in England, to remove from an injured Christian and humane community the unjust aspersions you have cast upon it in this matter. It is useless for us to seek through the Northern press to overtake and correct the errors, owing to the prejudice in that section against us. I ask it of you, however, in assurance that the high character and love of truth which have marked "Tom Brown's School Days" and the "Manliness of Christ" will not withhold the truth, and willingly offend the innocent.
It seems strange that one accustomed to weighing evidence should be misled by Redpath's book, whose extravagance classes it among works of romance and fiction, and awakens the suspicion of pure sensationalism. Lying before me is another volume, "Reminiscences of Old John Brown," by G. W. Brown, M. D., Rockford, Illinois, 1880. The author of this book was a co-worker with John Brown in Kansas, in full sympathy in politics and with him, but not in his wicked policy of violence, murder and massacre. He asserts and proves that John Brown was the responsible and guilty author of the "Pottawattomie massacre" of five families in Kansas, with torments and cruelties worthy of savagery. The Hon. Eli Thayer, of Massachusetts, an abolitionist, in review of Dr. Brown's book, says: "The writer's confidence has been many times abused, but never in any other instance so grossly and wickedly abused as by John Brown. * * * But whether sane or insane, he acted well the part of heavy villain in the Kansas drama." (Italics his). We know, and records prove, that John Brown, after full and fair trial before the proper civil tribunal was duly convicted of murders, including a negro slave's.
You will hardly feel surprised, therefore, if people of the South gaze in amazement at finding that you introduce such a man's character and behaviour into your book on the "Manliness of Christ," or that Christian readers, familiar with the facts of his imprisonment and death, feel offended in seeing him brought into comparison with Christ! The very copy of the Bible, owned and used by him in jail here, lies before me. Its passages touching "oppression," etc., etc., are heavily and frequently penciled, but no pencil mark distinguishes or emphasizes a single passage that is distinctively Christian. He was religious, but not Christian: religion was the crutch on which his fanaticism walked. It was the "higher law" religion, under whose baleful influence many tears have been wrung from the innocent, and the buttresses of governments have fairly crumbled, and the order and stability of society have been made to tremble on your con-
