Marriage merely added another trouble to the stormy and burdened life of our great reformer. He had successfully fought the powers of Rome; the queenly daughter of Henry the Eighth, and Anne Boleyn had found him incorrigible and given him up as a hopeless case; Calvin could not tame him; but now a chit of a girl with retrousse nose, who should have been at work in a paper-box factory, led him a merry dance, and the voice that had thundered threat and defiance piped in forced assent. December strawberries, I am told, lack the expected flavor.
When Knox died, he left a widow aged twenty-five, come Michaelmas. She wore deep mourning, and so did Mary, Queen of Scots, but Mary explained that her deep veil was merely to hide her smiles.
In two years the widow married Andrew Ker, notorious for having once leveled a pistol at the Queen. The widow survived Knox just sixty-two years, and died undeceived, not realizing that she had once been wedded to a man who had shaped a great religion—one whom Carlyle, his countryman, calls the master mind of his day.
JOHN BRIGHT
I have often tried to picture to myself what famine is, but the human mind is not capable of drawing any form, any scene, that will realize the horrors of starvation. The men who made the Corn Laws are totally ignorant of what it means. The agricultural laborers know something of it in some counties, and there are some hand-loom weavers in Lancashire who know what it is. I saw the other night, late at night, a light in a cottage-window, and heard the loom busily at work, the shuttle flying rapidly. It ought to have a cheerful sound, but when it is at work near midnight, when there is care upon the brow of the workman—lest he should not be able to secure that which will maintain his wife and children—then there is a foretaste of what is meant by the word "famine."
Oh, if these men who made the Corn Laws, if these men who step in
between the Creator and His creatures, could for only one short
twelvemonth—I would inflict upon them no harder punishment for
their guilt—if they for one single twelvemonth might sit at the
loom and throw the shuttle! I will not ask that they should have the
rest of the evils; I will not ask that they shall be torn by the
harrowing feelings which must exist when a beloved wife and helpless
children are suffering the horrors which these Corn Laws have
inflicted upon millions.
—John Bright
[Illustration: John Bright.]
The Society of Friends—I like the phrase, don't you? The thought of having friends, and of being a friend, comes to us like a benison and a benediction. Friendship is almost a religion: the recognition in your life of the fact that to have friends you must be one is religion.
The Quakers did not educate men to preach: they simply educated them to be Friends—and live. Those who "heard the Voice" preached. Most modern preachers do not follow a Voice—they only harken to an echo. The practical test with the Quakers was whether the man heard the "Voice" or not—if so, he could preach. Men were not licensed to preach—that is quite superfluous and absurd. Those who have to listen are the only ones to decide concerning whether the speaker has heard the "Voice" or not. As it is now, we often license men to preach who can not. The ability should be the license.
For, certain it is that men who can command attention need no testimonial from a commission in lunacy. People who have lived and are living are the only ones who have a message for living men and women.