Dr. Furness had taken part in the public meeting held on the day of John Brown’s execution, to offer prayers for the heroic soul that was then passing away, and had gone with two or three others, to the rail-road station, to receive the martyr’s body, when it was brought from the gallows by Mr. (afterwards General) Tyndale and Mr. McKim, and it was generally feared that he and his church would receive the brunt of Slavery’s first blow.  The air was thick with vague apprehension and rumor, so much so, that some of Dr. Furness’s devoted parishioners, who followed his abolitionism but not his non-resistance, came armed to church, uncertain what an hour might bring forth, or in what shape of mob violence or assassination the blow would fall.  Few of Dr. Furness’s hearers will forget his sermon of December 16, 1860, so full was it of prophetic warning, and saddened by the thought of the fate which might be in store for him and his congregation.  It was printed in the “Evening Bulletin,” and made a deep impression on the public outside of his own church, and was reprinted in full, in the Boston “Atlas.”

“But the trouble cannot be escaped.  It must come.  But we can put it off.  By annihilating free speech; by forbidding the utterance of a word in the pulpit and by the press, for the rights of man; by hurling back into the jaws of oppression, the fugitive gasping for his sacred liberty; by recognizing the right of one man to buy and sell other men; by spreading the blasting curse of despotism over the whole soil of the nation, you may allay the brutal frenzy of a handful of southern slave-masters; you may win back the cotton States to cease from threatening you with secession, and to plant their feet upon your necks, and so evade the trouble that now menaces us.  Then you may live on the few years that are left you, and perhaps—­it is not certain—­we may be permitted to make a little more money and die in our beds.  But no, friends, I am mistaken.  We cannot put the trouble off.  Or, we put it off in its present shape, only that it may take another and more terrible form.  If, to get rid of the present alarm, we concede all that makes it worth while to live—­and nothing less will avail—­perhaps those who can deliberately make such a concession, will not feel the degradation, but, stripped of all honor and manhood, they may eat as heartily and sleep as soundly as ever.  But the degradation is not the less, but the greater, for our unconsciousness of it.  The trouble which we shall then bring upon ourselves, is a trouble in comparison with which the loss of all things but honor is a glorious gain, and a violent death for right’s sake on the scaffold, or by the hands of a mob, peace and joy and victory.

Since we are thus placed, and there is no alternative for us of the free States, but to meet the trouble that is upon us, or by base concessions and compromises to bring upon ourselves a far greater trouble, in the name of God, let