leuctra and Mantinea."

COLUMBIA, S. C., July, 1853.

L.

1 General Minutes, appended to his edition of the Book of Common Prayer, for the American Methodists.

2 Diodor. Sic. L. xv. c. 87, 6.

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