Addresses by the Right Reverend Phillips BrooksBrooks, Phillips
Religion
Addresses by the Right Reverend Phillips Brooks
Brooks, Phillips
Episcopal Church -- Sermons; Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 -- Sermons; Sermons, American
at last might look up together and love to call him, with one voice, our
Father.
Thus, we have seen something of what the character of Mr. Lincoln was,
and how it issued in the life he lived. It remains for us to see how it
resulted also in the terrible death which has laid his murdered body
here in our town among lamenting multitudes to-day. It is not a hard
question, though it is sad to answer. We saw the two natures, the nature
of Slavery and the nature of Freedom, at last set against each other,
come at last to open war. Both fought, fought long, fought bravely; but
each, as was perfectly natural, fought with the tools and in the ways
which its own character had made familiar to it. The character of
Slavery was brutal, barbarous, and treacherous; and so the whole history
of the slave power during the war has been full of ways of warfare
brutal, barbarous, and treacherous, beyond anything that men bred in
freedom could have been driven to by the most hateful passions. It is
not to be marvelled at. It is not to be set down as the special sin of
the war. It goes back beyond that. It is the sin of the system. It is
the barbarism of Slavery. When Slavery went to war to save its life,
what wonder if its barbarism grew barbarous a hundred-fold!
One would be attempting a task which once was almost hopeless, but which
now is only needless, if he set himself to convince a Northern
congregation that Slavery was a barbarian institution. It would be
hardly more necessary to try to prove how its barbarism has shown itself
during this war. The same spirit which was blind to the wickedness of
breaking sacred ties, of separating man and wife, of beating women till
they dropped down dead, of organizing licentiousness and sin into
commercial systems, of forbidding knowledge and protecting itself with
ignorance, of putting on its arms and riding out to steal a State at the
beleaguered ballot-box away from freedom--in one word (for its simplest
definition is its worst dishonor), the spirit that gave man the
ownership in man in time of peace, has found out yet more terrible
barbarisms for the time of war. It has hewed and burned the bodies of
the dead. It has starved and mutilated its helpless prisoners. It has
dealt by truth, not as men will in a time of excitement, lightly and
with frequent violations, but with a cool, and deliberate, and
systematic contempt. It has sent its agents into Northern towns to fire
peaceful hotels where hundreds of peaceful men and women slept. It has
undermined the prisons where its victims starved, and made all ready to
blow with one blast their wretched life away. It has delighted in the
lowest and basest scurrility even on the highest and most honorable
lips. It has corrupted the graciousness of women and killed out the
truth of men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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