"CHRISTIAN READER, -After the foregoing address, I need not put thee to much more trouble: only I shall say, that he must needs be a great stranger in our Israel, or sadly smitten with that epidemic plague of indifferency, which hath infected many of this generation, to a benumbing of them, and rendering them insensible and unconcerned in the matters of God, and of their own souls, and sunk deep in the gulf of dreadful inconsideration, who seeth not, or taketh no notice of, nor is troubled at the manifest and terrible appearances of the inexpressibly great hazard, our all, as Christians in this life, is this day exposed into. I mean the mystery of the gospel of the grace of God, wherein the exceeding riches of his grace, in his kindness towards us, through Christ Jesus, hath been shown. We have enjoyed for a considerable time, a clear and powerful dispensation hereof, in great purity and plenty; but, alas is it not manifest to all, that will not willfully shut their eyes, that this mercy and goodness of God hath been wickedly abused, and the pure administration of his grace and love perfidiously sinned away, by this apostate generation. " John Brown was an American abolitionist, who advocated and practiced armed insurrection as a means to end all slavery. He led the Pottawatomie Massacre in 1856 in Bleeding Kansas and made his name in the unsuccessful raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859. President Abraham Lincoln said he was a "misguided fanatic" and Brown has been called "the most controversial of all 19th-century Americans." Brown's actions are often referred to as "patriotic treason", depicting both sides of the argument.
