The reveille / by John F.W. Ware.

  • John F. W. Ware
Date:
1864
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The reveille / by John F.W. Ware. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    such as the world had never seen. It chained, not men’s bodies, but their souls. It robbed them of that which was most precious, — right to their own opinions. It walled up the kingdom of Heaven, then opened a little postern gate, and if you would pay the priest, and acknowledge the infallibility of the Church, and recognize the Pope as Christ’s vicegerent, you might be admitted. Under this terrible thrall men’s consciences, as their hopes, slept. But the monk Luther startled the sleepers. The reveille was sounded, and with no uncertain sound. Men everywhere sprung up at it, alert, delighted, recognizing it as the call to life, for which they long had sighed ; and the power of the Church was broken, and Protestantism born. I remember that after one of those earlier terrible fights at the West — was it at Fort Donelson ? — a writer tells us that when he woke in the morning he could see no signs of an army about him, but, so far as his eye could reach, only long, low mounds covered with snow. Then suddenly the morning drum, the quick roll, the reveille ! and every mound of snow sprung into the air; the snow-wreaths fell away, and revealed the full-armed, ready soldier. Weary with their struggle, they had sunk to slum- ber as they stood, and the night storm had wrapped them in its mantle. So it has seemed to me that waking cry of Luther startled the sleepers from cold, deathlike slumber, and revealed them to them-
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