Chapter XXXI: Part II

The tidings of his death, long expected, gave a shock to the whole world. Governments, rulers, eminent statesmen, and scholars from all civilized nations gave sincere tokens of sympathy. For the hour sympathy rolled as a wave over all our own land. It closed the last furrow of war, it extinguished the last prejudice, it effaced the last vestige of hatred, and cursed shall be the hand that shall bring them back.

Johnson and Buckner on one side, Sherman and Sheridan upon the other, of his bier, he went to the tomb, a silent symbol that liberty had conquered slavery; patriotism, rebellion; and peace, war. He rests in peace. No drum or cannon shall disturb his rest. Sleep, hero, until another trumpet shall shake the heavens and the earth――then come forth to glory and immortality!

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FROM “THE SPARKS OF NATURE.”

PATRIOTISM, in our day, is made to be an argument for all public wrong and all private meanness. For the sake of country a man is told to yield everything that makes the land honorable. For the sake of country a man must submit to every ignominy that will lead to the ruin of the State through disgrace of the citizen. There never was a man so unpatriotic as Christ was. Old Jerusalem ought to have been everything to Him. The laws and institutions of His country ought to have been more to Him than all the men in His country. They were not, and the Jews hated Him; but the common people, like the ocean waters, moved in tides towards His heavenly attraction wherever He went.

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When men begin their prayers with, “O thou omnipotent, omnipresent, all-seeing, ever-living, blessed Potentate, Lord God Jehovah!” I should think they would take breath. Think of a man in his family, hurried for his breakfast, praying in such a strain. He has a note coming due, and it is going to be paid to-day, and he feels buoyant; and he goes down on his knees like a cricket on the hearth, and piles up these majestically moving phrases about God. Then he goes on to say that he is a sinner; he is proud to say that he is a sinner. Then he asks for his daily bread. He has it; and he can always ask for it when he has it. Then he jumps up, and goes over to the city. He comes back at night, and goes through a similar wordy form of “evening prayers;” and he is called “a praying man!” A _♦praying man_? I might as well call myself an ornithologist, because I eat chicken once in awhile for my dinner.

♦ ‘prayiny’ replaced with ‘praying’

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When I see how much has been written of those who have lived; how the Greeks preserved every saying of Plato’s; how Boswell followed Johnson, gathering up every leaf that fell from that rugged old oak, and pasting it away,――I almost regret that one of the disciples had not been a recording angel, to preserve the odor and richness of every word of Christ. When John says, “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written,” it affects me more profoundly than when I think of the destruction of the Alexandrian Library, or the perishing of Grecian art in Athens or Byzantium. The creations of Phidias were cold stone, overlaid by warm thought; but Christ described His own creations when He said, “The words that I speak unto you, they are life.” The leaving out of these things from the New Testament, though divinely wise, seems, to my yearning, not so much the unaccomplishment of noble things as the destruction of great treasures, which had already had oral life, but failed of incarnation in literature.

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JOHN B. GOUGH.

NO one who ever heard this great natural orator of the Temperance cause can forget the impression he made. It was not simply “a voice crying,” it was a whole man speaking, out of his very life, and every part of him contributed something to the effect. His face, his hands, his body, all joined together with his voice to give expression to his thoughts. Without education, with no elocutionary training, he was, nevertheless, an orator of the first rank, for he knew how to play on all the keys of human nature, and he moved all classes of listeners. He was born in England in 1817. Having lost his father at the age of twelve, he came to America to make his way. He was at first successful, but later troubles heaped up on him, and he drifted into a life of hopeless dissipation. He made a wretched living by going from one drinking house to another, singing songs and giving comic impersonations. He tried to get on the stage, for which he had a passion, but his dissolute life made such a career impossible. In 1839 he married, and tried to work, but his old habits were too strong for him, and a few years later he lost his wife and child and sank into a woeful condition. He used to describe how, in the delirium which came upon him at this period, the tools with which he tried to work became serpents and crawled in his hands. In 1842, when at the lowest point of dissipation, he received some kindness from a Quaker, who induced him to sign the pledge. Once he broke it through the influence of old companions, but he immediately recovered control and made a public confession.

Possessed henceforth with a great desire to devote himself to the cause of Temperance, he started out at once as a lecturer and tramped from place to place, holding meetings and stirring his listeners with his eloquence, which was of an unusual sort.

During the first year of his travels he spoke 386 times on the one subject which lay at his heart. He possessed a remarkable power of imitation, and he could move the audience to bursts of laughter, or go down to the depths of pathos and draw tears from the hardest hearts. His power on the platform steadily increased and he soon had a national reputation.

Ten years after his change of life, he was invited to visit England in the interests of Temperance Reform, and his first lecture in Exeter Hall produced a sensation. The call for lectures came from all the cities, and he spent two years in that country.

No event of his life showed his power more clearly than did his address at Oxford, where his voice was at first drowned by the hisses and cat-calls of the students. He, however, held his own and conquered his audience and came through triumphantly, so that at a subsequent visit at Oxford he was received with distinction. He addressed over 5,000 audiences during the first seventeen years of his lecture travels, and he always succeeded in carrying deep conviction. He was not a constructive reformer, but he used all his powers to reform individuals by reaching their consciences and wills. In this work he was eminently successful. Later in his life he also lectured on other subjects, and became one of the most popular attractions for lyceums. He always chose subjects which would give full scope for his powers of eloquence, and he was almost certain to touch upon his great life-theme. His most frequent lectures were on “Eloquence and Orators” and “Peculiar People,” and he never failed to give a fund of anecdotes, told with rare skill and imitation.

He lived for years at West Boylston, Massachusetts, and as he prospered through his lecture-work he gathered books about him and lived a joyous, happy life, writing and talking with his many friends.

His published works (some of which have been translated into French, Dutch, Scandinavian and Tamil) are “Autobiography” (1846); “Orations” (1854); “Temperance Addresses” (1870); “Temperance Lectures” (1879), and “Sunlight and Shadow; or, Gleanings from My Life-Work” (1880).

While lecturing at Frankford, Pennsylvania, February 18, 1886, he was stricken down with cerebral apoplexy and lapsed into unconsciousness, soon followed by death. He had just uttered the words “Young man, keep your record clean.”

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WATER AND RUM.

The following apostrophe on Water and execration on Rum, by Mr.
John B. Gough, was never published in full till after his death.
He furnished it to a young friend many years ago, who promised
not to publish it while he was on the lecture platform.

WATER! There is no poison in that cup; no fiendish spirit dwells beneath those crystal drops to lure you and me and all of us to ruin; no spectral shadows play upon its waveless surface; no widows’ groans or orphans’ tears rise to God from those placid fountains; misery, crime, wretchedness, woe, want, and rags come not within the hallowed precincts where cold water reigns supreme. Pure now as when it left its native heaven, giving vigor to our youth, strength to our manhood, and solace to our old age. Cold water is beautiful and bright and pure everywhere. In the moonlight fountains and the sunny rills; in the warbling brook and the giant river; in the deep tangled wildwood and the cataract’s spray; in the hand of beauty or on the lips of manhood――cold water is beautiful everywhere.

Rum! There is a poison in that cup. There is a serpent in that cup whose sting is madness and whose embrace is death. There dwells beneath that smiling surface a fiendish spirit which for centuries has been wandering over the earth, carrying on a war of desolation and destruction against mankind, blighting and mildewing the noblest affections of the heart, and corrupting with its foul breath the tide of human life and changing the glad, green earth into a lazar house. Gaze on it! But shudder as you gaze! Those sparkling drops are murder in disguise; so quiet now, yet widows’ groans and orphans’ tears and maniacs’ yells are in that cup. The worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched are in that cup.

Peace and hope and love and truth dwell not within that fiery circle where dwells that desolating monster which men call rum. Corrupt now as when it left its native hell, giving fire to the eye, madness to the brain, and ruin to the soul. Rum is vile and deadly and accursed everywhere. The poet would liken it in its fiery glow to the flames that flicker around the abode of the damned. The theologian would point you to the drunkard’s doom, while the historian would unfold the dark record of the past and point you to the fate of empires and kingdoms lured to ruin by the siren song of the tempter, and sleeping now in cold obscurity, the wrecks of what once were great, grand and glorious. Yes, rum is corrupt and vile and deadly, and accursed everywhere. Fit type and semblance of all earthly corruption!