'There Is A Time to Preach & A Time to Fight' - John Peter Muhlenberg : American Minute with Bill Federer

John Peter Gabriel Muhlenburg was memorialized in a poem by Thomas Buchanan Read, titled “The Rising,” published in William Holmes McGuffey Fifth Eclectic Reader (Cincinnati & New York: Van Antwerp, Bragg & Co., revised ed., 1879, Lesson LXV, pp. 200-204):

…Within its shade of elm and oak
The church of Berkley Manor stood:
There Sunday found the rural folk,
And some esteemed of gentle blood.

In vain their feet with loitering tread
Passed ‘mid the graves where rank is naught:
All could not read the lesson taught
In that republic of the dead.

The pastor rose: the prayer was strong;
The psalm was warrior David’s song;
The text, a few short words of might,-
“The Lord of Hosts shall arm the right!”

He spoke of wrongs too long endured,
Of sacred rights to be secured;
Then from his patriot tongue of flame
The startling words for Freedom came.

The stirring sentences he spake
Compelled the heart to glow or quake,

And, rising on his theme’s broad wing,
And grasping in his nervous hand
The imaginary battle-brand,
In face of death he dared to fling
Defiance to a tyrant king.

Even as he spoke, his frame renewed
In eloquence of attitude,

Rose, as it seemed, a shoulder higher;
Then swept his kindling glance of fire
From startled pew to breathless choir;

When suddenly his mantle wide
His hands impatient flung aside,
And, lo! He met their wondering eyes
Complete in all a warrior’s guise.
A moment there was awful pause,-

When Berkley cried, “Cease, traitor! Cease!
God’s temple is the house of peace!”

The other shouted, “Nay, not so,
When God is with our righteous cause:
His holiest places then are ours,
His temples are our forts and towers
That frown upon the tyrant foe:

In this the dawn of Freedom’s day
There is a time to fight and pray!”

And now before the open door-
The warrior priest had ordered so-
The enlisting trumpet’s sudden soar
Rang through the chapel, o’er and o’er,
Its long reverberating blow,

So loud and clear, it seemed the ear
Of dusty death must wake and hear.
And there the startling drum and fife
Fired the living with fiercer life;

While overhead with wild increase,
Forgetting its ancient toll of peace,
The great bell swung as ne’er before:
It seemed as it would never cease;

And every word its ardor flung
From off its jubilant iron tongue
Was, “War! War! War!”

“Who dares”-this was the patriot’s cry,
As striding from the desk he came -
“Come out with me, in Freedom’s name,
For her to live, for her to die?”

A hundred hands flung up reply,
A hundred voices answered “I!”

In Washington, D.C., at the corner of Connecticut Ave. and Ellicott St., there is a bronze memorial to John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg, with the inscription:

JOHN PETER GABRIEL MUHLENBERG
1746-1807
SERVING
HIS CHURCH
HIS COUNTRY
HIS STATE

…THE “FIGHTING PARSON OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION”

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