p. 268 | Mrs. Stowe's Reward by William B. Wright

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 23, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 17.

Mrs. Stowe's Reward.

By William B. Wright

Of all the great agents by whom the destruction of slavery was accomplished, Mrs. Stowe seems to the eyes of poetic justice the most abundantly rewarded.

Garrison died in the dawn of the new day. Phillips lived remote from the battlefield so nobly won. New foes charged upon Beecher before he had taken breath from the battle. The gentle Whittier, loved and honored by all, looks from his harbor upon the stormy past, and sees afar the liberated captives. But Mrs. Stowe alone has been permitted, not only to see the desire of her eyes, but to reap with her own hands the harvest she planted; to realize in her own experience that the reward of the faithful, the entering into the joy of their Lord, is, for having served one city well, to be permitted to serve other cities; for having helped our brethren, to be permitted to help them still. For another cabin has arisen on the banks of the St. John. It has long radiated faith, hope, and charity among the needy. She who helped to break the fetters of iron has been suffered to break many a chain of ignorance and degradation.

Mrs. Stowe was among the first, after the war, to take up her residence in Florida. There she began to do for the neglected—white and black—what she had done so effectively for the scholarly students at Andover. Her influence pervaded her neighborhood. The professor, her husband, preached every Sunday to the large company collected by her efforts. He gave gratuitously to this humble work the time and energy which was vainly sought with offers of large emolument by editors of encyclopedias and periodicals in England and America.

A church building became a necessity. Mrs. Stowe left her sunny home at Mandarin to supply one. At the serious peril of her health she spent an entire winter giving readings in the Northern States. The proceeds of these readings, with some assistance given at her personal solicitation, sufficed to build the church. In it the rich and the poor—the emancipated slave and the emancipated master—meet together, the Lord the maker of them both. Of late the infirmities of age have prevented the professor from preaching, and a younger man has taken pastoral charge. Each Sunday Mrs. Stowe, surrounded by a large class of blacks, devotes to them the heart and brain which wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

When it was needed, she dipped her pen in ink and made a million readers realize their duties to those who lived in Uncle Tom's cabin. When she had done that so well that the world wondered, she entered the cabin itself and began to instruct with living voice those who could not read the written word—and this she has been doing so unobtrusively, so gently, that it is not strange if angels have seen and admired.—Rev. W. B. Wright, in Cottage Hearth.