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The patience of hope, the fidelity of love, the martyr-spirit that could bear torture, yet not swerve from its integrity, are all to find their exceeding great reward. I did not look for it so soon. Far in advance of the present I saw the long road each had to travel, still stretching its weary length. But suddenly the pilgrimage has ended.
Such a sacrifice, accompanied, as it must be in the present state of society, with a thousand other sacrifices of reputation, friendships, popular pleasures, and social favor, is an exercise of the highest virtue, a demonstration of the greatest magnanimity, and is accompanied or followed with an intensity of satisfaction which none but the martyr-spirit of truth can conceive.
"Those who have had much to do with students, especially with the female portion," said a Normal School Report a few years since, "well know the sort of martyr-spirit that extensively prevails, how ready they often are to sacrifice everything for the sake of a good lesson, how false are their notions of true economy in mental labor, ... sacrificing their physical natures most unscrupulously to their intellectual.
Time wore on, and showed that the power of the martyr-spirit is not always that of the champion of worldly success, for it was now but a struggle between George Lindsay, with a stained name, and the stern demon of misfortune. He was at length overtaken by poverty, which, as affecting Effie, preyed so relentlessly upon his spirits, that within two years he followed John Carr to the grave.
Besides, it is well known that the anticipation of an unjust accusation is far more agitating to a virtuous man than the reality, which is sure to arouse that strange martyr-spirit wherewith injustice always arms its victim, and supported by which alone even the most timid men have often suffered with fortitude, and the most unworthy died with dignity.
The past and the present were dove-tailed. >From the Bohemian Brethren came the strict discipline, the ministerial succession, and the martyr-spirit; from Zinzendorf the idea of "Church within the Church," the stress laid on the great doctrine of reconciliation through the blood of Christ, and the fiery missionary enthusiasm.
In bare justice to brave, misguided Humanity; in daily touch with beings in so many respects little lower than the imagined angels; in dispassionate survey of history's lurid record of distorted loyalty staining our old, sad earth with life-blood of opposing loyalty, while each side fights for an idea; in view of the zeal which fires the martyr-spirit to endure all that equal zeal can inflict; in contemplation of the ever-raging enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, the Ormuzd and the Ahriman in man; in view even of that dismal experiment indifferently termed "making the best of both worlds," and "serving God and Mammon " in view of all these things, I cannot think it is anything worse than a locally-seated and curable ignorance which makes men eager to subvert a human equality, self-evident as human variety, and impregnable as any mathematical axiom.
Her attitude, however, indicated intentness of thought, though not disturbing thought. "Rose," she said at length, "I grow less at peace with myself as the years move onward." "You speak from some passing state of mind," suggested Mrs. Everet. "No; from a gradually forming permanent state. Ten years ago I looked back upon the past in a stern, self-sustaining, martyr-spirit.
The possibility of living in holy familiarity with God the Father, and with our Lord Jesus Christ, and with the Holy Spirit, learning the thoughts of God, feeling the thrill of His power, viewing His far-reaching plans, and co-operating in His glorious work is this only a fascinating dream? Nay, the Covenanters of the martyr-spirit found it to be a realization.
There lived no spark of your ascendant worth, When o'er your land the victor Moslem swept; No patriot then the sons of freedom led, In mountain-pass devotedly to die; The martyr-spirit of resolve was fled, And the high soul's unconquered buoyancy; And by your graves, and on your battle-plains, Warriors, your children knelt, to wear the stranger's chains.
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