The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1885-10-26

battle, and got it not. They were homesick, and
received no message from their loved ones.
They died in barns, in bushes. in ditches-the
ouzzards OF the summer heat the only attend
ants on their obsequies. No one bat the infinite
GOD who knows everything, knows the ten
thousandth part of the length. and breadth, and
depth, and heighth OF anguish of Northern and
Southern battleields. Why did these fathers
leave their children and go to the front, and why
dld these young men, postponing the marriage
day. start out into the probabilities of never
coming back? For the country they died. Life
for life. Blood for blood. Substitution.
But we need not go so far. What is that mon
ument in Greenwood 1t is to the doctors who
fell in the Southern epidemics. Why gol Were
there not enough sick to be attended in these
northern latitudes? Oh, yes; but the doctor puts
a few medical books in his valise. and some walls
of medicine. and leaves his patients here in the
hands of other physicians, and takes the rail
train. Before he gets to the infected regions he
passes crowded rail-trains, regular and extra.
taking the flying and affrighted popu-
lations. He arrives in a city over which
a great horror is brooding. He goes
from couch to couch, feeling of pulse and study
ing symptoms and prescribing, day after day,
night after night, until a fellow physician says:
Doctor, you had better 60 home and rest; you
look miserable" Bat he cannot rest while so
many are suffering. On and on, until some
morning finds him in a delirium in which he
talks of home, and then rises and says he must
go and look after those patents. He is told to
lie down, but he fights his attendants until he
falls back, and is weaker and weaker, and dies
for people with whom he had no kinship and far
away from his family. and is hastily put away in
a strangers tomb; and only the fifth part of a
newspaper line tells as of his sacrifice, his name
just mentioned among five. Yet he has touched
the furthest height Of sublimity in that three
weeks of humanitarian service. He goes straight
as an arrow to the bosom of Him who said: II
was sick and We visited me-" Life for life.
Blood for blood. Substitution.
In the legal profession / see the same principle
of self-sacrifce. In 1916. William Freeman, a
pauperized and idiotic negro. was. at Auburn,
N. Y. on trial for murder. He had slain the
entire Van Nest family. The foamIng wrath of
the community could be kept off him only by
armed constables. Who would volunteer to be
his counsel? No attorney wanted to sacrifice his
popularity by such an ungrateful task. All were
silent save one, a young lawyer with feeble
voice that could hardly be heard outside the bar.
pale, and thin. and awkward 1t was William
IL. Seward, who saw that the prisoner was idi-
otto and irresponsible, and ought to be put in an
asylum rather than put to death, the heroic
counsel ~uttering these beautiful words: 81 speak
now in the hearing of q people who have
prejudged the prisoner and condemned me for
pleading in his behalf. He is a convict, a pau
per, a negro without intellect. sense or emotion.
My child with an affectionats smile disarmS my
careworn face of its frown whenever L cross my
threshold. The beggar in the street obliges me
to give because he says, God bless you! as |
pass. My dog caresses me with fondness if l
will but smile on him. My horse recognizes me
when 1 fill his manger. What reward, what
gratitude. what sympathy and affection can | ex-
pect hereg There the prisoner sits. Look at
him.. Look at the assemblage around you. Lis
ten to their Unsurpassed censures and their ok
cited fears, and tell me where among my neigh
bors or my fellow men, where even in his heart
l can expect to find a sentiment, a thought, not
to say of reward, or of acknowledgment, or even
of recognition2 = y Gentlemen, you may
think of this evidence what you please, bring in
what verdict you can, but l asseverate before
heaven and you that to the best of nv knowl-
edge and belief the prisoner at the bar does
not at this moment know why it is that nv
shadow falls on you instead of his own" The
gallows got its victim, but the post mortem ex-
animation of the poor creasure showed to all the
surgeons and to all the world that the public were
wrong and William H. Seward was right. and that
hard, stony step of obloGuy i'll the Auburn court
room was the first step of the stairs of fame, up
which he went to the top, or to within one step
of the top, that last denied him through the
treachery of American politics. Nothing sub
than William Ell. Seward. without reward, stand
ing between the fury of the p~opulace and the
loathsome imbecile. Substitution.
In the realm of the fine arts there was as re-
markable an instance. A brilliant but hyper
criticised painter, Joseph William Turner, was
met by a volley of abuse from all the art gal
leries of Europe. His paintings, which have
since won the applause of all civilized nations
THE Fifth Plague of Egypt" Fishermen on a
Lee Shore in Squally Weather" Calais Pier"
''The Sun Rising Through Mist" and Dido
Building Carthage" were then targets for critics
to shoot at. In defense of this outrageously
abused man. a young author of twenty-four
years, just one year out of college, came forth
with his pen and wrote the ablest and most ia
nous essays on art that the world ever saw, or
ever will see-"John Ruskin's Modern Painters. ~
For seventeen years, this author fought the
battles of the maltreated artist, and after. in
poverty and Observation-Disclosures, the painter had
died, and the public tried to undo their cruelties
toward him by giving him a big funeral and
burial at st. Paurs Cathedral. his old-time friend
took out Of a tin box nineteen thousand
pieces of paper containing drawings by the old
painter, and, through many weary and uncom-
pensated months. assorted and arranged them
for public observation. People say John Ruskin,
in his old days, is cross, misanthropic and NOR
bid. Whatever he may do that he ought not to
do. and whatever he may say tina he ought not
to say between now and his death, he will leave
this world insolvent as far as it has any capacity
to pay this authors pen for its chivalric and
Christian defense of poor painters pencil. John
Ruskin for William Turner. Blood for blood.
Substitution.
AN EXALTING PRINCIPLE.
What an exalting principle this which leads
one to suffer for another. Nothing So kindles
enthusiasm, or awakens eloquence, or chimes
poetic canto, or moves nations. That principle
is the dominant one in our religion-Christ the
martyr, Christ the celestial hero, Christ the de-
fender, Christ the substitute. No new principle,
for it was as old as human nature; but now on a
grander, wider, higher. deeper and more world
resembling scale. The shepherd boy as cham
piop for Israel, with a sling toppled the giant of
Philistine braggadocio in the dust, but here is
another David who for all the armies of churches
militant and trium plant. hurls the Goliath Of
hell into defeat, the crash of his brazen armor
like an explosion at He'll Gate. Abraham had at
Gods command agreed to sacrifice his son Isaac,
and the same God just in time had provided a
ram of the thicket as a substitute; but here is
another Isaac bound to the altar, and no hand
arrests the sharp edges of liberation and death,
and the universe shivers, and quakes, and recoils,
and groans at the horror. All good men have
for centuries been trying to tell who this substi-
tute was like, and every comparison. inspired and