Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.Stowe, Harriet Beecher
History
Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
United States -- Biography; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Biography
But the beautiful and gay girl carried unknown and dormant in her own
nature, the elements of an earnest and lofty religious character, which
no touch of the droning services of a dead church had ever yet stirred
to consciousness--and the wild singing, the fervent exhortations, the
vivid and real emotions which were exhibited in this meeting, fired the
electric train and roused the fervor of her own nature. Life, death,
eternity, all became vivid and real to her, and the command to come out
from a vain world and be separate; to confess Christ openly before men,
seemed to her to have a living and present power.
It is very commonly the case that minds for the first time awakened
to the real power of religion, feel that the only true faith is to be
found under the forms and ideas which have so moved them, and that
to confess Christ means a visible union with any particular body of
Christians who have made real to them the Christian idea. Such was the
call felt by this young girl to join herself with this despised body of
Christians.
Her parents were greatly shocked and annoyed when they found that
instead of ridiculing the Ranters, she was going again and again to
their services, with an undissembled earnestness: and when finally
she announced to them her purpose to unite herself to them in the
public ordinance of baptism, their indignation knew no bounds, and
they threatened her that if she did she should never enter their doors
again, or be to them more than a stranger.
Then was the crisis in which the woman stood between two worlds--two
kinds of life--on one side, the most earnest and whole-hearted
excitement of the higher moral feelings, on the other side, the
material good things of this world.
The mother of Lloyd Garrison hesitated not a moment between the
convictions of her conscience and a worldly good. Like the primitive
Christians, she went down into the waters of baptism feeling that she
was leaving father, mother, and home, and casting herself on God alone.
Her parents, with true John Bull obstinacy, made good their word,
and shut their doors upon her; but an uncle, struck perhaps with her
courage and constancy, opened to her an asylum where she remained till
her marriage. In later years her parents became reconciled to her.
The religious life thus begun was carried on with a marked and
triumphant fullness. She was a woman of enthusiastic convictions,
of strong mind, and of great natural eloquence, and during the
infancy and childhood of William Lloyd he was often with her in the
prayer-meetings, which were vivified by the electric eloquence of
her prayers and exhortations--for the Baptist as well as Methodist
denominations, allowed to women as well as men, a Christian equality in
the use of the gifts of instruction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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