How can a man behold the light who has no answering inward light?
They are true to their sight, but when they look this way they
see nothing, they are blind. For the children of the light to contend
with them is as if there should be a contest between eagles and owls. Show
me a man who feels bitterly toward John Brown, and let me hear what noble
verse he can repeat. He’ll be as dumb as if his lips were stone.
It is not every man who can be a Christian, even in a very moderate sense,
whatever education you give him. It is a matter of constitution and
temperament, after all. He may have to be born again many times. I have known
many a man who pretended to be a Christian, in whom it was ridiculous, for he
had no genius for it. It is not every man who can be a free man, even.
Editors persevered for a good while in saying that Brown was crazy; but at
last they said only that it was “a crazy scheme,” and the only
evidence brought to prove it was that it cost him his life. I have no doubt
that if he had gone with five thousand men, liberated a thousand slaves,
killed a hundred or two slaveholders, and had as many more killed on his own
side, but not lost his own life, these same editors would have called it by
a more respectable name. Yet he has been far more successful than that. He
has liberated many thousands of slaves, both North and South. They seem to
have known nothing about living or dying for a principle. They all called
him crazy then; who calls him crazy now?
All through the excitement occasioned by his remarkable attempt and subsequent
behavior the Massachusetts legislature, not taking any steps for the defense
of her citizens who were likely to be carried to Virginia as witnesses and
exposed to the violence of a slaveholding mob, was wholly absorbed in a
liquor-agency question, and indulging in
poor jokes on the word “extension.”
Bad spirits occupied their thoughts. I am sure that no statesman up to the
occasion could have attended to that question at all at that time, — a
very vulgar question to attend to at any time!
When I looked into a liturgy of the
Church of England,
printed near the end of the last century, in order to find a service
applicable to the case of Brown, I found that the only martyr recognized and
provided for it was
King Charles the
First,
an eminent scamp. Of all the inhabitants of England and of the world, he was
the only one, according to this authority, whom that church had made a martyr
and saint of; and for more than a century it had celebrated his martyrdom, so
called, by an annual service. What a satire on the Church is that!
Look not to legislatures and churches for your guidance, nor to any soulless
incorporated bodies, but to inspirited or inspired ones.
What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with
wisdom and manhood? To omit his other behavior, see what a work this
comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. Where is our
professor of belles-lettres, or of logic and rhetoric, who
can write so well? He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like
Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do
not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously
withal, in Roman or English or any history.
