Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 1 (of 3)Parker, Theodore
Religion
Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 1 (of 3)
Parker, Theodore
Sermons, American; Unitarianism
grimly dead, each covering with his body the spot he defended with his
arms. They had no quarrel; yet they lie there, slain by a brother's
hand. It is not old and decrepid men, but men of the productive age,
full of lusty life.
But it is only the smallest part that perish in battle. Exposure to
cold, wet, heat; unhealthy climates, unwholesome food, rum, and forced
marches, bring on diseases which mow down the poor soldiers worse than
musketry and grape. Others languish of wounds, and slowly procrastinate
a dreadful and a tenfold death. Far away, there are widows, orphans,
childless old fathers, who pore over the daily news to learn at random
the fate of a son, a father, or a husband! They crowd disconsolate into
the churches, seeking of God the comfort men took from them, praying in
the bitterness of a broken heart, while the priest gives thanks for "a
famous victory," and hangs up the bloody standard over his pulpit!
When ordinary disease cuts off a man, when he dies at his duty, there is
some comfort in that loss. "It was the ordinance of God," you say. You
minister to his wants; you smoothe down the pillow for the aching head;
your love beguiles the torment of disease, and your own bosom gathers
half the darts of death. He goes in his time and God takes him. But when
he dies in such a war, in battle, it is man who has robbed him of life.
It is a murderer that is butchered. Nothing alleviates that bitter,
burning smart!
Others not slain are maimed for life. This has no eyes; that no hands;
another no feet nor legs. This has been pierced by lances, and torn with
the shot, till scarce any thing human is left. The wreck of a body is
crazed with pains God never meant for man. The mother that bore him
would not know her child. Count the orphan asylums in Germany and
Holland; go into the hospital at Greenwich, that of the invalids in
Paris, you see the "trophies" of Napoleon and Wellington. Go to the
arsenal at Toulon, see the wooden legs piled up there for men now active
and whole, and you will think a little of the physical horrors of war.
In Boston there are perhaps about 25,000 able-bodied men between 18 and
45. Suppose them all slain in battle, or mortally hurt, or mown down by
the camp-fever, vomito, or other diseases of war, and then fancy the
distress, the heart-sickness amid wives, mothers, daughters, sons and
fathers, here! Yet 25,000 is a small number to be murdered in "a famous
victory;" a trifle for a whole "glorious campaign" in a great war. The
men of Boston are no better loved than the men of Tamaulipas. There is
scarce an old family, of the middle class, in all New England, which did
not thus smart in the Revolution; many, which have not, to this day,
recovered from the bloody blow then falling on them. Think, wives, of
the butchery of your husbands; think, mothers, of the murder of your
sons!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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