But martyrs struggle for a brighter prize,
And win it with more pain. Their blood is shed
In confirmation of the noblest claim—
Our claim to feed upon immortal truth,
To walk with God, to be divinely free,
To soar and to anticipate the skies.”
The martyrs of Missouri, though unknown to fame and unambitious of distinction, have, in their humble, unostentatious, quiet way, suffered as keenly and as severely as any others. They have taken the spoiling of their goods as joyfully, “counted all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus the Lord,” “counted not their lives dear unto themselves so that they might finish their course with joy and the ministry which they have received of the Lord Jesus to testify the gospel of the grace of God,” and in all their sufferings for righteousness’ sake have entered as fully into the spirit of the Master, even in sealing their testimony with their blood, as did John Calos, Nicholas Burton, Paul Clement, John Huss, Jerome of Prague, Bishops Latimer and Ridley, Archbishop Cramner, or any other of the long roll of distinguished martyrs.
The martyrs of Missouri may not occupy a place as high as others on the scrolls of fame, yet it is only a difference of time and country. It is the meridian of the nineteenth, instead of the fifteenth, sixteenth or seventeenth century. We are in Missouri, one of the United States of America, instead of Madrid, the valleys of Piedmont and Savoy, or Paris, or Italy, or Bohemia, or Turin, or London, or any other country or place where the blood of the martyrs has been shed for the testimony of Jesus. The spirit of persecution is the same, and the high sense of consecration to God and fidelity to Jesus that led the old martyrs to the rack and the stake have not been wanting in the ministers of the gospel in Missouri. The spirit, the heroism, the faith, the zeal, the devotion, were all here; and but for the remaining sense of enlightened Christianity that had been so long fostered by the genius of our free institutions, and the power it still exercised upon the public mind, the rack, the stake and all the horrible fires of the Inquisition would have been here also. The absence of these and other instruments of torture from the history of martyrdom in Missouri is due to other causes than the spirit and design of the authors and agents of religious persecution. The spirit was willing, but the cause and the occasion were wanting. Mobocracy sometimes invented a cause and made an occasion. The victim was found and offered without an altar. In such cases brutal cruelty was scarcely softened by religious refinement.
Some suffered for intermeddling with party politics; some for declining to take the oath of loyalty to the Government, as ministers; others for refusing to preach under a flag; others because they did not pray for the destruction of all rebels; others for expressing sympathy for one side or the other; others because they were born and brought up in the South; others, still, for declining to sanction the wrongs and outrages committed upon defenseless citizens, and helpless women and children, and still others because they were ministers and belonged to a certain ecclesiastical body.
How far these various considerations were only pretexts or occasions can not now be determined, other than by the analysis of the state of society heretofore given and the real animus of these persecutions.