Josephine Elizabeth Grey Butler

“ At the meeting of our Abolitionist Federation about to be held in Paris will that voice be heard, or will it be lost amidst the excitement of those days, amidst the pressure of a thousand interests and the voices of appeal from many workers in innumerable good causes? And yet a few streets distant there are and will be abodes filled with human beings—our sisters, driven outside the pale of all law, hemmed round and crushed down by a cordon and by weights of arbitrary police rules, slaves and prisoners to whom no light comes, to whom no word of hope penetrates. ”

“ Among the first who came to us to our own house, to die, was a certain Marion, who seemed to us a kind of first-fruits of the harvest, in the gathering in of which we were to be allowed in after years to participate. The first time I saw her was in a crowded room. Her face attracted me: not beautiful in the common acceptation of the word, but having a power greater than beauty; eyes full of intelligence and penetration; a countenance at once thoughtful and frank, with at times a wildly seeking look, as if her whole being cried out, “Who will show us any good?” ”

“ Will He not help? Does He look down from His eternal calm of heaven an indifferent spectator? Can it be that the Eternal rests content that any human beings whom He has created should perish for ever? That men should destroy themselves in spite of God is a terrible thought, but not so terrible, not so fatal to hope, to love, and to faith as the thought, full of deadly poison, that God cares not—that the heart of Him who redeemed us is cold, when my own is filled with an agony of compassion. ”

“ Give the women a vote, and see what will be the result. In all my work my one strength has been the strength of the Almighty, sought and won by constant prayer; and the prayer which I now offer in my secret chamber is that the veil may be taken away, and the selfishness—the perhaps unconscious selfishness—may be removed from the hearts of men who deny women equality, and keep them outside the Constitution. Think what we could do in the cause of morality, think of the pain and trouble and martyrdom that we might be saved in the future, if we had that little piece of justice. ”

“ The sister of the hero, a good, kind, prosperous, society woman, asks him with sincerity: “But do you believe it possible that a woman who has lived such a life can ever again be really elevated, morally re-instated, and restored to the nobility of womanhood?” She waits for a reply, imagining that that question is the one which presses most on her brother’s mind, while he is thus determined to sacrifice all for his former victim. His reply embodies a thought, which rarely, if ever, occurs even to the best of men. ”

“ It will rouse some consciences, no matter how imperfect men may find it. On the eve of a war it may be said that the sound of the trumpet is imperfect because it only calls to the battle, and that we want to see the troops, their arms, and the strength of muscle on either side. Yet the call to battle is needed; the close grappling with the foe will follow. It is only when the slave begins to move, to complain, to give signs of life and resistance, either by his own voice, or by the voice of one like himself speaking for him, that the struggle for freedom truly begins. ”

“ It has brought hope to many, showing how the truth is marching on, how the winged seed has taken root, not only in obscure ground, and in humble minds, but in the mind of a great genius, whose voice has sounded aloud and afar the justice of the movement, for which so many of us have prayed and laboured, and the injustice under which so many have suffered and died—their sorrows and their death taken no account of because they were the helpless victims of the tyranny appealed against. ”

“ Geneva, March 25th, 1896.
I have been called to witness a dark page in the history of human life. It is pain to me to have to record it; but its lessons are needful and solemn, and I wish I had a voice to reach to the end of the civilised world, that those lessons might be heard. How many years we have had the hard task imposed on us of trying to show people—good people—the horrible principles embodied in the State regulation of vice, and the results which must necessarily follow—and they would not, will not believe us. ”

“ The Nazarene is a great conqueror. The heart of the most scornful of the rebels against God’s holy laws may be broken, softened and laid bare to the healing dews of heaven; and his eyes may be opened to see, like Hagar, close at hand a well of water which he knew not of.
In speaking of life and love to some of the most fallen and wrecked of men and women, it has sometimes appeared as if I were speaking into the ears of a corpse, of one in whom there remains no longer any conscience or will to respond to the call of God. ”

“ The true Church of Christ is wider than all communions and creeds. In some of those creeds our God has been so maligned, so caricatured, may I say, that many have been turned into rebels, or apparently rebels, whose hearts are not really estranged from the true God. That poor, unhappy and outwitted son of the Patriarch Isaac, who had in an evil hour sold his birthright for a miserable mess of pottage, cried with a loud and bitter cry: “Hast thou but one blessing, O my father? Bless me, even me also, O my father!” Yes, the Eternal Father will bless the apparently rejected son. ”

“ The sweet visions of my early youth, when I used to sit under the shade of the trees in my father’s home, and read of the holy martyrs and dream of a golden age, are nothing compared with the hope and enthusiasm which God gives me now, and which He has continued to give me while health failed, and some present hopes were blighted, and my way began to be strewn with the graves of those I loved, and I trod the lonely path of widowhood, and the world’s worst evils continued to glare in my eyes. I have had sharp, deep wounds, and long conflict of soul ”

“ Good and noble souls have laboured in secret, heroically, to try to undermine the system, and some have suffered persecution and contempt for the cause. I tell you all this because I want you to see, as I do, how providentially it seems that the open appeal to international effort should have come from England now. I want you to see how God has been training us, not for our battle in England alone, but for this battle of principles all over Europe. I am convinced that we should be simply fools if we were to be contented with achieving our own repeal victory. ”

“ The doubt, the dark misery growing out of the contemplation of the sorrows of earth and the apparent waste of souls are no longer able to drive me into sullenness and despair, for I have found the door of hope. I do not say—for I speak neither more nor less than I have learned of God—that the perplexity is solved, that the sorrow is gone. Sorrow is with me still, the enduring companion of my life. I do not pretend to be able to explain the secrets of God and the great problems of life with any clearness of speech to satisfy another. ”

“ Having conversed of late years with a few of such sorrowful persons, and with some who have been driven by false representations of the character of God to the verge of a complete and final rejection of all faith in Him, I have seen the relief it has brought when the other side has been set before them. I have seen countenances light up as with a new hope, and the man or woman addressed like one who has thrown off a burden of years, and who now begins to breathe freely, delivered from an intolerable oppression. ”

“ Not that our work in the cause of education has in any sense been a failure—far from it; but we need a still larger infusion into these noble schemes for educating the masses of the spirit of self-sacrifice, even of martyrdom. We need to have our hearts still more deeply penetrated with pity, and to be more resolutely bent on making all our practical efforts tend to the revival of justice, and of a pure and equal moral standard and equal laws. While therefore I continue to regard the cause of education as a most sacred cause, I come to the present meeting with a sad heart ”

“ Dare I to ask our friends who will assemble in Paris to keep their ears open to this cry, and to remember that there, close by, in the midst of all the charms of the Exhibition, and the interest of social gatherings and meetings on behalf of every good end, there, close by, are crushed hearts and maddened spirits, whose existence as an officially acknowledged social necessity is a crime prophetic of woe for that charming city en fête just now, but which must pass under a cloud sooner or later, if for these and other slaves the sword of justice is not unsheathed? ”

“ It has my deepest sympathy. It points perhaps to the most important of all the means by which we hope, against hope, to undo the heavy burdens, and let the oppressed go free, and inaugurate a purer and sounder national life. To keep pace however with this portion of the great work, one requires to have the head and heart tolerably free, and that cannot be the case with one who is called to deal with the most miserable, to walk side by side, hand in hand, with the outcast, the victim of our social sins, whose name one scarcely dares to name in refined society. ”

“ This work, I think, is mine; but there is other work not less holy, which aims not less directly at a future emancipation. But while I feel all the greater dependence on, and deeper gratitude, to you my fellow-workers in this Council and others, for the work you are doing, and for the work you will do, in the cause of humanity, I am obliged to confess to you that, for my own part, I fear I may not in future be able to give the needful time to this work, nor to bring to it the vigour and spirit which it demands and deserves. I wish to leave this work in abler and freer hands. ”

“ O send us light, for without it there can be no destruction of the evil. We cannot make war against a hidden foe. In the darkness these poor sisters of ours, these creatures of Thine, are daily murdered, and we do not know what to do or where to turn, and we find no way by which to begin to act. Send us light, O our God, even though it may be terrible to bear.” I had made a record of this petition, and then I had forgotten it. But not so our faithful God. His memory is better than mine! He did not forget, and He is now sending the answer to that prayer. ”

“ May it be that we shall see these same familiar features renewed in the times of the new heavens and the new earth?—all that tends to decay and death, all storms, violence and destructive forces done with for ever, and this beautiful earth again such as we have seen it and loved it at its best, but infinitely better and more beautiful than its present earthly best. Its present unrest, the violent and terrifying forces working within its bosom are, it may be, the travail pangs which will usher in the new earth. ”

“ The problems of life at times appear so perplexing as to be incapable of any solution. The lines of good and evil, of right and wrong, light and darkness, appear blurred; and the weak and burdened spirit loses the hold it had retained hitherto of the highest standard, fidelity to which alone can bring us again out of darkness and trouble into light and hope. ”

“ My last words to you, in case I may not be permitted to remain long among you, will be words of hope—all of hope. It cannot be said that now, aged, and often in pain and in much weakness, it is any natural buoyancy which upholds me. It is a granted hopefulness. The “Angel of the Dawn” is ever present. Deeply fixed in my soul is the conviction that the power and love of God are about to be manifested in proportion to the troubles of our times, and far beyond them. ”

“ Sometimes I have been answered by the wildest blasphemies on the part of men, who later asked with hungry eyes, “Tell me truly, is there any hope for me?” Love is not easily persuaded that the moment of death has arrived. Love, like Rizpah, watches with a constancy stronger than death by the silent corpses of her dearly beloved and longed-for, with all her strength denying that they shall be given as carrion to the wolves and the vultures. ”

“ Unless God by the might of His Holy Spirit works powerfully and widely in the hearts of our people—in our own hearts, each one of us—we shall not be saved as a people in the mighty shaking of the nations which is at hand. The diseases of our own hearts and of our social system, if but slightly healed, will break forth again; moral corruption will set in again like a flood-tide; the noble watchwords of to-day will become the rotten and wretched Shibboleths of to-morrow ”

“ I care little that men accuse me, as you say, of mere sentiment, and of carrying away my hearers by feeling rather than by facts and logic. Even while they are saying this they read my words, and they are made uncomfortable! They feel that there is a truth of some sort there, and that sentiment itself is after all a fact and a power when it expresses the deepest intuitions of the human soul. ”

“ I look back to the years when my soul was in darkness on account of sin—the sin, the misery and the waste which are in the world, the great and sad problems of life, the prosperity of evil-doers, the innocent suffering for the guilty, the cruelties, the wrongs inflicted and never redressed, and the multitudes who seem to be created only to be lost. ”

“ But often my letters will be about trifling matters, so that you may be tempted to say, ‘Why write at all?’ Yet, after all, life is largely made up of trifles. Moreover, I do not wish to invest myself in borrowed plumes. I do not want you to find out later that I am much like other people, perhaps even more commonplace than most. I would rather your eyes were opened at once. I cannot reproach myself with ever having assumed a character not my own to you or to anyone. Such impostures are always too deeply purchased by the loss of self-respect. ”

“ We praise, we thank Him for what He has done already for us, and for what He is going to do, for we shall one day have a complete victory. We can echo the words of that which is written: “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour, for He hath regarded the low estate of His handmaidens.” And remember, women, if we are faithful unto death, from henceforth all men shall call us blessed. Yes, generations to come, your children and your children’s children will call you blessed, because you have laboured for purer morals and for juster laws. ”