Old-Thinker News | May 2, 2012

Comment from Old-Thinker News: I found this in a little book I discovered at the local flea market. It is titled “Readings and Recitations for Winter Evenings,” published in 1895.

What is a minority?

By John B. Gough

What is a minority? The chosen heroes of this earth have been in a minority. There is not a social, political, or religious privilege that you enjoy to-day that was not bought for you by the blood and tears and patient suffering of the minority. It is the minority that have vindicated humanity in every struggle. It is a minority that have stood in the van of every moral conflict, and achieved all that is noble in the history of the world. You will find that each generation has been always busy in gathering up the scattered ashes of the martyred heroes of the past, to deposit them in the golden urn of a nation’s history. Look at Scotland, where they are erecting monuments-to whom? -to the Covenanters. Ah, they were in a minority. Read their history, if you can, without the blood tingling to the tips of your fingers. These were in the minority, that, through blood, and tears, and bootings and scourgings-dying the waters with their blood, and staining the heather with their gore-fought the glorious battle of religious freedom.

Minority! if a man stands up for the right, though the right be on the scaffold, while the wrong sits in the seat of government; if he stands for right, though he eat, with right and truth, a wretched crust; if he walk with obloquy and scorn in the by-lanes and streets, while the falsehood and wrong ruffle it in silken attire, let him remember that whatever the right and truth are there are always

“Troops of beautiful tall angels”

gathered round him, and God Himself stands within the dim future, and keeps watch over his own! If a man stands for the right and the truth, though every man’s finger be pointed at him, though every woman’s lip be curled at him in scorn, he stands in a majority; for God and good angels are with him, and greater are they that are for him than all they that be against him.