Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (71 page)

Lincoln (unlike Job) bids his countrymen accept the punishment as evidence that great offense was committed and for expiation thereof, which gives them “firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right”—which is only a limited and imperfect vision, but which includes God’s justice in “a just and lasting peace.” Lincoln’s final, unifying touch is to say this peace comes not
between
the warring regions but
among
ourselves, as American individuals, and, looking beyond civil war, “with all nations.”

Lincoln wrote later of his second inaugural and its theme of the inscrutability of God’s seeming injustice, “I expect it to wear as well as, perhaps better than, any thing I have produced; but I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world.”

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FELLOW COUNTRYMEN:

At this second appearing to take the oath of the presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement, somewhat in detail, of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to
myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it; all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to
saving
the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to
destroy
it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would
make
war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would
accept
war rather than let it perish, and the war came.

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the
cause
of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph. and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
inflamed abolitionist sentiments preceding the Civil War, had a brother who provided a similarly strong voice in the struggle for social reform. Henry Ward Beecher’s name was used for “Beecher’s Bibles”—the nickname for Sharps rifles used to combat the spread of slavery in the Kansas Territory before the Civil War. At an 1856 abolitionist meeting in Connecticut, Beecher argued that a Sharps rifle held a better argument than a Bible for persuading slaveholders, a precursor to Mao Tse-tung’s observation that political power came out of the barrel of a gun.

Beecher was among the most popular and controversial of American clergymen in the nineteenth century, because he spoke out on current social issues as well as on religious doctrine, and because he dressed differently and flaunted his unorthodoxy. For almost forty years, he served as pastor of Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, where his weekly sermons drew more than two thousand listeners (they were so popular that ferries
from Manhattan were nicknamed Beecher Boats); an 1870s scandal involving charges of adultery led to a sensational trial; he was acquitted, and the notoriety failed to diminish his popularity.

In his January 15, 1866, sermon on visions, Beecher told Plymouth Church in narrative form about the uplifting experience of standing “on a mount of vision.” (Note the sermon’s start with the indefinite use of “they” to lead the audience into the story.) The same sense of being uplifted occurs early in the sermon with Beecher’s reference to “Sabbath mornings that rose upon me with healing in their wings.” That last phrase has been used frequently in presidential speeches; Woodrow Wilson used it, and I added it to one of Richard Nixon’s speeches. It comes from the biblical book of the prophet Malachi: “But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings” (Malachi 4:2).

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THEY COME, SOMETIMES
, without our knowing what brings them. There is always a cause, but we are not always conscious of it. I have had some Sabbath mornings that rose upon me with healing in their wings, after a troubled week. I can scarcely tell why I was troubled, but the mind’s fruit was not sweet. Yet, when the Sabbath morning came, I no sooner looked down upon the bay, and across at my morning signal—the star on Trinity Church, symbolic of the star that hung over the spot where the child Jesus lay—than I felt that it was an elect morning. And when I went into the street, all the trees—if it was summer—were murmuring to me; all the birds were singing to me; the clouds were bearing messages to me; everything was kindred to me. All my soul rejoiced; I do not know why. I had met with no unusual good fortune. I had been moody all the week, perhaps. My heart had said, “I will not pray.” I was unprepared for any such experience, so far as my own volition was concerned; but undoubtedly there was some cause operating which was in consonance with the laws of the mind; and when the morning came, with its propitious conjunction of circumstances, these results took place. We do not understand the reason of these hours; and when they come without volition or preparation on our part, they seem more like a sheet let down from heaven than like natural phenomena. I like to think that they are divine inspirations. My reason tells me that they are not, but I like to think that they are. Such poetic illusions help to make truth higher and better….

I never shall forget the half day that I spent on Gorner Grat, in
Switzerland. I was just emerging from that many-formed crystal country (for Switzerland is one vast multiform crystal), and, coming up through the valley of the Rhône, and threading my way along the valley of the Visp, I arrived in the evening at Zermatt, in a perfect intoxication of delight. I lay that night and dreamed of the morning till it broke on me, when we directed our footsteps up the mountain; and after climbing two or three hours, we reached the top of Gorner Grat. It is a barren rock, with snow only here and there in the cracks and crevices; but, oh, what a vision opened upon me as I cast my eyes around the horizon! There stood some fifteen of Europe’s grandest mountains. There were Monte Rosa, Lyskamm, Breithorn, Steinbock, Weisshorn, Mischabel, and, most wonderful of all, Matterhorn, that lifts itself up thirteen thousand feet and more and is a square-cut granite rock, standing like a vast tower in the air, and all of it apparently, from basis to summit, rising right up before you. And there was Gorner Glacier, a great river of ice, always moving, but never seeming to move. Down from the sides of these mountains flowed ten distinct glaciers beside. I swept the horizon and saw at one glance these glorious elevations, on whose tops the sun kindled all the melodies and harmonies of light. I was alone. I disdained company. I was a son of God, and I felt eternity, and God, and glory. And life!—its murmur was like the murmur of the ocean when you hear the beating of the surf against the shore twenty miles away. Life!—it was like the faintest memory of a fading dream. And the influences that had subdued me or warped me—in that royal hour of coronation I lifted them up and asked, in the light of the other sphere, What are ambition, and vanity, and selfishness, and all other worldly passions? Looking down from that altitude, I gained anew a right measure of life. I never have forgotten it, and I never shall forget it till that vision lapses into the eternal one! Thus, too, one may stand on a mount of vision, quite apart from life and its seductive influences, and there fashion again and readjust all his moral measurements.

My dear Christian brethren, if any of you have been accustomed to look upon these hours as mere visionary hours, in the bad sense of
visionary
, I beseech you to review your judgment. How many of them have you lost! Remember that these hours, although they are not meant to be absolute hours of revelation, are hours of exaltation, in which you have clearer faculties, a higher range of thought and feeling, and a better capacity for moral judgment. You have ecstasies of joy then that perhaps you never have at any other time.

Do not neglect these hours. They are hours in which the gates of the celestial city are opened to you; they are hours in which the guiding stars of heaven shine out for you.

William Ashley (“Billy“) Sunday, the most famous preacher of the early twentieth century, began his extraordinary career in another line of work: playing baseball.

After eight years of major-league play, the baseball star decided to pursue a religious calling and became an ordained minister. In revival meetings around the country, with a tent overhead and sawdust underfoot, Billy Sunday—that was his real name—attracted an audience estimated at a hundred million.

Sunday’s typical revival sermon shows his idiomatic language and common-man approach to sermonizing. With direct address and humorous imagery (“a face so long you could eat oatmeal out of the end of a gas pipe”), Sunday testifies to the conversions he has witnessed, a method aimed to bring more converts “to the front.”

***

THE TROUBLE WITH
many men is that they have got just enough religion to make them miserable. If there is not joy in religion, you have got a leak in your religion. Some haven’t religion enough to pay their debts. Would that I might have a hook and for every debt that you left unpaid I might jerk off a piece of clothing. If I did some of you fellows would have not anything on but a celluloid collar and a pair of socks.

Some of you have not got religion enough to have family prayer. Some of you haven’t got religion enough to take the beer bottles out of your cellar and throw them in the alley. You haven’t got religion enough to tell the proprietor of the red light, “No, you can’t rent my house after the first of June”; to tell the saloonkeeper, “You can’t have my house when the lease runs out”; and I want to tell you that the man who rents his
property to a saloonkeeper is as low-down as the saloonkeeper. The trouble with you is that you are so taken up with business, with politics, with making money, with your lodges, and each and every one is so dependent on the other, that you are scared to death to come out and live **clean-cut for God Almighty.

The matter with a lot of you people is that your religion is not complete. Why, I am almost afraid to make some folks laugh for fear that I will be arrested for breaking a costly piece of antique bric-a-brac.

To see some people you would think that the essential of orthodox Christianity is to have a face so long you could eat oatmeal out of the end of a gas pipe. Sister, that is not religion; I want to tell you that the smiling, happy, sunny-faced religion will win more people to Jesus Christ than the miserable old, grim-faced kind will in ten years.

I pity anyone who can’t laugh. There must be something wrong with their religion or their lives. The devil can’t laugh.

I have seen women come down the aisle by the thousands, men who drank whisky enough to sink a ship. I see fallen women come to the front by scores and hundreds, and I have seen them go away cleansed by the power of God.