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The first martyr outside the city wall, bruised and battered by the cruel stones, remembered his Master's death, and shaped his own to be like it.
But two days, and the dread choice had to be made the crisis in the life of Alfgar, a crisis which has its parallel in the lives of many around us approached, and he had to choose between Christ and Odin, between the death of the martyr and apostasy. He walked to and fro upon the ramparts, after his father left him, in the growing darkness, feebly illuminated by the light of a new moon.
This was the first of the long train of enigmas with which Christianity entered the discussion. And there went with it a peculiarity of which I shall have to speak more markedly, as a note of all Christian notions, but which distinctly began in this one. The Christian attitude to the martyr and the suicide was not what is so often affirmed in modern morals. It was not a matter of degree.
Sleeman says that it was usual to play music at the suttee, but that the white man's notion that this was to drown the screams of the martyr is not correct; that it had a quite different purpose.
Thus early did the notion that there are things worth more than life enter his head, though he could not foresee that he was to be himself a martyr and that the day of his death would before long be commemorated in his country to recall to his countrymen lessons as important to their national existence as his mother's precept was for his childish welfare.
"I had scarcely lain down in bed, ere these thoughts took such possession of me, that sleep for once in my life was out of the question; and then the misery of getting up at four in the morning putting on your clothes by the flickering light of the porter's candle getting your boots on the wrong feet, and all that kind of annoyance I am sure I fretted myself into the feeling of a downright martyr before an hour was over.
Obedience to God or reason can originally recommend itself to a man only as the surest and ultimately least painful way of balancing his aims and synthesizing his desires. So necessary is this sanction even to the most impetuous natures, that no martyr would go to the stake if he did not believe that the powers of nature, in the day of judgment, would be on his side.
"I've no fancy for leading round a lovely martyr in chains. Especially as you're about as healthy and well placed a person as I know. And you'll feel as well as you look when you've had something to eat."
"She's expecting her eighth baby any day now, and not a stitch has she ready for it. The other seven have wore out all she made for the first, and she's never had time or strength or spirit to make any more. That woman is a martyr, Mrs. Blythe, believe ME. When she married Fred Proctor I knew how it would turn out. He was one of your wicked, fascinating men.
Then came the tidings that Blake, with the prisoners from No Wood Creek and Bear Cliff was close at hand, and everybody looked with eager eyes for the coming across the snowy prairie of that homeward bound convoy that big village of the Sioux, with its distinguished captives, wounded and unwounded; one of the former, the young sub-chief Eagle Wing, alias Moreau; one of the latter a self-constituted martyr, since she was under no official restraint, Nanette Flower, hovering ever about the litter bearing that sullen and still defiant brave, whose side she refused to leave.
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