Uncle Tom's Cabin eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 704 pages of information about Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Uncle Tom's Cabin eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 704 pages of information about Uncle Tom's Cabin.

     “’T was something like the burst from death to life;
     From the grave’s cerements to the robes of heaven;
     From sin’s dominion, and from passion’s strife,
     To the pure freedom of a soul forgiven;
     Where all the bonds of death and hell are riven,
     And mortal puts on immortality,
     When Mercy’s hand hath turned the golden key,
     And Mercy’s voice hath said, Rejoice, thy soul is free."

The little party were soon guided, by Mrs. Smyth, to the hospitable abode of a good missionary, whom Christian charity has placed here as a shepherd to the outcast and wandering, who are constantly finding an asylum on this shore.

Who can speak the blessedness of that first day of freedom?  Is not the sense of liberty a higher and a finer one than any of the five?  To move, speak and breathe,—­go out and come in unwatched, and free from danger!  Who can speak the blessings of that rest which comes down on the free man’s pillow, under laws which insure to him the rights that God has given to man?  How fair and precious to that mother was that sleeping child’s face, endeared by the memory of a thousand dangers!  How impossible was it to sleep, in the exuberant possession of such blessedness!  And yet, these two had not one acre of ground,—­not a roof that they could call their own,—­they had spent their all, to the last dollar.  They had nothing more than the birds of the air, or the flowers of the field,—­yet they could not sleep for joy.  “O, ye who take freedom from man, with what words shall ye answer it to God?”

CHAPTER XXXVIII

The Victory

“Thanks be unto God, who giveth us the victory."*

     * I Cor. 15:57.

Have not many of us, in the weary way of life, felt, in some hours, how far easier it were to die than to live?

The martyr, when faced even by a death of bodily anguish and horror, finds in the very terror of his doom a strong stimulant and tonic.  There is a vivid excitement, a thrill and fervor, which may carry through any crisis of suffering that is the birth-hour of eternal glory and rest.

But to live,—­to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually smothered,—­this long and wasting heart-martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after hour,—­this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or woman.

When Tom stood face to face with his persecutor, and heard his threats, and thought in his very soul that his hour was come, his heart swelled bravely in him, and he thought he could bear torture and fire, bear anything, with the vision of Jesus and heaven but just a step beyond; but, when he was gone, and the present excitement passed off, came back the pain of his bruised and weary limbs,—­came back the sense of his utterly degraded, hopeless, forlorn estate; and the day passed wearily enough.

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Uncle Tom's Cabin from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.