are all settled comfortably into our winter places, with our winter
surroundings and belongings; all cracks and openings are calked and
listed, the double windows are in, the furnace dragon in the cellar is
ruddy and in good liking, sending up his warming respirations through
every pipe and register in the house; and yet, though an artificial
summer reigns everywhere, like bees, we have our swarming-place,--in my
library. There is my chimney-corner, and my table permanently
established on one side of the hearth; and each of the female genus has,
so to speak, pitched her own winter-tent within sight of the blaze of my
camp-fire. I discerned to-day that Jennie had surreptitiously
appropriated one of the drawers of my study-table to knitting-needles
and worsted; and wicker work-baskets and stands of various heights and
sizes seem to be planted here and there for permanence among the
bookcases. The canary-bird has a sunny window, and the plants spread out
their leaves and unfold their blossoms as if there were no ice and snow
in the street, and Rover makes a hearth-rug of himself in winking
satisfaction in front of my fire, except when Jennie is taken with a fit
of discipline, when he beats a retreat, and secretes himself under my
table.
Peaceable, ah, how peaceable, home and quiet and warmth in winter! And
how, when we hear the wind whistle, we think of you, O our brave
brothers, our saviors and defenders, who for our sake have no home but
the muddy camp, the hard pillow of the barrack, the weary march, the
uncertain fare,--you, the rank and file, the thousand unnoticed ones,
who have left warm fires, dear wives, loving little children, without
even the hope of glory or fame,--without even the hope of doing anything
remarkable or perceptible for the cause you love,--resigned only to fill
the ditch or bridge the chasm over which your country shall walk to
peace and joy! Good men and true, brave unknown hearts, we salute you,
and feel that we, in our soft peace and security, are not worthy of you!
When we think of you, our simple comforts seem luxuries all too good for
us, who give so little when you give all!
But there are others to whom from our bright homes, our cheerful
firesides, we would fain say a word, if we dared.
Think of a mother receiving a letter with such a passage as this in it!
It is extracted from one we have just seen, written by a private in the
army of Sheridan, describing the death of a private. "He fell instantly,
gave a peculiar smile and look, and then closed his eyes. We laid him
down gently at the foot of a large tree. I crossed his hands over his
breast, closed his eyelids down, but the smile was still on his face. I
wrapt him in his tent, spread my pocket-handkerchief over his face,
wrote his name on a piece of paper, and pinned it on his breast, and
there we left him: we could not find pick or shovel to dig a grave."
There it is!--a history that is multiplying itself by hundreds daily,
the substance of what has come to so many homes, and must come to so
many more before the great price of our ransom is paid!
What can we say to you, in those many, many homes where the light has
gone out forever?--you, O fathers, mothers, wives, sisters, haunted by a
name that has ceased to be spoken on earth,--you, for whom there is no
more news from the camp, no more reading of lists, no more tracing of
maps, no more letters, but only a blank, dead silence! The battle-cry
goes on, but for you it is passed by! the victory comes, but, oh, never
more to bring him back to you! your offering to this great cause has
been made, and been taken; you have thrown into it _all_ your living,
even all that you had, and from henceforth your house is left unto you
desolate! O ye watchers of the cross, ye waiters by the sepulchre, what
can be said to you? We could almost extinguish our own home-fires, that
seem too bright when we think of your darkness; the laugh dies on our
lip, the lamp burns dim through our tears, and we seem scarcely worthy
to speak words of comfort, lest we seem as those who mock a grief they
cannot know.
But is there no consolation? Is it nothing to have had such a treasure
to give, and to have given it freely for the noblest cause for which
ever battle was set,--for the salvation of your country, for the freedom
of all mankind? Had he died a fruitless death, in the track of common
life, blasted by fever, smitten or rent by crushing accident, then might
his most precious life seem to be as water spilled upon the ground; but
now it has been given for a cause and a purpose worthy even the anguish
of your loss and sacrifice. He has been counted worthy to be numbered
with those who stood with precious incense between the living and the
dead, that the plague which was consuming us might be stayed. The blood
of these young martyrs shall be the seed of the future church of
liberty, and from every drop shall spring up flowers of healing. O
widow! O mother! blessed among bereaved women! there remains to you a
treasure that belongs not to those who have lost in any other wise,--the
power to say, "He died for his country." In all the good that comes of
this anguish you shall have a right and share by virtue of this
sacrifice. The joy of freedmen bursting from chains, the glory of a
nation new-born, the assurance of a triumphant future for your country
and the world,--all these become yours by the purchase-money of that
precious blood.
Besides this, there are other treasures that come through sorrow, and
sorrow alone. There are celestial plants of root so long and so deep
that the land must be torn and furrowed, ploughed up from the very
foundation, before they can strike and flourish; and when we see how
God's plough is driving backward and forward and across this nation,
rending, tearing up tender shoots, and burying soft wild-flowers, we ask
ourselves, What is He going to plant?
Not the first year, nor the second, after the ground has been broken up,
does the purpose of the husbandman appear. At first we see only what is
uprooted and ploughed in,--the daisy drabbled, and the violet
crushed,--and the first trees planted amid the unsightly furrows stand
dumb and disconsolate, irresolute in leaf, and without flower or fruit.
Their work is under the ground. In darkness and silence they are
putting forth long fibres, searching hither and thither under the black
soil for the strength that years hence shall burst into bloom and
bearing.
What is true of nations is true of individuals. It may seem now winter
and desolation with you. Your hearts have been ploughed and harrowed and
are now frozen up. There is not a flower left, not a blade of grass, not
a bird to sing,--and it is hard to believe that any brighter flowers,
any greener herbage, shall spring up than those which have been torn
away; and yet there will. Nature herself teaches you to-day. Out-doors
nothing but bare branches and shrouding snow; and yet you know that
there is not a tree that is not patiently holding out at the end of its
boughs next year's buds, frozen indeed, but unkilled. The rhododendron
and the lilac have their blossoms all ready, wrapped in cere-cloth,
waiting in patient faith. Under the frozen ground the crocus and the
hyacinth and the tulip hide in their hearts the perfect forms of future
flowers. And it is even so with you: your leaf-buds of the future are
frozen, but not killed; the soil of your heart has many flowers under it
cold and still now, but they will yet come up and bloom.
The dear old book of comfort tells of no present healing for sorrow.
_No_ chastening for the present seemeth joyous, but grievous, but
_afterwards_ it yieldeth peaceable fruits of righteousness. We, as
individuals, as a nation, need to have faith in that AFTERWARDS. It is
sure to come,--sure as spring and summer to follow winter.
There is a certain amount of suffering which must follow the rending of
the great cords of life, suffering which is natural and inevitable; it
cannot be argued down; it cannot be stilled; it can no more be soothed
by any effort of faith and reason than the pain of a fractured limb, or
the agony of fire on the living flesh. All that we can do is to brace
ourselves to bear it, calling on God, as the martyrs did in the fire,
and resigning ourselves to let it burn on. We must be willing to suffer
since God so wills. There are just so many waves to go over us, just so
many arrows of stinging thought to be shot into our soul, just so many
faintings and sinkings and revivings only to suffer again, belonging to
and inherent in our portion of sorrow; and there is a work of healing
that God has placed in the hands of Time alone.
Time heals all things at last; yet it depends much on us in our
suffering, whether time shall send us forth healed, indeed, but maimed
and crippled and callous, or whether, looking to the great Physician of
sorrows, and coworking with him, we come forth stronger and fairer even
for our wounds.
We call ourselves a Christian people, and the peculiarity of
Christianity is that it is a worship and doctrine of sorrow. The five
wounds of Jesus, the instruments of the passion, the cross, the
sepulchre,--these are its emblems and watchwords. In thousands of
churches, amid gold and gems and altars fragrant with perfume, are seen
the crown of thorns, the nails, the spear, the cup of vinegar mingled
with gall, the sponge that could not slake that burning death-thirst;
and in a voice choked with anguish the Church in many lands and divers
tongues prays from age to age, "By thine agony and bloody sweat, by thy
cross and passion, by thy precious death and burial!"--mighty words of
comfort, whose meaning reveals itself only to souls fainting in the cold
death-sweat of mortal anguish! They tell all Christians that by
uttermost distress alone was the Captain of their salvation made perfect
as a Saviour.
Sorrow brings us into the true unity of the Church,--that unity which
underlies all external creeds, and unites all hearts that have suffered
deeply enough to know that when sorrow is at its utmost there is but one
kind of sorrow, and but one remedy. What matter, _in extremis_, whether
we be called Romanist, or Protestant, or Greek, or Calvinist?
We suffer, and Christ suffered; we die, and Christ died; he conquered
suffering and death, he rose and lives and reigns,--and we shall
conquer, rise, live, and reign. The hours on the cross were long, the
thirst was bitter, the darkness and horror real,--_but they ended_.
After the wail, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" came the calm, "It
is finished"; pledge to us all that our "It is finished" shall come
also.
Christ arose, fresh, joyous, no more to die; and it is written, that,
when the disciples were gathered together in fear and sorrow, he stood
in the midst of them, and showed unto them his hands and his side; and
then were they glad. Already had the healed wounds of Jesus become
pledges of consolation to innumerable thousands; and those who, like
Christ, have suffered the weary struggles, the dim horrors of the
cross,--who have lain, like him, cold and chilled in the hopeless
sepulchre,--if his spirit wakes them to life, shall come forth with
healing power for others who have suffered and are suffering.
Count the good and beautiful ministrations that have been wrought in
this world of need and labor, and how many of them have been wrought by
hands wounded and scarred, by hearts that had scarcely ceased to bleed!
How many priests of consolation is God now ordaining by the fiery
imposition of sorrow! how many Sisters of the Bleeding Heart, Daughters
of Mercy, Sisters of Charity, are receiving their first vocation in
tears and blood!
The report of every battle strikes into some home; and heads fall low,
and hearts are shattered, and only God sees the joy that is set before
them, and that shall come out of their sorrow. He sees our morning at
the same moment that He sees our night,--sees us comforted, healed,
risen to a higher life, at the same moment that He sees us crushed and
broken in the dust; and so, though tenderer than we, He bears our great
sorrows for the joy that is set before us.
After the Napoleonic wars had desolated Europe, the country was, like
all countries after war, full of shattered households, of widows and
orphans and homeless wanderers. A nobleman of Silesia, the Baron von
Kottwitz, who had lost his wife and all his family in the reverses and
sorrows of the times, found himself alone in the world, which looked
more dreary and miserable through the multiplying lenses of his own
tears. But he was one of those whose heart had been quickened in its
death anguish by the resurrection voice of Christ; and he came forth to
life and comfort. He bravely resolved to do all that one man could to
lessen the great sum of misery. He sold his estates in Silesia, bought
in Berlin a large building that had been used as barracks for the
soldiers, and, fitting it up in plain, commodious apartments, formed
there a great family-establishment, into which he received the wrecks
and fragments of families that had been broken up by the war,--orphan
children, widowed and helpless women, decrepit old people, disabled
soldiers. These he made his family, and constituted himself their father
and chief. He abode with them, and cared for them as a parent. He had
schools for the children; the more advanced he put to trades and
employments; he set up a hospital for the sick; and for all he had the
priestly ministrations of his own Christ-like heart. The celebrated
Professor Tholuck, one of the most learned men of modern Germany, was an
early _protégé_ of the old Baron's, who, discerning his talents, put him
in the way of a liberal education. In his earlier years, like many
others of the young who play with life, ignorant of its needs, Tholuck
piqued himself on a lordly scepticism with regard to the commonly
received Christianity, and even wrote an essay to prove the superiority
of the Mohammedan to the Christian religion. In speaking of his
conversion, he says,--"What moved me was no argument, nor any spoken
reproof, but simply that divine image of the old Baron walking before my
soul. That life was an argument always present to me, and which I never
could answer; and so I became a Christian." In the life of this man we
see the victory over sorrow. How many with means like his, when
desolated by like bereavements, have lain coldly and idly gazing on the
miseries of life, and weaving around themselves icy tissues of doubt
and despair,--doubting the being of a God, doubting the reality of a
Providence, doubting the divine love, imbittered and rebellious against
the power which they could not resist, yet to which they would not
submit! In such a chill heart-freeze lies the danger of sorrow. And it
is a mortal danger. It is a torpor that must be resisted, as the man in
the whirling snows must bestir himself, or he will perish. The apathy of
melancholy must be broken by an effort of religion and duty. The
stagnant blood must be made to flow by active work, and the cold hand
warmed by clasping the hands outstretched towards it in sympathy or
supplication. One orphan child taken in, to be fed, clothed, and
nurtured, may save a heart from freezing to death: and God knows this
war is making but too many orphans!
It is easy to subscribe to an orphan asylum, and go on in one's despair
and loneliness. Such ministries may do good to the children who are
thereby saved from the street, but they impart little warmth and comfort
to the giver. One destitute child housed, taught, cared for, and tended
personally, will bring more solace to a suffering heart than a dozen
maintained in an asylum. Not that the child will probably prove an
angel, or even an uncommonly interesting mortal. It is a prosaic work,
this bringing-up of children, and there can be little rosewater in it.
The child may not appreciate what is done for him, may not be
particularly grateful, may have disagreeable faults, and continue to
have them after much pains on your part to eradicate them,--and yet it
is a fact, that to redeem one human being from destitution and ruin,
even in some homely every-day course of ministrations, is one of the
best possible tonics and alternatives to a sick and wounded spirit.
But this is not the only avenue to beneficence which the war opens. We
need but name the service of hospitals, the care and education of the
freedmen,--for these are charities that have long been before the eyes
of the community, and have employed thousands of busy hands: thousands
of sick and dying beds to tend, a race to be educated, civilized, and
Christianized, surely were work enough for one age; and yet this is not
all. War shatters everything, and it is hard to say what in society will
not need rebuilding and binding up and strengthening anew. Not the least
of the evils of war are the vices which a great army engenders wherever
it moves,--vices peculiar to military life, as others are peculiar to
peace. The poor soldier perils for us not merely his body, but his soul.
He leads a life of harassing and exhausting toil and privation, of
violent strain on the nervous energies, alternating with sudden
collapse, creating a craving for stimulants, and endangering the
formation of fatal habits. What furies and harpies are those that follow
the army, and that seek out the soldier in his tent, far from home,
mother, wife, and sister, tired, disheartened, and tempt him to forget
his troubles in a momentary exhilaration, that burns only to chill and
to destroy! Evil angels are always active and indefatigable, and there
must be good angels enlisted to face them; and here is employment for
the slack hand of grief. Ah, we have known mothers bereft of sons in
this war, who have seemed at once to open wide their hearts, and to
become mothers to every brave soldier in the field. They have lived only
to work,--and in place of one lost, their sons have been counted by
thousands.
And not least of all the fields for exertion and Christian charity
opened by this war is that presented by womanhood. The war is
abstracting from the community its protecting and sheltering elements,
and leaving the helpless and dependent in vast disproportion. For years
to come, the average of lone women will be largely increased; and the
demand, always great, for some means by which they may provide for
themselves, in the rude jostle of the world, will become more urgent and
imperative.
Will any one sit pining away in inert grief, when two streets off are
the midnight dance-houses, where girls of twelve, thirteen, and
fourteen are being lured into the way of swift destruction? How many of
these are daughters of soldiers who have given their hearts' blood for
us and our liberties!
Two noble women of the Society of Friends have lately been taking the
gauge of suffering and misery in our land, visiting the hospitals at
every accessible point, pausing in our great cities, and going in their
purity to those midnight orgies where mere children are being trained
for a life of vice and infamy. They have talked with these poor
bewildered souls, entangled in toils as terrible and inexorable as those
of the slave-market, and many of whom are frightened and distressed at
the life they are beginning to lead, and earnestly looking for the means
of escape. In the judgment of these holy women, at least one third of
those with whom they have talked are children so recently entrapped, and
so capable of reformation, that there would be the greatest hope in
efforts for their salvation. While such things are to be done in our
land, is there any reason why any one should die of grief? One soul
redeemed will do more to lift the burden of sorrow than all the
blandishments and diversions of art, all the alleviations of luxury, all
the sympathy of friends.
In the Roman Catholic Church there is an order of women called the
Sisters of the Good Shepherd, who have renounced the world to devote
themselves, their talents and property, entirely to the work of seeking
out and saving the fallen of their own sex; and the wonders worked by
their self-denying love on the hearts and lives of even the most
depraved are credible only to those who know that the Good Shepherd
Himself ever lives and works with such spirits engaged in such a work. A
similar order of women exists in New York, under the direction of the
Episcopal Church, in connection with St. Luke's Hospital; and another in
England, who tend the "House of Mercy" of Clewer.
Such benevolent associations offer objects of interest to that class
which most needs something to fill the void made by bereavement. The
wounds of grief are less apt to find a cure in that rank of life where
the sufferer has wealth and leisure. The _poor_ widow, whose husband was
her all, _must_ break the paralysis of grief. The hard necessities of
life are her physicians; they send her out to unwelcome, yet friendly
toil, which, hard as it seems, has yet its healing power. But the
sufferer surrounded by the appliances of wealth and luxury may long
indulge the baleful apathy, and remain in the damp shadows of the valley
of death till strength and health are irrecoverably lost. How
Christ-like is the thought of a woman, graceful, elegant, cultivated,
refined, whose voice has been trained to melody, whose fingers can make
sweet harmony with every touch, whose pencil and whose needle can awake
the beautiful creations of art, devoting all these powers to the work of
charming back to the sheepfold those wandering and bewildered lambs whom
the Good Shepherd still calls his own! Jenny Lind, once, when she sang
at a concert for destitute children, exclaimed in her enthusiasm, "Is it
not beautiful that I can sing so?" And so may not every woman feel, when
her graces and accomplishments draw the wanderer, and charm away evil
demons, and soothe the sore and sickened spirit, and make the Christian
fold more attractive than the dizzy gardens of false pleasure?
In such associations, and others of kindred nature, how many of the
stricken and bereaved women of our country might find at once a home and
an object in life! Motherless hearts might be made glad in a better and
higher motherhood; and the stock of earthly life that seemed cut off at
the root, and dead past recovery, may be grafted upon with a shoot from
the tree of life which is in the Paradise of God.
So the beginning of this eventful 1865, which finds us still treading
the wine-press of our great conflict, should bring with it a serene and
solemn hope, a joy such as those had with whom in the midst of the fiery
furnace there walked one like unto the Son of God.
The great affliction that has come upon our country is so evidently the
purifying chastening of a Father, rather than the avenging anger of a
Destroyer, that all hearts may submit themselves in a solemn and holy
calm still to bear the burning that shall make us clean from dross and
bring us forth to a higher national life. Never, in the whole course of
our history, have such teachings of the pure abstract Right been so
commended and forced upon us by Providence. Never have public men been
so constrained to humble themselves before God, and to acknowledge that
there is a Judge that ruleth in the earth. Verily his inquisition for
blood has been strict and awful; and for every stricken household of the
poor and lowly hundreds of households of the oppressor have been
scattered. The land where the family of the slave was first annihilated,
and the negro, with all the loves and hopes of a man, was proclaimed to
be a beast to be bred and sold in market with the horse and the
swine,--that land, with its fair name, Virginia, has been made a
desolation so signal, so wonderful, that the blindest passer-by cannot
but ask for what sin so awful a doom has been meted out. The prophetic
visions of Nat Turner, who saw the leaves prop blood and the land
darkened, have been fulfilled. The work of justice which he predicted is
being executed to the uttermost.
But when this strange work of judgment and justice is consummated, when
our country, through a thousand battles and ten thousands of precious
deaths, shall have come forth from this long agony, redeemed and
regenerated, then God himself shall return and dwell with us, and the
Lord God shall wipe away all tears from all faces, and the rebuke of his
people shall he utterly take away.
XIII.
THE NOBLE ARMY OF MARTYRS.