=168.= WINTER AND SPRING.
In the hard, cold winter of our northern lands, how do we feel a longing for the presence of life! Then we love to look on a pine or fir tree, which seems the only living thing in the woods, surrounded by dead oaks, birches, maples, looking like the gravestones of buried vegetation: that seems warm and living then; and at Christmas, men bring it into meetinghouses and parlors, and set it up, full of life, and laden with kindly gifts for the little folk. Then even the unattractive crow seems half sacred, through the winter bearing messages of promise from the perished autumn to the advancing spring—this dark forerunner of the tuneful tribes which are to come. We feel a longing for fresh, green nature, and so in the shelter of our houses keep some little Aaron's rod, budding alike with promise and memory; or in some hyacinth or Dutchman's tulip we keep a prophecy of flowers, and start off some little John to run before, and with his half-gospel tell of some great Emmanuel, and signify to men that the kingdom of heavenly beauty is near at hand. Now that forerunner disappears, for the desire of all nations has truly come; the green grass is creeping everywhere, and it is spangled with many flowers that came unasked….
What if there was a spring time of blossoming but once in a hundred years! How would men look forward to it, and old men, who had beheld its wonders, tell the story to their children, how once all the homely trees became beautiful, and earth was covered with freshness and new growth! How would young men hope to become old, that they might see so glad a sight! And when beheld, the aged man would say, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation."
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From an "Installation Sermon," January 4th, 1846.
=169.= THE TRUE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH.
The saints of olden time perished at the stake; they hung on gibbets; they agonized upon the rack; they died under the steel of the tormentor. It was the heroism of our fathers' day that swam the unknown seas; froze in the woods; starved with want and cold; fought battles with the red right hand. It is the sainthood and heroism of our day that toils for the ignorant, the poor, the weak, the oppressed, the wicked. Yes, it is our saints and heroes who fight fighting; who contend for the slave, and his master too, for the drunkard, the criminal; yes, for the wicked or the weak in all their forms…. But the saints and the heroes of this day, who draw no sword, whose right hand is never bloody, who burn in no fires of wood or sulphur, nor languish briefly on the hasty cross; the saints and heroes who, in a worldly world, dare to be men; in an age of conformity and selfishness, speak for Truth and Man, living for noble aims, men who will swear to no lies howsoever popular; who will honor no sins, though never so profitable, respectable, and ancient; men who count Christ not their master, but teacher, friend, brother, and strive like him to practice all they pray; to incarnate and make real the Word of God, these men I honor far more than the saints of old…. Racks and fagots soon waft the soul to God, stern messengers, but swift. A boy could bear that passage,—the martyrdom of death. But the temptation of a long life of neglect, and scorn, and obloquy, and shame, and want, and desertion by false friends; to live blameless though blamed, cut off from human sympathy, that is the martyrdom of to-day. I shed no tears for such martyrs. I shout when I see one; I take courage and thank God for the real saints, prophets and heroes of to-day…. Yea, though now men would steal the rusty sword from underneath the bones of a saint or hero long deceased, to smite off therewith the head of a new prophet, that ancient hero's son; though they would gladly crush the heart out of him with the tombstones they piled up for great men, dead and honored now; yet in some future day, that mob penitent, baptized with a new spirit, like drunken men returned to sanity once more, shall search through all this land for marble white enough to build a monument to that prophet whom their fathers slew; they shall seek through all the world for gold of fineness fit to chronicle such names. I cannot wait; but I will honor such men now, not adjourn the warning of their voice, and the glory of their example, till another age! The church may cast out such men; burn them with the torments of an age too refined in its cruelty to use coarse fagots and the vulgar axe! It is no loss to these men; but the ruin of the church. I say the Christian church of the nineteenth century must honor such men, if it would do a church's work; must take pains to make such men as these, or it is a dead church, with no claim on us, except that we bury it. A true church will always be the church of martyrs. The ancients commenced every great work with a victim! We do not call it so; but the sacrifice is demanded, got ready, and offered by unconscious priests long ere the enterprise succeeds. Did not Christianity begin with a martyrdom?
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From "Historic Americans."