Now, the lives of great men tell us that God has always used visions for disturbing contentment, destroying ease, and securing progress. Witness the life of that young patrician, Wendell Phillips. His college mates love to describe him as they first saw him in the halls of Cambridge. His elegant person, his accomplished manners, his refined scholarship, made him the idol of the Harvard boys. Even in his youthful days he excelled as an orator, and was the easy master of the platform. But to him came the sirens singing of leisure, of opulence, and ambition. Full oft he looked forward to the day when he would be the champion of "elegant repose and cultivated conservatism" of the patrician element in his patrician state. But suddenly the Christ, in the person of one of his little ones, crossed the young scholar's path. One golden October afternoon, while Wendell Phillips was sitting in his office, he heard the noise of a strange disturbance in the street. Looking out he saw the mob maltreating Garrison, as, with blows and kicks, they dragged him toward the jail. All that night young Phillips lay tossing on his couch, thinking ever of this man who had been mobbed in the city where Otis had said "Liberty of speech is inalienable."
All that night the vision of the slave, scarred and scorned and forsaken, stood before his mind, while ever he heard a voice whispering: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." In that vision hour perished forever all his dreams of opulence and ease. He decided to turn his back upon all preferment and ambition, all comfort and leisure, and follow his vision whithersoever it led. Soon the vision led him to the platform of Faneuil Hall, where an official was justifying the murderers of Lovejoy. "Mr. Chairman," he said, "when I heard the gentleman lay down principles which placed the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer of the dead." And that vision lent his words such burning eloquence that Wendell Phillips' speech in Faneuil Hall ranks with Patrick Henry's at Williamsburg and Abraham Lincoln's at Gettysburg--and there is no fourth. His vision led him unto obloquy also. What revilings were his! What bitter hatred! What insults and scoffs! At last the vision led him unto fame. The very city that would have slain him builded his monument, and men who once would not defile their lips with his name taught their children the pathway to his tomb. It was that vision splendid that saved Phillips from sodden contentment. Had Christ never crossed his path, his imagination would have lost its brightest picture, his life its noblest impulses, its most energetic forces.