Page:John Brown (1899).pdf/46

 The preacher and congregation angrily objected to this. Brown left the church on account of it; and though he was all his life a devout Calvinist, conducting family worship daily and sometimes "exhorting" in public, he never belonged to another church. This certainly shows that at this period there was no want of earnestness in his devotion to the blacks.

In 1837 there occurred the episode which first indicated Brown's intention to attack slavery vî et armis. His children have testified that in that year he assembled them one day at family prayer, swore them all to work with him for the emancipation of the slaves, and, kneeling on the floor, invoked the blessing of God on the undertaking. There is no reason to believe that either Brown or his children forgot this compact. He seems never to have reminded his sons of it, nor to have been under the necessity of doing so. His children were not relig-