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sacredly cherish a line from your hand.
Believing God reigns, I feel to view these recent events as his providence, which in time may be fully manifested, although at present inscrutable.
A host of friends love and remember you, and I speak for many in my immediate neighborhood.
Farewell, dear brother.
God bless you.
John Brown's reply to a Christian conservative.
My dear Sir: Your kind mention of some things in my conduct here, which you approve, is very comforting indeed to my mind.
Yet I am conscious that you do me no more than justice.
I do certainly feel that through divine grace I have endeavored to be “faithful in a very few things,” mingling with even these much of imperfection.
I am certainly “unworthy even to suffer affliction with the people of God;” yet in infinite grace he has thus honored me. May the same grace enable me to serve him in a “new obedience,” through my little remainder of this life, and to rejoice in him forever.
I cannot feel that God will suffer even the poorest service we may any of us render him or his cause to be lost or in vain.
I do feel, “dear brother,” that I am wonderfully “strengthened from on high.”
May I use that strength in “showing his strength unto this generation,” and his power to every one that is to come.
I am most grateful for your assurance that my poor, shattered, heart-broken I “family will not be forgotten.”
I have long tried to recommend them to ( “the God of my fathers.”
I have many opportunities for faithful plain dealing with the more powerful, influential, and intelligent classes in this region, which, I trust, are not entirely misimproved.
I humbly trust that I firmly believe that i “God reigns,” and I think I can truly say, “Let the earth rejoice.”
May God take care of his own cause, and of his own great name, as well as of those who love their neighbors.
Farewell!
Yours, in truth, John Brown.
The next letter was addressed to his old schoolmaster, in Litchfield, Connecticut, and is thus introduced by the Rev. L. W. Bacon:
My aged friend, the Rev. H. L. Vaill, of this place, remembers John Brown as having been under his instruction in the year 1817, at Morris Academy.
He was a godly youth, laboring to recover from his disadvantages of early education, in the hope of entering the ministry of the gospel.
Since then, the teacher and pupil have met but once to take “ a retrospective look over the route by which God had led them.”
But a short time since, Mr. Vaill wrote to Brown, in his
