Page:The Natick resolution, or, resistance to slaveholders.djvu/12

10 power; but the blood of Brown, as it will be dispensed by the friends of justice and humanity, will be its certain death, while it will add energetic life and resistless power to liberty.

Redemption is to come to the slave and his oppressors, not by the Cross of Christ, as it is preached among us, but by the gallows of Brown. The Cross of Christ—as borne aloft before this nation—has been and now is a bulwark of defence, a tower of strength, a munition of rocks,— of American slaveholders; the Gallows of Brown, as it will be borne aloft in front of the hosts of freedom—the true army of the living God against slavery—does and will strike terror to their hearts, and consternation into the ranks of slave-breeders and slave-traders, drive them from their strongholds, and make them a hissing and byword to all lands.

Henceforth, the slaves and their friends in the North will know nothing but John Brown and him hung; and they have only to shriek his name through the midnight chambers of repose of the merciless, but shivering, cowering, slave-drivers, to carry dismay to their guilty hearts. Slaveholders, and their allies and abettors, have known and will continue to know, nothing but Christ and him crucified, as they have learned Him from their slaveholding priests and churches; and they have raised and will continue to raise Him from the sepulchre of the dead past, only to sanctify "the sum of all villany," as embodied in themselves. John Brown and him hanged will be the inspiration and slogan of the aroused slaves and their friends, till the four millions, now held and used as chattels, bought and sold and herded together in concubinage as brutes, punished with death for every attempt to raise themselves to the condition of men and women, and compelled to feel after God and immortality amid beasts and creeping things, shall be regenerated and redeemed.

This may seem to you madness. It is so, as viewed from the slaveholding stand-point. But, it is the madness of the Good Samaritan and of Paul; it is the madness of Jesus Christ; the madness of one who sees and worships God in the living, rather than in the dead; in the living slave, rather than in a dead Jesus; in a living, rather than in a dead Christ. It is the madness of one who, on the public