The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12Brann, William Cowper
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The Complete Works of Brann, the Iconoclast — Volume 12
Brann, William Cowper
Brann, William Cowper, 1855-1898; Essays; Reformers
"I know nothing of the future; I spend no time
speculating upon it--I am overwhelmed by the Past and at
death grips with the Present. At the grave God draws
the line between the two eternities. Never has living man
lifted the somber veil of Death and looked beyond.
"There is a Deity. I have felt his presence. I have
heard his voice, I have been cradled in his imperial robe.
All that is, or was, or can ever be, is but "the visible
garment of God." I seek to know nothing of his plans
and purposes. I ask no written covenant with God, for
he is my Father. I will trust him without requiring priests
or prophets to indorse his note. As I write, my little
son awake, alarmed by some unusual noise, and come
groping through the darkness to my door. He sees the
light shining through the transom, returns to his trundle-
bed and lies down to peaceful dreams. He knows that
beyond that gleam his father keeps watch and ward, and
he asks no more. Through a thousand celestial transoms
streams the light of God. Why should I fear the sleep
of Death, the unknown terrors of that starless night, the
waves of the river Styx? Why should I seek assurance
from the lips of men that the wisdom, love and power
of my heavenly Father will not fail?"
Like the lowly Judean carpenter who gave his life in a
protest against the wrongs which wealth and power had
done to his fellow man, he was hated by the Pharisees
and hypocrites, but he never cast a stone at the poor and
unfortunate, but was ever ready to support the weak
battling in the cause of right against the cohorts of the
wrong.
He was not only a poet, but was a prophet and a
priest; not the prophet and priest of orthodoxy, that has
handed down to us through the ages, written in the blood
of slaughtered millions, that dark story of forked-tailed
demons and flaming hells, that has given us a God that
loves us better than an earthly father can, yet permits
us in the sight of his great white throne to writhe and
suffer through the endless ages of eternity in the flames
of hell. But he was a priest and prophet of a greater
and grander faith, that in the evolution of the unborn
centuries yet to come, will strip from the Godhead all
of the horrid concepts, born of the puny hate of man
for his fellow man.
Mr. Brann was a man of the highest moral courage,
no one doubted this, but some doubted whether he had
that kind of physical courage that is necessary to
contend with mobs and assassins, but when the hour came
--when, without the slightest warning or anticipation or
danger, the death wound tore through his back, with
a coolness that few even of the bravest of men would
have possessed under the circumstances, with a courage
that could have led the Irish exiles, in that desperate and
deathless charge on the bloody heights of Fontenoy, he
turned and fired every bullet of his pistol into the body
of his assassin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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