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How feeble words seem here How can I hope to utter what your hearts are full of?
I fear to disturb the harmony which his life breathes round this home.
One and another of you, his neighbors, say, “I have known him five years,” “I have known him ten years.”
It seems to me as if we had none of us known him. How our admiring, loving wonder has grown, day by day, as he has unfolded trait after trait of earnest, brave, tender, Christian life!
We see him walking with radiant, serene face to the scaffold, and think what an iron heart, what devoted faith!
We take up his letters, beginning “My dear wife and children, every one,” --see him stoop on his way to the scaffold and kiss that negro child,--and this iron heart seems all tenderness.
Marvellous old man!
We have hardly said it when the loved forms of his sons, in the bloom of young devotion, encircle him, and we remember he is not alone, only the majestic centre of a group.
Your neighbor farmer went, surrounded by his household, to tell the slaves there were still hearts and right arms ready and nerved for their service.
From this roof four, from a neighboring roof two, to make up that score of heroes.
How resolute each looked into the face of
Virginia, how loyally each stood at his forlorn post, meeting death cheerfully, till that master-voice said, “It is
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enough.”
And these weeping children and widow seem so lifted up and consecrated by long, single-hearted devotion to his great purpose, that we dare, even at this moment, to remind them how blessed they are in the privilege of thinking that in the last throbs of those brave young hearts, which lie buried on the banks of the
Shenandoah, thoughts of them mingled with love to God and hope for the slave.
He has abolished slavery in
Virginia.
You may say this is too much.
Our neighbors are the last men we know.
The hours that pass us are the ones we appreciate the least.
Men walked
Boston streets, when night fell on
Bunker's Hill, and pitied
Warren, saying, “Foolish man!
Thrown away his life!
Why did n't he measure his means better?”
Now we see him standing colossal on that blood-stained sod, and severing that day the tie which bound
Boston to
Great Britain.
That night George III.
ceased to rule in
New England.
History will date Virginia Emancipation from
Harper's Ferry.
True, the slave is still there.
So, when the tempest uproots a pine on your hills, it looks green for months,--a year or two.
Still, it is timber, not a tree.
John Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system; it only breathes,--it does not live,--hereafter.
Men say, “How coolly brave!”
But matchless courage seems the least of his merits.
How gentleness graced it!
When the frightened town wished to bear off the body of the
Mayor, a man said, “I will go,
Miss Fowke, under their rifles, if you will stand between them and me.”
He knew he could trust their gentle respect for woman.
He was right.
He went in the thick of the fight and bore off the body in safety.
That same girl flung herself between
Virginia rifles and your brave young
Thompson.
They had no pity.
The pitiless bullet reached him, spite of woman's prayers, though the fight had long been over.
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How God has blessed him!
How truly he may say, “I have fought a good fight, I have
finished my course.”
Truly he has
finished,--done his work.
God granted him the privilege to look on his work accomplished.
He said, “I will show the
South that twenty men can take possession of a town, hold it twenty-four hours, and carry away all the slaves who wish to escape.”
Did he not do it?
On Monday night he stood master of
Harper's Ferry, --could have left unchecked with a score or a hundred slaves.
The wide sympathy and secret approval are shown by the eager, quivering lips of lovers of slavery, asking, “O, why did he not take his victory and go away?”
Who checked him at last?
Not startled
Virginia.
Her he had conquered.
The Union crushed,seemed to crush him. In reality God said, “That work is done; you have proved that a Slave State is only fear in the mask of despotism; come up higher, and baptize by your martyrdom a million hearts into holier life.”
Surely such a life is no failure.
How vast the change in men's hearts!
Insurrection was a harsh, horrid word to millions a month ago.
John Brown went a whole generation beyond it, claiming the right for white men to help the slave to freedom by arms.
And now men run up and down, not disputing his principle, but trying to frame excuses for
Virginia's hanging of so pure, honest, high-hearted, and heroic a man.
Virginia stands at the bar of the civilized world on trial.
Round her victim crowd the apostles and martyrs, all the brave, high souls who have said, “God is God,” and trodden wicked laws under their feet.
As I stood looking at his grandfather's gravestone, brought here from
Connecticut, telling, as it does, of his death in the Revolution, I thought I could hear our hero-saint saying, “My fathers gave their swords to the oppressor,--the slave still sinks before the pledged force of this nation.
I give my sword to the slave my fathers forgot.”
If any
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swords ever reflected the smile of Heaven, surely it was those drawn at
Harper's Ferry.
If our God is ever the
Lord of Hosts, making one man chase a thousand, surely that little band might claim him for their captain.
Harper's Ferry was no single hour, standing alone,--taken out from a common life,--it was the flowering out of fifty years of single-hearted devotion.
He must have lived wholly for one great idea, when these who owe their being to him, and these whom love has joined to the circle, group so harmoniously around him, each accepting serenely his and her part.
I feel honored to stand under such a roof.
Hereafter you will tell children standing at your knees, “I saw
John Brown buried,--I sat under his roof.”
Thank God for such a master.
Could we have asked a nobler representative of the
Christian North putting her foot on the accursed system of slavery?
As time passes, and these hours float back into history, men will see against the clear December sky that gallows, and round it thousands of armed men guarding
Virginia from her slaves.
On the other side, the serene brow of that calm old man, as he stoops to kiss the child of a forlorn race.
Thank God for our emblem.
May he soon bring
Virginia to blot out hers in repentant shame, and cover that hateful gallows and soldiery with thousands of broken fetters.
What lesson shall those lips teach us?
Before that still, calm brow let us take a new baptism.
How can we stand here without a fresh and utter consecration?
These tears!
how shall we dare even to offer consolation?
Only lips fresh from such a vow have the right to mingle their words with your tears.
We envy you your nearer place to these martyred children of God.
I do not believe slavery will go down in blood.
Ours is the age of thought.
Hearts are stronger than swords.
That last fortnight!
How sublime its lesson!
the
Christian one of conscience,
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--of truth.
Virginia is weak, because each man's heart said amen to
John Brown.
His words,--they are stronger even than his rifles.
These crushed a State.
Those have changed the thoughts of millions, and will yet crush slavery.
Men said, “Would he had died in arms!”
God ordered better, and granted to him and the slave those noble prison hours,--that single hour of death; granted him a higher than the soldier's place, that of teacher; the echoes of his rifles have died away in the hills,--a million hearts guard his words.
God bless this roof,--make it bless us. We dare not say bless you, children of this home!
you stand nearer to one whose lips God touched, and we rather bend for your blessing.
God make us all worthier of him whose dust we lay among these hills he loved.
Here he girded himself and went forth to battle.
Fuller success than his heart ever dreamed God granted him. He sleeps in the blessings of the crushed and the poor, and men believe more firmly in virtue, now that such a man has lived.
Standing here, let us thank God for a firmer faith and fuller hope.
