Among the Abolitionists of Pennsylvania no man stands higher than Dr.
Furness; and no anti-slavery minister enjoys more universal respect. For
more than thirty years he bore faithful witness for the black man; in
season and out of season contending for his rights. When others deserted
the cause he stood firm; when associates in the ministry were silent he
spoke out. They defined their position by declaring themselves "as much
opposed to slavery as ever, but without sympathy for the abolitionists."
He defined his by showing himself more opposed to slavery than ever, and
fraternizing with the most hated and despised anti-slavery people.
Dr. Furness came into the cause when it was in its infancy, and had few
adherents. From that time till the day of its triumph he was one with
it, sharing in all its trials and vicissitudes. In the operations of the
Vigilance Committee he took the liveliest interest. Though not in form a
member he was one of its chief co-laborers. He brought it material aid
continually, and was one of its main reliances for outside support. His
quick sympathies were easily touched and when touched were sure to
prompt him to corresponding action. He would listen with moistened eyes
to a tale of outrage, and go away saying never a word. But the story of
wrong would work upon him; and through him upon others. His own feelings
were communicated to his friends, and his friends would send gifts to
the Committee's treasury. A wider spread sympathy would manifest itself
in the community, and the general interests of the cause be visibly
promoted. It was in the latter respect, that of moral co-operation, that
Dr. Furness's services were most valuable. After hearing a harrowing
recital, whether he would or not, it became the burden of his next
Sunday's sermon. Abundant proof of this may be found in his printed
discourses. Take the following as an illustration. It is an extract from
a sermon delivered on the 29th of May, 1854, a period when the slave
oligarchy was at the height of its power and was supported at the North
by the most violent demonstrations of sympathy. The text was, "Feed my
Lambs:"
"And now brothers, sisters, children, give me your hearts,
listen with a will to what I have to say. As heaven is my
witness, I would not utter one word save for the dear love of
Christ and of God, and the salvation of your own souls. Does it
require any violent effort of the mind to suppose Christ to
address each one of us personally the same question that He put
to Peter, 'Lovest thou me?' * * * And at the hearing of His
brief command, 'Feed my lambs,' so simple, so direct, so
unqualified, are we prompted like the teacher of the law who,
when Christ bade him love his neighbor as himself, asked, 'And
who is my neighbor?' and in the parable of the good Samaritan,
received an answer that the Samaritans whom he despised, just as
we despise the African, was his neighbor, are we prompted in
like manner to ask, 'Who are the lambs of Christ?' Who are His
lambs? Behold that great multitude, more than three millions of
men and feeble women and children, wandering on our soil; no not
wandering, but chained down, not allowed to stir a step at their
own free will, crushed and hunted with all the power of one of
the mightiest nations that the world has yet seen, wielded to
keep them down in the depths of the deepest degradation into
which human beings can be plunged. These, then that we despise,
are our neighbors, the poor, stricken lambs of Christ.
To cast one thought towards them, may well cause us to bow down
our heads in the very dust with shame. No wonder that professing
to love Christ and his religion, we do not like to hear them
spoken of; for so far from feeding the lambs of Christ, we are
exciting the whole associated power of this land, to keep them
from being fed. 'Feed my lambs,' We might feed them with
fraternal sympathy, with hope, with freedom, the imperishable
bread of Heaven. We might lead them into green pastures and
still waters, into the glorious liberty wherewith Christ died to
make all men free, the liberty of the children of God. We might
secure to them the exercise of every sacred affection and
faculty, wherewith the Creator has endowed them. But we do none
of those things. We suffer this great flock of the Lord Jesus to
be treated as chattels, bought and sold, like beasts of burden,
hunted and lacerated by dogs and wolves. I say we, we of these
Free Northern communities, because it is by our allowance,
signified as effectually by silence, as by active co-operation,
that such things are. They could continue so, scarcely an hour,
were not the whole moral, religious and physical power of the
North pledged to their support. Are we not in closest league and
union with those who claim and use the right to buy and sell
human beings, God's poor, the lambs of Christ, a union, which we
imagine brings us in as much silver and gold as compensates for
the sacrifice of our humanity and manhood? Nay, are we not under
a law to do the base work of bloodhounds, hunting the panting
fugitives for freedom? I utter no word of denunciation. There is
no need. For facts that have occurred only within the last week,
transcend all denunciation. Only a few hours ago, there was a
man with his two sons, hurried back into the inhuman bondage,
from which they had just escaped, and that man, the brother, and
those two sons, the nephews of a colored clergyman of New York,
of such eminence in the New School Presbyterian Church, that he
has received the honors of a European University, and has acted
as Moderator in one of the Presbyteries of the same Church, when
held in the city where he resides. Almost at the very moment the
poor fugitive with his children, were dragged through our city,
the General Assembly of that very branch of the Presbyterian
Church, now in session here, after discussing for days the
validity of Roman Catholic baptism, threw out as inexpedient to
be discussed, the subject of that great wrong which was flinging
back into the agony of Slavery, a brother of one of their own
ordained ministers, and could not so much as breathe a word of
condemnation against the false and cruel deed which has just
been consummated at the capitol of the nation.
When such facts are occurring in the midst of us, we cannot be
guiltless concerning the lambs of Christ. It is we, we who make
up the public opinion of the North, we who consent that these
free States shall be the hunting-ground, where these, our poor
brothers and sisters, are the game; it is we that withhold from
them the bread of life, the inalienable rights of man. As we
withhold these blessings, so is it in our power to bestow them.
The sheep then that Christ commands us, as we love Him, to feed,
are those who are famishing for the lack of the food which it is
in our power to supply. And we can help to feed and relieve and
liberate them, by giving our hearty sympathy to the blessed
cause of their emancipation, to the abolition of the crying
injustice with which they are treated, by uttering our earnest
protest against the increasing and flagrant outrages of the
oppressor, by withholding all aid and countenance from the work
of oppression."
To say that Dr. Furness, in his pleadings for the slave, was "instant in
season and out of season," is not to exaggerate. So palpably was this
true, that even some of his sympathizing friends intimated to him, that
his zeal carried him beyond proper bounds, and that his discourses were
needlessly reiterative. To these friends,--who, it is needless to say,
did not fully comprehend the breadth and bearing of the question,--he
would reply as he did in the following extract from a sermon delivered
soon after the one above quoted:
"Again and again, I have had it said to me, with apparently the
most perfect simplicity, 'Why do you keep saying so much about
the slaves? Do you imagine that there is one among your hearers
who does not agree with you? We all know that Slavery is very
wrong. What, is the use of harping upon this subject Sunday
after Sunday? We all feel about it just as you do.' 'Feel about
it just as I do,' Very likely, my friends. It is very possible
that you all feel as much, and that many of you feel about it
more than I do. God knows that my regret always has been not
that I feel so much, but that I do not feel more. Would to
Heaven that neither you nor I could eat or sleep for pity, pity
for our poor down-trodden brothers and sisters. But the thing to
which I implore your attention now, is, not what we know and
feel, but the delusion which we are under, in confounding
_knowing_ with _doing_, in fancying that we are working to
abolish Slavery because we know that it is wrong. This is what I
would have you now to consider, the deception that we practise
on ourselves, the dangerous error into which we fall, when we
pass off the knowledge of our duty for the performance of it.
These are two very distinct things. If you know what is right,
happy are ye if ye do it.
Observe, my friends, what it is to which I am now entreating
your consideration. It is not the wrongs nor the rights of the
oppressed upon which I am now discoursing. It is our own
personal exposure to a most serious mistake. It is a danger,
which threatens our own souls, to which I would that our eyes
should be open and on the watch.
And here, by the way, let me say that one great reason why I
refer as often as I do, to that great topic of the day, which,
in one shape or another, is continually shaking the land and
marking the age in which we live, is not merely the righting of
the wronged, but the instruction, the moral enlightenment, the
religious edification of our own hearts, which this momentous
topic affords. To me this subject involves infinitely more than
a mere question of humanity. Its political bearing is the very
least and most superficial part of it, scarcely worth noticing
in comparison with its moral and religious relations. Once,
deterred by its outside, political aspect, I shunned it as many
do still, but the more it has pressed itself on my attention,
the more I have considered it--the more and more manifest has it
become to me, that it is a subject full of light and of
guidance, of warning and inspiration for the individual soul. It
is the most powerful means of grace and salvation appointed in
the providence of Heaven, for the present day and generation,
more religious than churches and Sabbaths. It is full of
sermons. It is a perfect gospel, a whole Bible of
mind-enlightening, heart-cleansing, soul-saving truth. How much
light has it thrown for me on the page of the New Testament!
What a profound significance has it disclosed in the precepts
and parables of Jesus Christ! How do His words burst out with a
new meaning! How does it help us to appreciate His trials and
the Godlike spirit with which He bore them!"
The dark winter of 1860 broke gloomily over all abolitionists; perhaps
upon none did it press more heavily, than upon the small band in
Philadelphia. Situated as that city is, upon the very edge of Slavery,
and socially bound as it was, by ties of blood or affinity with the
slave-holders of the South, to all human foresight it would assuredly be
the first theatre of bloodshed in the coming deadly struggle. As Dr.
Furness said in his sermon on old John Brown: "Out of the grim cloud
that hangs over the South, a bolt has darted, and blood has flowed, and
the place where the lightning struck, is wild with fear." The return
stroke we all felt must soon follow, and Philadelphia, we feared, would
be selected as the spot where Slavery would make its first mortal
onslaught, and the abolitionists there, the first victims. Dr. Furness
had taken part in the public meeting held on the day of John Brown's
execution, to offer prayers for the heroic soul that was then passing
away, and had gone with two or three others, to the rail-road station,
to receive the martyr's body, when it was brought from the gallows by
Mr. (afterwards General) Tyndale and Mr. McKim, and it was generally
feared that he and his church would receive the brunt of Slavery's first
blow. The air was thick with vague apprehension and rumor, so much so,
that some of Dr. Furness's devoted parishioners, who followed his
abolitionism but not his non-resistance, came armed to church, uncertain
what an hour might bring forth, or in what shape of mob violence or
assassination the blow would fall. Few of Dr. Furness's hearers will
forget his sermon of December 16, 1860, so full was it of prophetic
warning, and saddened by the thought of the fate which might be in store
for him and his congregation. It was printed in the "Evening Bulletin,"
and made a deep impression on the public outside of his own church, and
was reprinted in full, in the Boston "Atlas."
"But the trouble cannot be escaped. It must come. But we can put
it off. By annihilating free speech; by forbidding the utterance
of a word in the pulpit and by the press, for the rights of man;
by hurling back into the jaws of oppression, the fugitive
gasping for his sacred liberty; by recognizing the right of one
man to buy and sell other men; by spreading the blasting curse
of despotism over the whole soil of the nation, you may allay
the brutal frenzy of a handful of southern slave-masters; you
may win back the cotton States to cease from threatening you
with secession, and to plant their feet upon your necks, and so
evade the trouble that now menaces us. Then you may live on the
few years that are left you, and perhaps--it is not certain--we
may be permitted to make a little more money and die in our
beds. But no, friends, I am mistaken. We cannot put the trouble
off. Or, we put it off in its present shape, only that it may
take another and more terrible form. If, to get rid of the
present alarm, we concede all that makes it worth while to
live--and nothing less will avail--perhaps those who can
deliberately make such a concession, will not feel the
degradation, but, stripped of all honor and manhood, they may
eat as heartily and sleep as soundly as ever. But the
degradation is not the less, but the greater, for our
unconsciousness of it. The trouble which we shall then bring
upon ourselves, is a trouble in comparison with which the loss
of all things but honor is a glorious gain, and a violent death
for right's sake on the scaffold, or by the hands of a mob,
peace and joy and victory.
Since we are thus placed, and there is no alternative for us of
the free States, but to meet the trouble that is upon us, or by
base concessions and compromises to bring upon ourselves a far
greater trouble, in the name of God, let us let all things go,
and cleave to the right. Prepared to confront the crisis like
men, let us with all possible calmness endeavor to take the
measure of the calamity that we dread. God knows I have no
desire to make light of it. But I affirm, that never since the
world began, was there a grander cause for which to speak, to
suffer and to die, than the cause of these free States, as
against that of the States now rushing upon Secession. The great
grievance of which they complain, is nothing more nor less than
this: that we endanger the right they claim to treat human
beings as beasts of burden. And they maintain this monstrous
claim by measures inhuman and barbarous, listening not to the
voice of reason or humanity, but treating every man who goes
amongst them, suspected of not favoring their cause, or of the
remotest connection with others who do not favor it, with a most
savage and fiendish cruelty. It is the conflict between
barbarism and civilization, between liberty and the most
horrible despotism that ever cursed this earth, in which we are
called to take part.
And all that is great and noble in the past, all the patriots
and martyrs that have suffered in man's behalf, all the sacred
instincts and hopes of the human soul are on our side, and the
welfare of untold generations of men. Oh, if God, in his
infinite bounty, grants us the grace to appreciate the
transcendent worth of the cause which is now at stake, there is
no trouble that can befall us, no, not the loss of property, of
idolized parents or children, or life itself, that we shall not
count a blessed privilege. To serve this dear cause of peace and
liberty and love, we have no need to grasp the sword or any
instrument of violence and death. But we must be ready without
flinching, to confront the utmost that men can do, and amidst
all the uproar and violence of human passions, still calmly to
assert and to exercise our sacred and inalienable liberties, let
who will frown and forbid, assured that no just and
law-of-God-abiding people, will ever do otherwise than give us
their sympathy and their aid.
Death is the worst that can befall us, if so be that we are
faithful to the right. It is a solemn and a fearful thing to
die, and mortality shrinks from facing that last great mystery.
But we must all die, my friends, and the dying hour is not far
distant from the youngest of us. To most of us it is very near.
To many, only a few brief years remain. And for the sake of
these few and uncertain years, shall we push off this present
trouble upon our children, who have to stay here a little
longer? There is nothing that can so sweeten the bitter cup of
mortality when we shall be called to drink it, nothing that can
so cheer us in the prospect of parting from all we love, nothing
that can send such a blessed light on before us into the dark
valley which we must enter, as the consciousness of fidelity to
man and to God. And now in these times of great trouble which
have come upon us, we have a peculiar and special opportunity of
testifying our fidelity, and of enjoying a full experience of
its power to support us. We may gather from this trouble, a
sweetness that shall take away from all suffering its
bitterness. We may kindle that light in our bosoms, which shall
make death come to us as a radiant angel."
Four months after the above was uttered, on the 28th of April, 1861,
after the attack on Fort Sumter, and the whole North had burst into a
flame, people of all denominations flocked to Dr. Furness's church, as
to that church which had shown that it was founded on a rock, and none
can ever forget the long-drawn breath with which the sermon began: "The
long agony is over!" It was the _"Te Deum_" of a life-time.
Dr. Furness's words and counsels were not wanting throughout the war,
and his sermons were constantly printed in the daily press and in
separate pamphlet form. And since its close he has continued his
absorbing study of the historical accounts of Jesus.
Dr. Furncss was born in Boston, in April, 1802, and was graduated at
Harvard, in 1820, and five years later became the minister of the First
Congregational Unitarian Christians, in this city, and is consequently
the senior clergyman, here, on the score of length of pastorate.
Happy is the man, and enviable the gospel minister, who, looking back
upon his course in the great anti-slavery contest, can recall as the
chief charge brought against him, that of being over-zealous! That he
spoke too often and said too much in favor of the slave! There are but
few men, and still fewer ministers, who have a right to take comfort
from such recollections! and yet it is to this small class that the
cause is most indebted under God, for its triumph, and the country for
its deliverance from Slavery.