Jenny Geddes (Part One)

From: Jenny Geddes, or Presbyterianism and its great Conflict with Despotism,
by Rev. W. P. Breed, D.D., Philadelphia, Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1869.

Writers of human annals have been accustomed to divide their subjects into two general classes. The one comprises those which are truly and in themselves in a high sense historic, affecting widely and powerfully the interests of men and nations. The other embraces agencies and events whose significance is too trivial, whose influence is too feeble or plays in too narrow a circle to entitle them to any marked place upon the historic page.

It is evident, however, that events exceedingly minute in themselves may, by the force they borrow from circumstances, the principles they symbolize, the incidents to which they give rise, or the interests they come to affect, emerge into true historic dignity.

Thus history has not disdained to record that in the infancy of the Massachusetts colony, Canonicus, the haughty chief of the Naragansetts, sent to Plymouth a bundle of arrows bound together with the skin of a rattlesnake, and that Governor Bradford filled the skin with powder and shot and sent it back to his Indian majesty. Not that either Indian or arrows, powder or shot, or their exchange was a matter of any moment, but in this case the affair was a declaration of war on the one hand and an acceptance of the challenge on the other — a war which, had it been prosecuted, might have annihilated either an Indian tribe or the infant colony in which lay embosomed a nation and a civilization.

A few words from the lips of a monarch are in themselves no more than the shaking of a leaf in the wind, but spoken in the ear of a foreign ambassador at his court may not only shock the finances of a continent, but may bring nations into hostile and bloody collision.

The advent of a little seed upon the shore of some island in the sea is in itself an event lost in its own insignificance. But if that seed embosom the germ of some nutritious fruit, and, springing up into prolific maturity, in the course of years reproduce its kind until the whole island is supplied with its productions, its landing on those shores comes to be an event of historic magnitude and importance. Its fruit may not only feed thousands of native islanders, but, becoming an article of commerce, enrich them, build them houses, improve their domestic habits, cover their nakedness with comely habiliments and clothe the island in the rich attire of an advanced civilization. Nay, more, it may awaken the cupidity of greedy foreigners, and tempt the navies of distant powers to take forcible possession of those fertile fields, and other powers, jealous of this intrusion, may protest, and follow their protest with armed resistance; and thus out of the bosom of that little seed shall grow events the record of which shall fill many a bloody page of human history.

The personage named upon our title-page was one of so humble a rank in life, of such grade of intellectual power and culture, and of such general insignificance, that the mention of her as a subject of discourse might seem only an excuse for literary trifling. She was the consort of no monarch — the daughter of no queenly or titled mother. She was no cultivated Aspasia, fit to lecture on eloquence in the presence of a Socrates and captivate the heart of a Pericles. Neither was she a Hannah More, nor a Florence Nightingale, nor a brilliant beauty, dazzling the eyes of some royal court. Far from it; and yet, if we mistake not, it will be found that the part she played in life's drama, though of a very humble and uncouth sort, was, if not a prolific cause, at least the symbol and instrument of principles and events second in importance to very few in the course of human history.

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Copyright 1999 © First Presbyterian Church of Rowlett
See a PDF file of this article in The Blue Banner, v8#11-12.

Source: http://www.fpcr.org/blue_banner_articles/jgeddes.htm