e in which Ney and the Old Guard
staggered on at Mont St. Jean.

Let us redeem our creeds at the front, and prove the welding of our
weapons and their tempered blades upon every evil way and darkness and
superstition that afflict humankind.

And have you not seen with moistened eyes and beating hearts the
pathetic surgings of harassed and broken sons and daughters of
God toward His son Jesus Christ? I have watched them until I felt
constrained to cry aloud and spare not; and while viewing them here
and yonder, and refusing to be localized in our love toward them, have
not our spirits been rebuked, have they not known fear for ourselves,
have they not pensively echoed the charge of some that we have no real
roots in democracy, but are as plants in pots, and not as oaks in the
soil of earth? If independency is a barrier to the essence of which it
is supposedly a form, if superiority shuts us off from assimilation
with popular movements and delivers us over to cliques, then these
churches of ours[1] will end in a record of shame and confusion.
While we are busy in trivial things, our energy and our might will be
deflected, and the living God will hand over the crusade to those who
have proven worthier and who knew the day when it did come, even the
day of their visitation.

[Footnote 1: The special reference is to the Congregational churches.]

We must arise with courage undismayed, and join in the cry of the
ages:

When wilt thou save the people,
O God of mercy, when?
The people! Lord, the people!
Not crowns, nor thrones, but men.

Flower of thy heart, O Lord, are they,
Their heritage a sunless day.
Let them like weeds not fade away;
Lord, save the people.

If our hearts are thus enlarged, we shall run in the way of His
commandments; fatherhood and brotherhood and sonship will not be
symbols, shibboleths of pious intercourse, but ways of God's reaching
out through us for the total brotherhood. We shall silence the caviler
against missions; we shall raise the negro in the face of those who
say he can not be raised; we shall see the latter-day miracles, and
the lame man healed and rejoicing at the Temple gate. Thus may the
breath of God sweep across our pastorates and dismiss timidity,
provincialism, ease, and narrowness of outlook. And thus may the power
be demonstrated as of heaven because it is the power unto salvation.
Let us fear not men who shall die, nor be content to fill our peacef