Joseph Hall Quotes
Death did not first strike Adam, the first sinful man, nor Cain, the first hypocrite, but Abel, the innocent and righteous. The first soul that met with death, overcame death; the first soul that parted from earth went to heaven. Death argues not displeasure, because he whom God loved best dies first, and the murderer is punished with living.
Hall, Joseph. Contemplations on the Historical Passages of the Old and New Testaments. 1612. The Works of the Right Reverend Father in God, Joseph Hall, D.D., edited by Josiah Pratt, vol. 1, C. Whittingham, 1808, p. 19.
This great patriotic hymn was initially written as a poem and published in The Atlantic Monthly, February 1862. This last verse called for men to be willing to die to for the freedom of other men (the slaves) just as Christ had been willing to die to save men. This call was amazingly successful and struck a chord for many on the Union side for whom the Civil War was a holy war. Ironically, this powerful last verse is not familiar to most Americans who know and often sing the first verse.
Joseph Hall was an English bishop, satirist and moralist. His contemporaries knew him as a devotional writer, and a high-profile controversialist of the early 1640s. In church politics, he tended in fact to a middle way.
