Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/151

Rh the people, and as the wind scatters the martyr's ashes far and wide, so the spectacle or the fame of his fidelity spreads abroad the sentiment of that religion which made him strong. The persecuting Nile wafts Moses into the king's court, and the new religion is within the walls.

You know how the Puritans were treated in England, the Covenanters in Scotland; you know how they bore trial. You have heard of John Graham, commonly called Lord Claverhouse. He lived about two hundred years ago in England and Scotland, one of that brood of monsters which still disgrace mankind, and, as vipers and rattle-snakes, seem born to centralize and incarnate the poison of the world. An original tormentor, if there had never been any cruelty he would have invented it, of his own head. Had he lived in New England in this time, he would doubtless have been a United States commissioner under the Fugitive Slave Bill, perhaps a judge or a marshal; at any rate, a slave-hunter, a kidnapper in some form; and of course he would now be as much honoured in this city as he then was in Edinburgh and London, and perhaps as well paid. Well, Lord Claverhouse had a commission to root out the Covenanters with fire and sword, and went to that work with the zeal of an American kidnapper. By means of his marshals he one day caught a Scotch girl, a Covenanter. She was young, only eighteen;—she was comely to look upon. Her name was Margaret. Graham ordered her to be tied to a stake in the sea at low-water, and left to drown slowly at the advance of the tide. It was done: and his creatures,—there were enough of them in Scotland, as of their descendants here,—his commissioners, his marshals, and his attorneys,—sat down on the shore to watch the end of poor Margaret. It was an end not to be forgotten. In a clear, sweet voice she sung hymns to God till the waves of the sea broke over her head and floated her pious soul to her God and his heaven. Had Scotland been a Catholic country there would have been another Saint Margaret, known as the

You all know what strength of endurance religion gave