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THE INDEPENDENT.
July 27, 1898.
A railroad corporation maims or slaughters a passen-
geroracitizen, and has to pay for it. The State, like
other human forces, too frequently makes mistakes.
When it does, it ought to be held responsible for the con-
sequences...
This woman, whose name we shall be long in forget-
ting, for her misery’s sake, is acquitted, and set free.
The State (we say) has done its tardy best torigbt its own
enormous wrong upon her,
But who arraigns the erring State? Who calls Massa-
chusetts to the bar? What eminent lawyer takes the
case of Lizzie Andrew Borden versus the Common-
wealth?
If that girl should dedicate her remarkable force of
character, and the influential friends whom her misfor-
tunes have raised up for her, to an effort to secure from
the Legislature the passage of a law allowing her to in-
stitute such a prosecution as she is morally entitled to—
what would be the foregone result? It is too easy to re-
ply.’ She will never do it, But I hope the time will come,
when some heroic soul—some man with nerve of iron
and heart of fire—will carry such a case out to a tri-
umphant conclusion that shall become historic prece-
dent. That, and perhaps only that, would give guards
to the law that should render the possibility of such aw-
ful mischances almost null. Indictments would be
served with a holy caution and a righteous economy, if
the prosecuting officers were subject to equivalent dam-
ages for their own mistakes.
Reparation ? Commonwealth of Massachusetts ! Look
upon this acquitted citizen, the prisoner of your author-
ity and the victim of your mistake!
Silent and accusing woman! Look upon the Com-
monwealth ! What reparation can fact or fancy find for
her? What atonement can the mind or the might of
the law conceive that it should dare to offer her ?
Does your late acquittal set her where she was before
your heavy hand fell upon her young life? Can the
manly words of all your noble judges, and all your hon-
est juries put back into her blackened home the woman
whom you haled from it? Is there aman of you who
presumes to believe that he can measure the misery of a
woman in humiliation, in shame, in anguish such as
hers?
In all the course of the plea which he made for her,
the voice of her distinguished counsel, the ex-Governor
of Massachusetts, broke but once. Ile faltered when he
urged upon the jury to save her ‘for the honor of the
old Bay State.” A hundredfold more than the life and
honor of the citizen is at stake in the progress of legal
reform for which this brief word bas dared to plead,
It is the life and the honor, the glory,and the justness
of English Law; created and conserved ‘not to suspect,
but to presume innocent ; not to convict, but to protect ;
not to destroy, but tosave. Commonwealth of Massa-
chusetts! Look upon the Prisoner !
East GLOUCESTER, Mass,
CRUELTY OLD AND NEW.
BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY.
THE average Cook’s tourist, who bas seen and exam-
ined a medieval building, certainly carries away no love
for it. So great is the power of formed prejudice, so
ready is a suspicion or a misunderstanding to strengthen
itself, like an orchid upon air, that an ancient Italian
house, honeycombed with dim passages, and stairs, and
alcoves innumerable, means to the narrow mind of some
Americans, nothing beyond possible, nay, probable, vice
and crime ; it means potions and waylayings, chains and
cells, the rack and the fagots for the stake; with the
bones of nuns calcining the hollow walls, and, perhaps,
the specter of the Pope himself whisking his evil and in-
visible wings overhead! The best to he said of the
architecture of the Dark Ages, by half-educated people,
is that it may be imposing. but has a wicked look. They
quite forget that our own slanderous terrors lend it the
look it never had. Were we to stop to analyze its hate-
fulness, it would appear to consist in the fact that it is
not ours, - Is anything truer than that in the matter of
priding ourselves upon increased respect for one an-
other's feelings. modern eeciety poses as a huge and ab-
surd Pharisee? Weare kinder than our ancestors, for
the same reason that we are more universally expert in
the three R's; literally because we cannot help it, be-
cause converging circumstances have constrained us to
achange. If we breg now of our mutual tolerations,
and affect to despise the hearty old hangers and par-
boilers of simpler ages, we are running into the arms of
a logical and bistorical irrelevancy. The exterior differ-
ence is none of our making ; and the proportions of guilt
or innocence in the original case, remain, for us, the
same. Forif the Incarnation involve anything at all,
it must involve the deepening and widening of human
charities, era on era, The latest born of a perfect-
ible race, if he be a Christian, and true to the law of
spiritual development, ought to be, in the rich light of
his dynastic experience, the consummate neighbor ; the
most helpful and tender, the most enduring and pro-
tecting, the most understanding and reconciling man
among men, A flaw of unkindness, in him, ranks, rela-
tively, with the crude outrageous passion of his convert
brother, Clovis, A.p. 500, who smote down a follower as
he might a twig ora fly.
It is obvious that faith, love and war were the main
interests of life in Europe up to the Renaissance, when
other forces began to diffuse themselves and smooth the
face of the earth. Faith, love and war bred their ele-
mental strifes and enormities; and the consequences
have vanished with the causes, of which two have well-
nigh ceased to actuate the mind of man. We are better;
but it is largely because we have lived longer and have
learned indifference. We cannot cherish, in like degree,
the innocent, clannish craze for uniformity of opinion,
nor believe ourselves public benefactors when we put
dissenting spirits out of the room. Rose bushes nourish
slugs; and, even so, creeds have nourished fanaticism,
inwardly deploring it all the while. We must cast no
blame oncreeds. But it may be advisable to remember
that the system for which Catholicism is often held re-
sponsible—the abominable Jew-baiting of the twelfth
century and the equally abominable heretic-baiting in
Spain at the close of the fifteenth—were beaten upon
their own ground by the Penal Laws of modern and
Protestant England ; ‘ the most hateful things,” as Lord
Chief Justice Coleridge said in a recent speech, ‘‘ known
from the beginning of the world ”—a code which habitu-
ally took, not life indeed, but with a subtler assassina-
tion took from life for generations every prop it had to
lean on, every opportunity of learning, wealth, ambi-
tion, civic distinction or social safety, until a man should
deny the outlawed religion of his fathers. What do we
mean by this uuthinking cry of cruelty with which we
pursue the long-ago dead? Every day shows us that we
have been too hasty and too severe. While we find out
no new criminals and tyrants, reputations are being
built from their ruins, thanks to records newly read
and conscientious biography. Even Lucretia Borgia,
the worst type of the transitional time, comes forth a
noble woman and a genius, and no poisoner; and Sir
Thomas More turns out very consistently as the gentlest
of saints and statesmen, who did not flog the estrays of
the Reformation in his Chelsea garden !
It is much to be feared that our mingled scorn and
compassion for our medieval kinsfolk is composed of
cant pure and simple. They had no drainage, ard they
believed in brownies; but they can give us a lesson in
our present uttermost need, since there was no problem
of a pauper class in their cities, where the poor were, in
a measure never since known, the wards and children of
the rich. And it is well, beside the spectacle which is
ever before us of the extraordinary use which they
found for thumbscrews and wild horses, to place that
other spectacle of heroic charity which, like it, has van-
ished from our less contrasted civilization. Persecutions,
alas, were a normal thing; but so was the self-sacrifice
which made Martin halve his only cloak with a beggar,
Elizabeth lay a leper in her palace bed, Vincent replace
a galley slave at the oars and Francis go out alone into
the Umbrian hills, in the sweetest of legends, to convert
the cannibal wolf with pity and with a Gospel text.
These were not professed philanthropists like the little
souls who decry the conditions which bred them. No;
the world which smirks upon its own most flourishing
bull-fights, and cattle transportations, and child-labor
laws. and vivisection, and sunderings of the marriage
bond in almshouses, and Russian espionages and exiles,
and rides from Berlin to Vienna; even the more just
and loving West, which has no interest abroad in abol-
ishing the African slave-trade and none at home in ad-
justing the Indian peace with honor or in removing the
political disabilities of women, can hardly afford, with
gracefulness, to sniff at the “cruel” past. Migbt not
the accused, were it as wordy as the accuser, fitly thun-
der back the immortal indictment of boys, ‘‘ You're
another"?
AUBURNDALE, Mass.
-_———+ —__——
THE PRAYER THAT HAS POWER.
BY THEODORE L. CUYLER, D.D.
ALL of God's mighty men and women have been
mighty in prayer. When Martin Luther was in the
mid-valley of his conflict with the Man of Sin he used to
say that he could not get on without three hours a day
in prayer, Charles G. Fianey’s grip on God gave him
a tremendous grip ou sinners’ hearts. The greatest
preacher of our times—Spurgeon—had pre-eminently the
‘gift of the knees”; the last prayer I ever heard him
utter (at his own family worship) was one of the most
wots%rful that I ever listened to; it revealed the hiding
of his power. Abrabam Lincoln once said: “I have
been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelm-
ing conviction that I had nothere else to go; my own
wisdom and that of all around me seemed insufficient for
the day.” -
But what is prayer? Has every prayer power with
God? Let us endeavor to get some clearideas on that point.
Some people seem to regard prayer as the rehearsal of a
set form of solemn words, learned largely from the
ible, or aliturgy ; and when uttered they are only from
the throat outward. Genuine prayer is a believing
soul's direct converse with God. Phillips Brooks has
condensed it into four words—a ‘‘true wieh sent God.
ward.” By it, adoration, confession of sin and petition
for mercies and gifts ascend to the Throne, and by
means of it infinite blessings are brought down from
Heaven. The pull of our prayermay not move the Ever-
lasting Throne, but—like the pull on a line from the bow.
of a boat—it may draw us into closer fellowship with
God and fuller harmony with his wise and holy will.
1, This is the first characteristic of the prayer that has
power. ‘Delight thyself in the Lord, and he shall give
thee the desires of thy heart.” A great many prayers
are born of selfishness, and are too much like dictation
ordemand. None of God’s promises are unconditional ;
and we have no such assets to our credit that we have a
right to draw our checks and demand that God shall pay
them, The indispensable quality of all right asking isa
right spirit toward our Heavenly Father. When a
soul feels such an entire submissiveness toward God that
it delights in seeing him reign, and his glory advanced,
it may fearlessly pour out its desires; for then the de-
sires of God and the desires of that sincere submissive
soul will agree. God loves to give to them who love to
let him have his way ; they find their happiness in the
chime of their own desires with the will of God.
James and John once came to Jesus and made to him
the amazing request that he should ‘do for us whatso-
ever we shall desire”; and then they bolted out the peti-
tion that he would place one of them on his right hand
aud the other on his left hand when he set up his impe-
rial government at Jerusalem! They were as selfish
office-seekers as any who now pester our President at
Washington. As long as these self-seeking disciples ~
sought only their own glory, Christ could not give
them the askings of their ambitious hearts, By and by
when their hearts: had been renewed by the Holy Spirit
and they bad become so consecrated to Christ that they
were in complete chime with him, they were not afraid to
pour out their deepest desires. James declares that if
we ‘‘do not ask amiss,” God will * give liberally.” John
declares that ‘* whatsoever we ask, we receive of him,
because we keep his commandments and do those things
that are pleasing in his sight,” Just as soon as those
two Christians found their supreme happiness in Christ
and his cause they received the desires of their hearts.
2. The second trait of prevailing prayer is that it aims
at a mark, and knows what itis after. When we enter
a store or shop we ask the salesman to hand us the par-
ticular article we want. There isan enormous amount
of pointless, prayerless praying done in our devotional
meetings; it begins with nothing and ends nowhere.
The model prayers mentioned inthe Bible were short
and rightto the mark, ‘‘God be merciful to me asin-
ner!” ‘Lord save me!” cries sinking Peter, ‘* Come
down, ere my child die!” exclaims the heart-stricken
nobleman, Old Rowland Hill used tosay, ‘I like short,
ejaculatory prayer: it reaches Heaven before the Devil
can get a shot at it.”
3. In the next place, the prayer that has power with God
must be a prepaid prayer. If we expect a letter to reach
its destination we puta stamp on it; otherwise it goes
to the Dead-letter Office. There is what may be called
a Dead-prayer Office, and thousands of well-worded pe-
titions get buried up there. All of God’s promises have
their conditions ; we must comply with those conditions
or we cannot expect the blessings coupled with the
promises. No farmer is such an idiot as to look fora
crop of wheat unless he bas plowed and sowed his fields.
In prayer, we must first be sure that we are doing our
part if we expect God to do his part, There ia a legiti-
mate sense in which every Christian should do his ut-
most for the answering of his own prayers. Whena
certain venerable minister was called on to pray ina
missionary convention he first fumbled in his pocket,
and when he had tossed the coin into the plate he said,
“T cannot pray until I have given something.” He pre-
paid his prayer. For the churches in these days to pray
“Thy kingdom come,” and then spend more money on
jewelry and cigars tban in the enterprise of foreign mis-
sions, looks almost like a solemn farce, God has no
blessings for stingy pockets. When I hear requests for
prayer for the conversion of a son or daughter I say to
myself, How much is that parent doing to win that
child to Christ? The godly wife who makes her daily
life attractive to her husband has a right to ask God for
the conversion of that husban1; she is co-operating
with the Holy Spirit, and prepaying her heart’s request.
God never defaults; but he requires that we prove our
faith by our works, and that we never ask for a blessing
that we are not ready to labor for. Genuine, self-deny-
ing, prevailing prayer is always prepaid ; the offerer of
it is always willing to make any sacrifice to secure the
blessing which his soul desires, °
4, Another essential of the prayer that has power with
God is that it be the prayer of faith, and be offered in
the name of Jesus Christ. ‘“ Whatsoever ye shall ask in
my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glori-
fied in the Son.” The chief “wrestling” that we are to
do is not with any reluctance on God’s part; it is with
the obstacles which sin and unbelief putin our pathway,
What God orders we must submit to uncomplainingly ;
but we must never submit to what God can better, Never
utiegit, vege in any pious Purpose or holy under-
your pathway The faith, th: _ ok the orks out of
commonly cong: 3 f ‘faith crea ae rays
on Conquers; for such faith creates such a con-
hear ct inings that our Heavenly Father can wisely
the trium, hs ot strivi t ae * magnificent epic are
firmament of Bible ttors azn’ es faitht The
! ible story blazes with answers to prayer,
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