“The Israelites didn’t want a change. They didn’t want to go out of the land of bondage. Lots of livin’ ties united ’em to the land of their birth, and lots of onseen ones too. The graves of their ancestors, and memories, and loves, and joys, and sorrows all hung onto their heart-strings, and they didn’t want to go.
“But Moses wuz in the right on’t. And they come out at last into a land flowin’ with milk and honey.
“And they wuz glad they went.
“The Unbelievers didn’t want Jesus for a King and a Ruler—they didn’t want a change. They fit aginst God’s plan for ’em, and conquered, so they thought. But they didn’t, and now the world is glad on’t, as it stands under the glow a fallin’ from the glorious twentieth century.
“Ask the United Christian Nations of the World if it hain’t a blessed change. Ask ’em if they hain’t glad they went out of the superstitions and bondage of the old dispensation, out into the glorious liberty of the Gospel, out under the blessed rule of the Prince of Peace.
“No, Col. Seybert, I don’t think it is much of a reason, even if it is true, to say that the negroes don’t want to go. In all these cases I have brung up—and I might go on a bringin’ ’em up and a layin’ ’em down in front of you for hours and hours if it would do any good—but in all on ’em, as in these supreme cases I have mentioned, what difference did it make in the end whether the majority wuz willin’ or not to be saved, only in the discouragement and trouble it made the noble few who see clear from the beginnin’ to the end?
“HE HASTENED OFF.”
“What difference did their onwillingness make? The best, the right wuz done. The minority wuz wise and the majority wrong, as is dretful apt to be the case in this world. And the people wuz led through darkness, and sorrow, and onwillingness out into the broad sunshine. Led through Jordan’s stormy waves, out into ‘Canaan’s fair and happy land, where their possessions lay.’”
I had fell into that kinder melodius axent of mine almost entirely onbeknown to me, for it wuz from a him that I wuz quotin’. But it didn’t seem to impress Col. Seybert as I wanted it to.