You began by enduring, and you end by embracing their doctrines. Ah, Mark! Mark! Mark! how came it so?”
“Uncle, did you never hear of a gay man or woman of the world—well enough in their way—not sinners above all sinners, but with a certain light, satirical way of treating serious subjects, and a certain good-humoured contempt for those that entertained them—did you never hear an instance of such a man or woman going into a religious meeting to scoff, but returning home to pray? Well, very much akin to that was my experience. I went to the convention in New York, just to fulfil a promise made to my friend Lauderdale, and next to have a laugh at them! At the first meeting—well; I am not going to give you a report of it—sufficient is it to tell you that the subject was presented to my mind in a new and startling aspect. I laughed, or rather tried to laugh, it off.”
“I wish to goodness you had taken it more earnestly than to begin with laughing, to end with imitating.”
“At the second meeting, there were some still higher, purer souls, and more eloquent and commanding tongues; lips touched with fire, whose words were flame consuming the wrong principle, that shrivelled up before it. But I do not mean to become eloquent myself. This is not the time or place, nor are you the audience. It is enough to say that the speakers in that meeting gave me the heartache and the headache, and I wished in my soul I had never entered their hall. Yet nevertheless a fascination drew me there the third evening. And then, whether ‘the master minds’ of the cause had said all they had to say for the time, or whether they had not yet arrived upon the scene of action, I really cannot say—(for the room was crowded, and not by friends of the cause, as you will hear, but by conspirators, who had come there to break the meeting up)—but certainly, after one short address of thrilling eloquence and power—during the progress of which I felt myself to be a participant in an injustice, and at the close of which I was ready to make an irrevocable oath to clear my life from the sin—up jumps a fellow, with more zeal than knowledge, and more deviltry, I perfectly believe, than either, and so defames me and my fellow-citizens of the South, and so caricatures us as monsters of atrocity, and so whirrs and rattles whips and chains and gyves about my ears and eyes, that it was the cast of a die whether I should laugh or swear. But before it was decided, a resolution was put and an amendment offered, and two or three people rose, and half a dozen began to speak, and everybody wanted to talk, and nobody—but me—wanted to hear, and there was a confusion inside and a gathering mob outside, and in an incredibly short time there was a hailstorm of stones, and battered walls, and smashed windows, and the meeting was broken up in a row; and my Celtic blood boiled up and boiled over; and while laying about me valiantly in defence of freedom of speech, I lost myself. And when I found myself, I was lying with a broken arm and broken head in the watchhouse!”
“Good gracious, Mark! what a dishonour! What would my sister, what would my niece, say to that?”
“They do not know it, and they need not.”
“Well, really, one would have thought that would have cured you!”
“My good uncle, it did—of indecision. One is very apt to be confirmed to a cause in which they have suffered somewhat. I lay very ill for two weeks. During that time I was ministered to by some excellent men, and women also—persons whose disinterestedness, benevolence, gentleness, and perfect sincerity, gave me such a deep and beautiful impression of the Christian character as I had never received from book or pulpit—persons who had sacrificed fortune, position, friendships—all, to a pure but despised cause. It was the silent influence, even more than the spoken words of these, which fixed me forever in my good purpose.”
“It may be true, Mark, that there are such, or it may only have seemed so to you. What I know is, that if there are such disinterested souls in the cause, they are, at best, only the instruments with which the party leaders work for their own individual ends and selfish purposes.”
“No, it is not so, nor could it be so; wisdom and goodness could not become the tools of selfishness and worldliness.”