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Said the ancestors of this man two centuries ago to the Long Parliament, "If you want your laws obeyed, make them fit to be obeyed, and if not- Cromwell," and the devilism of England heard and trembled. Their child of to-day has but sounded forth the same idea, and the devilism of America trembles likewise.

It is fitting that he should die. He has done enough, and borne enough. One such example of self-forgetting heroism, sanctified by such tenderness and faith, meeting the eye and filling the heart of the civilized world, spreading its noble inspiration far and wide through a continent, quickening the pulses of heroism in a million souls, is God's prime benefaction to our time—the immortal fire that keeps humanity's highest hopes aflame.

To lift a nation out of the ignoble rut of money-making, stagnation, and moral decay, Freedom has offered the blood of her noblest son, and the result is worth a thousand times the costly price.

On the second day of December he is to be strangled in a Southern prison, for obeying the Sermon on the Mount. But to be hanged in Virginia is like being crucified in Jerusalem it is the last tribute which sin pays to virtue.

John Brown realized the New Testament. He felt that he owed the same duty to the black man on the plains of Virginia that he did to his blood brother. This was his insanity.

He does not belong to this age; he reaches back to the first three centuries of the Christian Church, when it was a proverb among the followers of Jesus, "No good Christian dies in his bed." Their fanaticism was his fanaticism. Hear his words to the slave court which tried him for his life, without giving him time to obtain counsel whom he could trust, and while he was partially deaf from his wounds, and unable to stand on his feet: "Had I interfered in this manner in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father,

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mother, wife, or child, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this enterprise, it would have been all right. Every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward. This court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed, which I suppose to be the Bible, which teaches me that 'all things whatsoever that men should do to me, I should do even so to them.' It teaches me farther to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.' I tried to act up to that instruction. I say that I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to interfere as I have done in behalf of his despised poor, I did no wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life, and mingle my blood with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave land, whose rights are disregarded by wicked laws, I say, let it be done." Ah, friends, how near is that land to moral ruin where such men are counted "mad"! Virginia that day doomed to death her best friend- he who would have saved her from falling some day by the hands she has manacled.

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"I know full well that were I a slave and miserable, forbidden to call my wife, my child, my right arm, my own soul, my own, liable to be chained, and whipped, and sold, the voice that should speak Freedom to me would be holier in its accents than the music of hymn and cathedral as sacred as the voice of an angel descending from God.

"In the eye that should be turned on me with rescue and help, a light would beam before which the shine of the sun would grow dim.

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The hand that should be stretched out to smite off my chains, it would thrill me like the touch of Christ. In his most blessed name, what on earth have his followers to do, what are they here for, if not to fly to the help of the oppressed, to maintain the holy cause of human freedom, and to stand out the unyielding opponents of outrage and wrong?"

And this, my friends, is the sacred, the radiant "Treason of John Brown. God bless him and all such traitors, say I, and let the Great North respond Amen.

The State that has parted with the bones of the dead Washington, and that has, long since, parted with the last shred of his principles, may now fittingly put the living Washington to death; but after all, it is but little that the rage of man can do.

There is One above greater than Virginia; and across the obscene roar of the slave power comes His voice, sounding in the ears of that scarred and manacled old man, "Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye did it unto me." And again, "He that loseth his life for my sake, shall find it again."

Yet a few days, and the bells of New England will toll for her departed hero; not slain, but made immortal.

He goes to the Puritan heaven of his free forefathers. He leaves with us two sacred trusts; his inspired example, preaching to all, "Go thou and do likewise;" and the bereaved families, whose husbands and fathers have fallen while fighting our battle.

God help us to be faithful to these trusts, and to be true to John Brown's life and example.

Ele Meelock

THEC

IV.

SERMON BY FALES HENRY NEWHALL.*

THE execution of John Brown sets forth in bold, clear relief the mortal conflict between Christianity and American Slavery. The smouldering fires carefully trodden down for years and generations, here burst forth in a volcanic blaze, that rises as if to "lick the stars." There is a shaking of statesmen and States over all the nation, a throbbing of telegraphic wires from centre to circumference, a swaying to and fro of vast populations, a rushing of armed squadrons along the national highways, and all to tread down that flame that comes roaring "up from the burning core below." Christianity and Slavery have been trying to live together in America. Churchmen and Statesmen, Synods and Conferences, Tract Societies and Missionary Societies, (alas! that a Christian and Christian minister should be forced to speak the humiliating words!) have striven to train them into brotherly harmony. It is as if men should strive to build a house of gunpowder upon a foundation of fire; as if they should strive to train the lightnings to sport harmlessly in a magazine. To understand this event, and rightly read its

* Entitled "The Conflict in America: a Funeral Discourse occasioned by the Death of John Brown of Osawatomie, who entered into Rest from the Gallows, at Charlestown, Virginia, December 2, 1859: " preached at the Warren Street Methodist Epis copal Church, Roxbury, Massachusetts, December 4, 1859, from Judges xvi, 30:

"And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life."

lessons, we must understand this conflict in all its fierceness and magnitude. Here is a simple, faithful, heroic Christian man drawing the sword upon American Slavery, and cheerfully dying in the conflict. Christianity and Slavery, these two sworn eternal foes, are drawn up face to face in this land in battle array; and the campaign is one in which the one or the other is certain to perish. John Brown has fallen in the

fight; no man can understand why he fell, who does not understand what that enemy is against whom he drew the sword, and what that Christianity is which nerved his heart. Let us look, for a few moments, at that enemy.

We talk much of Slavery, and think we understand it; yet though the word is in every body's mouth, not one man in a thousand reflects what it really is. It is not a sectional institution now, it is a national institution. Within a few years it has been made the sin of the nation, by the combined action of the three great departments of the United States Government, the National Congress, Executive, and Judiciary. President Buchanan claims it as a national institution, and coolly wonders how any body ever doubted it. The Supreme Court has officiously volunteered its decision that we, citizens of Massachusetts, are not merely connected with slaveholding States by the Federal Union, but we are citizens of a slaveholding nation. I am not, then, speaking to you of the sins of Carolina and Mississippi, but as an American citizen I speak of the sins for which you and I are responsible, and for which you and I must answer, as sure as there is a God in heaven. I shall not dress the subject in any colors of rhetoric; Slavery is seen best in naked ugliness. Take a bare, dry schedule of what the slave code demands of the slave and allows the master; of what it must demand and allow in order to live a day.

1. Now the kernel of Slavery is in three words, — Property in Man. Admit that it is ever right for one man to own another, and all the barbarities of the most atrocious slave

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