There is no recorded end of a life that I know of more entirely brave
and manly than the one of Captain John Brown, of which we know every
minutest detail, as it happened in the full glare of our modern life
not twenty years ago. About that I think there would scarcely be
disagreement anywhere. The very men who allowed him to lie in his
bloody clothes till the day of his execution, and then hanged him,
recognized this. “You are a game man, Captain Brown,” the Southern
sheriff said in the wagon. “Yes,” he answered, “I was so brought up. It
was one of my mother’s lessons. From infancy I have not suffered from
physical fear. I have suffered a thousand times more from bashfulness;”
and then he kissed a negro child in its mother’s arms, and walked
cheerfully on to the scaffold, thankful that he was “allowed to die
for a cause, and not merely to pay the debt of nature, as all must.”
There is no simpler or nobler record in the “Book of Martyrs,” and
in passing I would only remind you, that he at least was ready to
acknowledge from whence came his strength. “Christ, the great Captain
of liberty as well as of salvation,” he wrote just before his death,
“saw fit to take from me the sword of steel after I had carried it for
a time. But he has put another in my hand, the sword of the Spirit,
and I pray God to make me a faithful soldier wherever he may send me.”
And to a friend who left him with the words, “If you can be true to
yourself to the end how glad we shall be,” he answered, “I cannot say,
but I do not think I shall deny my Lord and Master, Jesus Christ.”