Life is not all comprised about a slender figure and transparent profile; faultless coils of hair; soft, rich, clinging garments; laces falling over taper fingers; graceful and dignified demeanor; low and sweetly modulated voice, and the perfection of faultless manners. There may be a place for the rude, uncouth clodhopper with disfigured features; tousled hair; clad in homespun or cheap denim; rags taking the place of lace; boorish and clumsy demeanor; a voice like a steamer foghorn; and the apotheosis of all that is blundering and awkward in manner.
I do not, for one moment, defend any unnecessary boorishness or uncouthness of manner, and must not be understood as doing so, but at the same time, in spite of these things, I am impelled to state my conviction that the latter class is more needful to the real progress of the world than the former. I notice that several times in the history of the world, canal-drivers, shepherd-boys, wood-choppers, and rail-splitters have made wonderful pilots for the Ship of State.
God has use in His world for the rough as well as the polished; the roar of the thunder as well as the coo of the dove; the stentorian trumpet-tone as well as the still, small voice. John the Baptist came from the desert robed in skins and camel's hair; his voice, doubtless, was not soft and well-modulated as were those of Herodias and Salome. He was "the voice of one crying in the wilderness." His call contained the thunder tones of the storm and wild cry of the lonely eagle seeking its solitary aerie; the strength and the roar of the lion. It was neither refined, pleasing, nor cultured, but it possessed life and power and it was chosen to herald the coming of the Messiah.
Nowhere have we been told that Elijah, Jeremiah and Daniel were noted for the soft and dulcet tones of their voices, yet they were the chosen instruments of the Divine in overthrowing dynasties and changing the history of nations. Peter the Hermit was not a sweet-voiced singer in Israel, but he started a movement that led to the civilization of Europe. I doubt not that the charges of the British against Joan of Arc that she cried in a coarse military voice when she led the armored hosts of France were true, but she drove the foreign invader from the soil of her beloved France where they had held footing for nigh upon a hundred years and no one else had been able to win a victory from them.
I doubt not there were times when Grant's voice did not possess the mellow and refined quality of the drawing-room exquisite, but he won victories and made a united people possible. John Brown was rude, rough, uncouth, boorish, when compared with the refined and polished cavaliers of the South. They called him a bandit, an invader, a revolutionist, an anarchist, and they captured and hanged him, but to thousands of men his crazy dream of the invasion of the South to forcibly compel the freedom of the slave is being more and more seen by hundreds of thousands of wise men to have been one of the most practical and effective means of calling the attention of men to the moral principle involved in the question of slavery, as to whether men of one color of blood or skin had the right to hold in bondage men of a different color.
When Theodore Parker was denouncing the iniquities of any and all slavery, his voice was not as soft and gentle and sweetly modulated as that of Longfellow, yet it played as important a part in the history of the development of mankind and stirred men to higher endeavor on the part of their suffering and down-trodden fellows.
What, then, is the upshot of the whole matter? It seems to me it is this: Listen to the voice that appeals to your own soul; that lifts you from the lower to the higher; that thrills you to deeds of heroism, that stimulates you to acts of nobleness, that calls you to a life of helpful self-sacrifice; and while doing this, cease to criticise, to find fault, to censure the kind of voice to which you do not care to listen. The strong, vigorous, robust, red-blooded man of the out-of-doors generally will not speak nor act with the perfect restraint and conventionality of the man born in the atmosphere of the drawing-room, but his message may be just as helpful to the world, and as divinely inspired as that of his more refined and dignified prototype.