ca, as yet, who loved his
fellow-man so well, and treated him so tenderly. He lived for him. He
took up his life and he laid it down for him. What sort of violence is
that which is encouraged, not by soldiers, but by peaceable citizens,
not so much by laymen as by ministers of the Gospel, not so much by the
fighting sects as by the Quakers, and not so much by Quaker men as by
Quaker women?

This event advertises me that there is such a fact as death,--the
possibility of a man's dying. It seems as if no man had ever died in
America before; for in order to die you must first have lived. I don't
believe in the hearses, and palls, and funerals that they have had.
There was no death in the case, because there had been no life; they
merely rotted or sloughed off, pretty much as they had rotted or
sloughed along. No temple's veil was rent, only a hole dug somewhere.
Let the dead bury their dead. The best of them fairly ran down like a
clock. Franklin,--Washington,--they were let off without dying; they
were merely missing one day. I hear a good many pretend that they are
going to die; or that they have died, for aught that I know. Nonsense!
I'll defy them to do it. They haven't got life enough in them. They'll
deliquesce like fungi, and keep a hundred eulogists mopping the spot
where they left off. Only half a dozen or so have died since the world
began. Do you think that you are going to die, sir? No! there's no
hope of you. You haven't got your lesson yet. You've got to stay after
school. We make a needless ado about capital punishment,--taking lives,
when there is no life to take. Memento mori! We don't understand that
sublime sentence which some worthy got sculptured on his gravestone
once. We've interpreted it in a grovelling and snivelling sense; we've
wholly forgotten how to die.

But be sure you do die nevertheless. Do your work, and finish it. If you
know how to begin, you will know when to end.

These men, in teaching us how to die, have at the same time taught us
how to live. If this man's acts and words do not create a revival, it
will be the severest possible satire on the acts and words that do. It
is the best news that America has ever heard. It has already quickened
the feeble pulse of the North, and infused more and more generous blood
into her veins and heart, than any number of years of what is called
commercial and political prosperity could. How many a man who was lately
contemplating suicide has now so