The contagion of fear and doubt and despair could not touch him.

He did not seem susceptible to the common influences which affect men.

His soul poised on its own centre, reposed calmly there through all the storms that beat for seven years on his noble breast.

The ingratitude and folly of those who should have been his allies, the insults of his foes, and the frowns of fortune never provoked him into a rash act, or deluded him into a single error." Horace Mann says that there must be a time when the vista of the future, with all its possibilities of glory and of shame, first opens to the vision of youth.

Then is he summoned to make his choice between truth and treachery; between honor and dishonor; between purity and profligacy; between moral life and moral death.