Mrs. H. W. Beecher

“ In that golden age there shall be research made for all the names that, since the world began, have wrought and suffered for the good of their kind. There will be a memorable resurrection of forgotten names. From the obscurity into which despotism has flung all who dared to defy it, from the shades and darkness of oblivion by which oppressors would cover down the memory of all who proclaimed human right and human liberty, they will come forth shining like the sun, and none be forgotten that labored to bring to pass the world’s freedom! ”

“ I stood in the crowded lecture-room as on the night when the current of religious feeling first was beginning to flow! Talk of a young mother’s feelings over her first babe—what is that compared with the solemnity, the enthusiasm, the impetuosity of gratitude, of humility, of singing gladness, with which a young pastor greets the incoming of his first revival? He stands upon the shore to see the tide come in! It is the movement of the infinite, ethereal tide! It is from the other world! There is no color like heart color. ”

“ Three weeks ago a foreigner, beholding the superlative excitement of the whole community, East, North, West, and South, would have thought that there could never be peace more. Newspapers flew like unquenchable arrows every whither, business was almost forgotten, the streets were crowded processions, meetings were convoked, and men of every profession, arguing, appealing, inflamed the people. Friends let go each other’s hands, families were divided for a time. Words ran high, every truth was carried to the utmost limit of violence. ”

“ Let the American flag be lifted up by Mr. Lincoln, as was the brazen serpent, and let it be known that every man who looks upon it on this continent shall be free, and a tide of joy and irresistible enthusiasm will sweep away every obstacle. Let Mr. Lincoln decree it. The nation will do it!
“Such a policy would carry the conscience of the North; would kindle the enthusiasm for liberty, which is always the most potent of influences; would bring all the historic traditions of the old American struggle to enkindle the ardor of the young, who are to form our armies. ”

“ To keep this law you must not shelter a slave mother fleeing to her free husband in the North, nor a slave girl whose foot bounds at the sound of a pursuer, as if it were the knell of virtue. You must not give direction to a fugitive, though his head be white and his old limbs reveal half a century of unrequited toil; though a man say to you, in the awful agony of his soul, ‘Kill me, but for the love of God do not betray me!’ the law enjoins you to go with the officer, if he summon you, and help in his arrest! ”

“ His heart, trained in life to play with jets, like an artificial fountain, seems, as he wanders along the streams, to resume its own liberty, and, like a meadow-brook, to wind and turn, amid flowers and fringing shrubs, at its own unmolested pleasure.
“Care and trouble, in ordinary life, and especially in cities, disturb the fountains of feeling, as rubbish fallen into the fountains of ruined cities in the East chokes them, or splits and scatters their streams through all secret channels. ”

“ But then an unusual thump on the pulpit Bible, and the ring and roar of a voice under full excitement, that went on swelling like a trumpet, and that no one, not the most listless, could hear without catching its excitement, waked us, blushing and confused that we had been asleep in church! Even on the serene and marble face of mother the faint suggestion of a smile came, as we clutched our hat, supposing meeting to be over, and then sheepishly dropped it and sank back in dismay. But even Sunday cannot hold out for ever, and meetings have to let out sometime! ”

“ Let me see one who has wrought through life; let me see a great nature that has gone through sorrows, through fire, through the flood, through the thunder of battle, ripening, sweetening, enlarging, and growing finer and finer, and gentler and gentler, that fineness and gentleness being the result of great strength and great knowledge accumulated through a long life—let me see such a one stand at the end of life, as the sun stands on a summer afternoon just before it goes down. ”

“ What does a man cost that is a slave? Just a little meal and a little pork, a small measure of the coarsest cloth and leather—that is all he costs. Because that is all he needs—the lowest fare and the scantiest clothing. He is a man with two hands, and two feet, and a belly. That is all there is of a profitable slave. But every new development within him which religion shall make—the sense of fatherhood, the wish for a home, the desire to rear his children well, the wish to honor and comfort his wife, every taste, every sentiment, every aspiration—will demand some external thing to satisfy it. ”

“ We will have one Constitution and one liberty, and that universal.’ The Atlantic shall sound it and the Pacific shall echo it back, deep answering to deep, 327and it shall reverberate from the Lakes on the North to the unfrozen Gulf on the South—‘One nation, one Constitution, one starry banner!’ Hear it, England!—one country, and indivisible. Hear it, Europe!—one people, and inseparable. One God; one hope; one baptism; one Constitution; one government; one nation; one country; one people—cost what it may, we will have it! ”

“ Faith without works and prayer without works are dead—stone-dead. Let the emigrants go hither and thither by hundreds, and pray as they go! Let them that have money now pour it out, and pray as they give! Let them that have sons in Kansas send them arms, and pray that they may have no occasion to use them; but that, if they must be used, that the son may so wield them that the mother be not ashamed of the son whom she bore! Let them that have influence speak out! Let ministers and Christian free men now, if ever, speak against barbarism and uphold the whole retinue of Christian institutions! ”

“ Then, holy and loving thoughts toward God or toward man seemed to me to be as beautiful as those fleecy islets along the west at sunset, crowned with glory; and the gentler aspirations for goodness and nobleness and knowledge seemed to me like silver mists through which the morning is striking, wafting them gently and in wreaths and films heavenward. Great deeds, heroism for worthy objects, for God, or for one’s fellows, or for one’s own purity, seemed not only natural but as things without which a soul could not live. ”

“ I cared little, and perhaps too little, whether I had or had not a church building. I thought of one thing—the love of Christ to men. This, to me, was a burning reality. Less clearly than now, perhaps, did I discern the whole circuit and orb of the nature of Christ; but with a burning intensity I realized the love of God in Jesus Christ. I believed it to be the one transcendent influence in this world by which men should be roused to a higher manhood and should be translated into another and better kingdom. ”

“ I have heard the voice of my Master, saying, ‘If any man come unto Me and hate not father, and mother, and brother, and sister, yea, and his own life also, he is not worthy of Me.’ When, therefore, the cause of truth and justice is put in the scale against my own country, I would disown country for the sake of truth; and when the cause of truth and justice is put in the scale against Great Britain, I would disown her rather than betray what I understood to be the truth. We are bound to establish liberty, regulated Christian liberty, as the law of the American Continent. ”

“ It was the uttermost of joy: it was the uttermost of sorrow—noon and midnight, without a space between.
“The blow brought not a sharp pang. It was so terrible that at first it stunned sensibility. Citizens were like men awakened at midnight by an earthquake, and bewildered to find everything that they were accustomed to trust wavering and falling. The very earth was no longer solid. The first feeling was the least. Men waited to get straight to feel. They wandered in the streets as if groping after some impending dread, or undeveloped sorrow, or some one to tell them what ailed them. ”

“ You yourself know the way and the power of prayer. God has been your refuge in many sorrows before. He will now hide you in His pavilion until the storm be overpast. The rain that beats down the flower to the earth shall pass at length, and the stem bent but not broken will rise again and blossom as before. Every pure woman on earth will feel that this wanton and unprovoked assault is aimed at you, but reaches to universal womanhood. Meantime your dear children will love you with double tenderness, and Theodore, at whom the shafts are hurled, will hide you in his heart of hearts. ”

“ Let every man firmly and openly take sides. This vibrating between humanity for the fugitive and conscience for the law, this clandestine humanity in spite of law, to which the lips only give a sullen and pouting obedience, is not consistent with sincerity and open-hearted integrity. We adjure every Christian man, every man to whom conscience is more than meat, and honor better than thrift, to stand forth and enunciate the invincible truth of the Christian’s creed: Obedience to laws, even though they sin against me: disobedience to every law that commands me to sin. ”

“ What is religion worth to a slave, except as a consolation from despair when the hand that breaks to him the bread of communion on Sunday takes the price of his blood and bones on Monday, and bids him God-speed on his pilgrimage from old Virginia tobacco-fields to the cotton-plantations of Alabama?
“What is church fellowship, and church privilege, and church instruction worth if the recipient is still as much a beast, just as little loved, just as ruthlessly desolated of his family, just as coolly sold, as if he were without God and without hope? ”

“ God is my witness that with singleness of heart I have given all my time, strength, and service to that which shall make our whole nation truly prosperous and glorious. Not by the lustre of arms, even in a just cause, would I seek her glory, but by a civilization that should carry its blessings down to the lowest classes, and nourish the very roots of society by her moral power and purity, by her public conscience, her political justice, and by her intelligent homes, filling up a continent and rearing a virtuous and noble citizenship. ”

“ With cheek still ruddy with youth, with eyes from which the laughter never died out except when the tears of sympathy filled them or the deep things of God veiled them, with a heart that was in sympathy with all nature round him, and which nature and He who is above nature fed with perennial freshness, with a voice that could interpret every emotion, with that excellent health that makes the body a perfect channel of expression for the mind and a complete instrument for its service, he stands like a David just come from his sheepfolds, free, unencumbered, and singing as he strikes. ”

“ We are not authorized to inflict vengeance. ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore, if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink; for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.’ About the use of every single sword and spear and ball needful to assert a divine principle there should be no squeamishness. I am for war just so far as it is necessary to vindicate a great moral truth. But one particle of violence beyond that is a flagrant treason against the law of love. ”

“ Our policy for the future is plain. All the natural laws of God are warring upon slavery. We have only to let the process go on. Let slavery alone. Let it go to seed. Hold it to its own natural fruit. Cause it to abide by itself. Cut off every branch that hangs beyond the wall, every root that spreads. Shut it up to itself and let it alone. We do not ask to interfere with the internal policy of a single State by Congressional enactments: we will not ask to take one guarantee from the institution. ”

“ The next time the masses, the religious-minded men of the then undivided North, are aroused, standing on no flimsy base of compromise but on the solid foundations of humanity, of natural feeling, of a Northern national feeling springing from a love of liberty, they will not be put to sleep again by any mere pretences of peace. The finality which the South gave was a hollow truce but to give them time to forge their arms and grind their swords. They bribed the North with a lie. The next time the North reaches forth her hand it will scarcely be for gold or silver. ”

“ Two columns of argument and appeal for more genuine enthusiasm for the great doctrines on which this government was founded close with a prayer, the only relief of a heart bursting with a mighty passion of sorrow and impatience:
“Great God, what a people hast Thou brought forth upon this continent! What love of liberty; what heroic love of law and institution; what courage, and constancy, and self-sacrifice hast Thou given them! And no man is found to lead this so great a nation! Be Thou Leader! Lord God of Hosts, hast Thou forgotten how to lead a people? ”

“ No man has spoken of Great Britain words of praise and blame with more honest heart than I have. That man is not your friend who dares not speak of your faults to your face. The man that is your friend, tells you when he thinks you are wrong; and whether I am right or wrong, I assert that in giving moral sympathy largely to the South, and, above all, in allowing the infamous traffic of your ports with the rebels, thus strengthening the hands of the slaveholders—and that without public rebuke—you have done wrong. ”

“ I feel lifted up to a sovereign height of inspiration when I conceive of the majesty of these treasures, effluent from the heart of God, which He is seeking to embody in our time, in our earth, in this nation. Therefore, when I see justice put down I feel like a lion. When I see a great moral principle overborne there are no bounds to my indignation. When I see a great humanity trodden under foot I long to be a champion for it. ”