A church that can never have done with excommunicating Christ
while it exists! Away with your broad and flat churches, and your
narrow and tall churches! Take a step forward, and invent a new
style of out-houses. Invent a salt that will save you, and defend
our nostrils.

  The modern Christian is a man who has consented to say all the
prayers in the liturgy, provided you will let him go straight to bed
and sleep quietly afterward. All his prayers begin with "Now I lay
me down to sleep," and he is forever looking forward to the time
when he shall go to his "long rest." He has consented to perform
certain old-established charities, too, after a fashion, but he does
not wish to hear of any new-fangled ones; he doesn't wish to have
any supplementary articles added to the contract, to fit it to the
present time. He shows the whites of his eyes on the Sabbath, and
the blacks all the rest of the week. The evil is not merely a
stagnation of blood, but a stagnation of spirit. Many, no doubt, are
well disposed, but sluggish by constitution and by habit, and they
cannot conceive of a man who is actuated by higher motives than they
are. Accordingly they pronounce this man insane, for they know that
they could never act as he does, as long as they are themselves.

  We dream of foreign countries, of other times and races of men,
placing them at a distance in history or space; but let some
significant event like the present occur in our midst, and we
discover, often, this distance and this strangeness between us and our
nearest neighbors. They are our Austrias, and Chinas, and South Sea
Islands. Our crowded society becomes well spaced all at once, clean
and handsome to the eye- a city of magnificent distances. We
discover why it was that we never got beyond compliments and
surfaces with them before; we become aware of as many versts between
us and them as there are between a wandering Tartar and a Chinese
town. The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of
the market-place. Impassable seas suddenly find their level between
us, or dumb steppes stretch themselves out there. It is the difference
of constitution, of intelligence, and faith, and not streams and
mountains, that make the true and impassable boundaries between
individuals and between states. None but the like-minded can come
plenipotentiary to our court.

  I read all the newspapers I could get within a week after this
event, and I do not remember in them a single expression of sympathy
for these men. I have since seen one noble statement, in a Boston
paper, not editorial. Some voluminous sheets decided not to print
the full report of Brown's words to the exclusion of other matter.
It was as if a publisher should reject the manuscript of the New
Testament, and print Wilson's last speech. The same journal which
contained this pregnant news was chiefly filled, in parallel
columns, with the reports of the political conventions that were being
held. But the descent to them was too steep. They should have been
spared this contrast- been printed in an extra, at least. To turn from
the voices and deeds of earnest men to the cackling of politicial
conventions! Office-seekers and speech-makers, who do not so much as
lay an honest egg, but wear their breasts bare upon an egg of chalk!
Their great game is the game of straws, or rather that universal
aboriginal game of the platter, at which the Indians cried hub, bub!
Exclude the reports of religious and political conventions, and
publish the words of a living man.

  But I object not so much to what they have omitted as to what they
have inserted. Even the Liberator called it "a misguided, wild, and
apparently insane-effort." As for the herd of newspapers and
magazines, I do not chance to know an editor in the country who will
deliberately print anything which he knows will ultimately and
permanently reduce the number of his subscribers. They do not
believe that it would be expedient. How then can they print truth?
If we do not say pleasant things, they argue, nobody will attend to
us. And so they do like some travelling auctioneers, who sing an
obscene song, in order to draw a crowd around them. Republican
editors, obliged to get their sentences ready for the morning edition,
and accustomed to look at everything by the twilight of politics,
express no admiration, nor true sorrow even, but call these men
"deluded fanatics"- "mistaken men"- "insane," or "crazed." It suggests
what a sane set of editors we are blessed with, not "mistaken men";
who know very well on which side their bread is buttered, at least.

  A man does a brave and humane deed, and at once, on all sides, we
hear people and parties declaring, "I didn't do it, nor countenance
him to do it, in any conceivable way. It can't be fairly inferred from
my past career." I, for one, am not interested to hear you define your
position. I don't know that I ever was or ever shall be. I think it is
mere egotism, or impertinent at this time. Ye needn't take so much
pains to wash your skirts of him. No intelligent man will ever be
convinced that he was any creature of yours. He went and came, as he
himself informs us, "under the auspices of John Brown and nobody
else." The Republican Party does not perceive how many his failure
will make to vote more correctly than they would have them. They
have counted the votes of Pennsylvania & Co., but they have not
correctly counted Captain Brown's vote. He has taken the wind out of
their sails- the little wind they had- and they may as well lie to and
repair.

  What though he did not belong to your clique! Though you may not
approve of his method or his principles, recognize his magnanimity.
Would you not like to claim kindredship with him in that, though in no
other thing he is like, or likely, to you? Do you think that you would
lose your reputation so? What you lost at the spile, you would gain at
the bung.

  If they do not mean all this, then they do not speak the truth,