It was this courage that made John Brown march on that most quixotic of all marches--with a handful of men to free the slave. It was rebellion, anarchy, unlawful invasion, the breaking of man's law--of course it was. But he saw a higher vision than man's outlook, he felt a higher call than man's demand, and he knew no law of man in the obedience of his soul, body, life, _his all_, to the call of the Spirit. And though a rude Kansas pioneer and farmer, he had the soul-courage to obey. Forward! March! He marched to his death! Did he? No! He marched to the death of his body, but he began a triumphant march in the heavens forever brilliantly illuminating the minds and souls of men, and lifting them up into a higher state of life, making them less sordid, less afraid of position, life, honor, less easily influenced by the keen censure and scorn of the blind world. Talk about battlefields and batteries, forts and forlorn hopes and the courages of the Charge of the Light Brigade, or of the Stand of the Old Guards at Waterloo, or of Dewey sailing into Manila Harbor; what were those acts of physical courage compared with the moral heroism that leads a man to dare the stake, the cross, or the tortures of the bigot? Read Mark Twain's _Life of Joan of Arc_, and feel your heart throb to the high-souled, divinely inspired courage of that girl of eighteen; not only physical courage, as when she led, in person, the charges of the French army against the English, who had been victorious in France for almost a hundred years, but when she dared the great ecclesiastical courts that badgered and baited her, as she sat unaided, alone, unbefriended, undefended, unadvised by man, for weeks at a time, when the cowardly hounds were determined to send her to the stake. Where did her heroism and courage come from that she, a mere country peasant child, who had never even ridden a horse, or seen a battlefield, who never had read a book, or knew the first thing of guiding and controlling soldiers, or setting an army in battle array; I say, where did her courage come from, that she could dare to go into the proud presence of nobles and warriors and demand that they give her a guard to take her to the King of France, where she assured him that she would soon drive out the English and have him duly crowned king of his reconquered provinces? Here was the radiant life in actual, potent exercise. She radiated courage and faith, just as the sun radiates heat--in such abundance that men sweated with it, men were fired to the intense heat and fervor of new life and courage with it. So that, from a cowed, disheartened pack of whipped men, who fled from the mere sound of approach of a small body of English soldiers, raw recruits, as well as seasoned veterans, shouted to be led against the foe, and when once in the conflict hammered away regardless of wounds, even of death, until victory was theirs.