59 Sermon Illustrations on Suffering

"We were some ten miles from Marseilles," says an officer, "when we saw a small vessel anchored in a narrow bay; and, fierce for prize-money, we manned a boat, and pushed forward till we came within pistol-shot of the craft, without seeing any one except an old woman seated in the door of a cottage at some distance. Just then a musket-shot from behind a rock laid our bowman a corpse, another disabled our marine, a third tore his cravat from the lieutenant's neck, and a fourth crippled the coxswain's arm. Still we saw no one; and, exasperated by these discharges, we gave three cheers, and, pulling for the place whence they seemed to come, saw at length a man and a boy running from us. We interchanged several shots in vain, until the lieutenant, resting his musket on a rock, shot the child while in the act of handing a cartridge to the man. The father instantly threw down his musket, and fell by the side of his son. We seized his musket; but he paid no attention to us. When we bade him follow us, he heeded us not; but, with the child's head in his lap, he kept wiping away the blood that oozed from the wound in his forehead, and neither wept nor spoke, but watched the last chilling shiver of his boy with an eye of inexpressible sadness. Then he jumped from the ground with a frantic air; the marine brought his bayonet to the charge, and the miserable father tried to run upon its point; but the marine, dropping his musket, encircled him in his arms. We desired him to lead us to the cottage. The marine carried the corpse, and the father walked by its side in silence, till we suddenly came upon the rear of the cottage. The old woman was still at her wheel, and, on discovering her son a prisoner, gave a shriek which announced to a lovely female in the hut that something painful had occurred. She rushed to assist her mother—her eye fell first upon her dead son in the arms of an enemy; and, seizing the boy, she tore him from the marine, kissed him more like a maniac than a mother, and, giving one deep, piercing sigh, fell at her mother's feet. We could stand it no longer, and hastened away; but that scene I can never blot from my memory."

We could not expect the heathen to denounce a custom so emphatically their own; yet we find the wisest and best of them reprobating it in the strongest terms. CICERO speaks of war, "contention by violence, as belonging to the brutes," and complains bitterly of its effects on liberal arts and peaceful pursuits. "All our noble studies, all our reputation at the bar, all our professional assiduities, are stricken from our hands as soon as the alarm of war is sounded. Wisdom itself, the mistress of affairs, is driven from the field. Force bears sway. The statesman is despised; the grim soldier alone is caressed. Legal proceedings cease. Claims are asserted and prosecuted, not according to law, but by force of arms."

SENECA, the great moralist of antiquity, is still more strong in his condemnation of war. "How are we to treat our fellow-creatures? Shall we not spare the effusion of blood? How small a matter not to hurt him to whom we are bound by every obligation to do all the good in our power!—Some deeds, which are considered as villanous while capable of being prevented, become honorable and glorious when they rise above the control of law. The very things which, if men had done them in their private capacity, they would expiate with their lives, we extol when perpetrated in regimentals at the bidding of a general. We punish murders and massacres committed among private persons; but what do we with wars, the glorious crime of murdering whole nations? Here avarice and cruelty know no bounds; enormities forbidden in private persons, are actually enjoined by legislatures, and every species of barbarity authorized by decrees of the senate, and votes of the people."

At the foot of a lofty hill, writes a correspondent of an American periodical, crowned to the summit with the richest verdure, a miserable mud cabin peeped out from among encircling bushwood and straggling elms. A stillness seemed to lie around the spot, and I felt an indescribable sensation creep over me as I drew near the house of mourning. I paused at the entrance. A low murmuring kind of sound stole upon my ear, and again all was hushed. I gently opened the door, and bent myself forward, as if to ascertain, unnoticed, what was passing within. I saw at the first glance that death had been there. The apartment on the threshold of which I now stood, was of the meanest construction; it was without a single piece of furniture that deserved the name. In one corner of it a dead body lay stretched out, very slightly covered with a tattered coat, and a cold kind of horrible feeling ran through my very soul; and it would probably have shrunk away from any further investigation, if I had not been suddenly arrested by a soft sweet voice, mingled with a low groan, somewhat like a death-rattle, that seemed to issue from the same apartment. I turned my head around, and beheld a sight that chained me, as if by magic, to the ground. Oh, it was heart thrilling to behold! On a bundle of straw, a woman, somewhat in years, lay apparently in the agonies of death. Near her head hung, reclining in deep sorrow, a beautiful little half naked child. On one side, a lovely girl, about thirteen years of age knelt; a Bible clasped in her thin slender hands, with which she was endeavoring to comfort her dying mother. I instantly recognized two of my Sabbath school children. The meeting was affecting. They had been without food for some days. The mother died next day, in the triumph of that faith which her little daughter taught her out of the Bible. The girls grew up to be respectable members of society, and one of them has been a teacher in a Sabbath school for several years.

"One day," says a military man, "I was on parade when preparation was making for a kind of punishment called the gauntlet. All the soldiers of the regiment were placed in two ranks facing each other, and about five feet apart. To each soldier was given a stick three feet long, or more. I could not bear to stay and witness the execution; but I was afterwards informed that the culprit, stripped naked to his waist, and his hands tied before him, was marched between the ranks, preceded by a soldier walking backwards with a bayonet at the sufferer's breast, to keep him from going too fast. In this way he was struck once by every soldier, officers going down on the outside of the ranks to see that each man did his duty! and, if any one was merely suspected of not laying on hard enough, he received over his own head a blow from the officer's cane. Sometimes the criminal has to retrace his steps; and, as a regiment consists of six hundred or a thousand men, and some German regiments of two thousand, he must receive from twelve hundred to two or even four thousand blows! The punishment often proves fatal; and to such a pitch of despair were those soldiers carried by their sufferings, that many of them committed suicide; and one poor fellow shot himself near my lodgings."

Mark the severity visited upon the slightest offences. "A midshipman named Gale, a most rascally, unprincipled fellow, found his pocket handkerchief in possession of one of the crew. He charged the man with stealing it. It was in vain that the poor wretch asserted that he found it under his hammock. He was reported as a thief; a court-matual sat upon him, and returned the shamefully disproportionate sentence of three hundred lashes through the fleet, and one year's imprisonment! Nor was that sentence a dead letter; the unhappy man endured it to the letter. Fifty were laid on alongside the Macedonian, in conformity with the common practice of inflicting the most strokes at the first ship, in order that the gory back of the criminal may strike the more terror into the crews of the other ships. This poor tortured man bore two hundred and twenty, and was pronounced by the attending surgeon unfit to receive the rest. Galled, beuised, and agonized as he was, he besought them to suffer the infliction of the remaining eighty, that he might not be called to pass through the degrading scene again; but this prayer was denied! He was brought on board, and when his wounds were healed, the captain, Shylock-like, determined to have the whole pound of flesh, ordered him to receive the remainder!