Page:Note of an English republican on the Muscovite crusade (IA noteofenglishrep00swiniala).pdf/23

 and gallant genius, clear and loud in heroic deprecation of all tacit compliance with the earliest wrongdoing of the present Czar's father—no nation which has not forfeited the truly divine right to lift up voice or hand on behalf of others as one pure alike of active and of passive complicity with evil and oppression, yet in wellnigh every nation and province there should be some relics at least of a party, some remnants at least of a church, whose prophets and apostles have bought this right, and the right to bequeath it to their disciples, with the travail and heavy labour of all their lives, as with a price and a ransom paid in bloody sweat and tears more bitter than very blood itself—

Not with fond shekels of the tested gold, Or stones whose rates are either rich or poor As fancy values them;

not with these, nor yet only with prayer and fasting, the mere love-offering of preserved souls and such whose minds are dedicate to nothing temporal; but with the sacrifice of a good fight fought, a great course finished, a high faith kept. And surely we also, in the old sacred words of the Christian apostle who spoke in his day on our side, on the side of a resistance to tyranny and evil yet wider and deeper and more practical, more literal at once and more significant as a symbol and example to all men, than ever the preacher or his hearers dreamed—surely we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses that it should be no groundless or unwarrantable hope if, knowing in what and in whom we have believed, we trust that now too the blood of as willing and as innumerable an army of martyrs