This ought ye to do, but
there are other things which you ought not to leave undone. The war
cannot be finished by sheets and pillow-cases. Sometimes I am tempted
to believe that it cannot be finished till we have flung them all away.
When I read of the Rebels fighting bare-headed, bare-footed, haggard,
and unshorn, in rags and filth,--fighting bravely, heroically,
successfully,--I am ready to make a burnt-offering of our stacks of
clothing. I feel and fear that we must come down, as they have done,
to a recklessness of all incidentals, down to the rough and rugged
fastnesses of life, down to the very gates of death itself, before we
shall be ready and worthy to win victories. Yet it is not so, for
the hardest fights the earth has ever known have been made by the
delicate-handed and purple-robed. So, in the ultimate analysis, it is
neither gold-lace nor rags that overpower obstacles, but the fiery
soul that consumes both in the intensity of its furnace-heat, bending
impossibilities to the ends of its passionate purpose.
This soul of fire is what I wish to see kindled in our women,--burning
white and strong and steady, through all weakness, timidity,
vacillation, treachery in Church or State or press or parlor, scorching,
blasting, annihilating whatsoever loveth and maketh a lie,--extinguished
by no tempest of defeat, no drizzle of delay, but glowing on its
steadfast path till it shall have cleared through the abomination of our
desolation a highway for the Prince of Peace.
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