I typed this up from a book I've been reading. I thought it was worth sharing for the purpose of inspiring devotion to God.


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John Brown Jr. was a spirited and headstrong boy, as Brown himself had been. The father took pride in his eldest son but also knew it was his duty to discipline him, both for John's own future welfare and as an example to his younger sons of the diligence and obedience that he expected of them all. Brown had assigned John Jr. shifts in the tannery's grinding mill. John's job was to shovel tanbark into the mill and to make sure that the old blind horse that was harnessed to the grinder kept circling the chute, thus turning the mechanism that reduce the bark to powder. It was tedious work, and John often shirked it, sneaking out to play with Jason and Owen or daydreaming at the tannery window. Several times Brown discovered John in his indolence. Finally he spoke with his son in his characteristic corrective mode that combined rebuke and Socratic dialogue. Did John understand why his father needed a good supply of ground bark? Did he believe that he was cultivating a habit of faithful industry by working in this manner? Had he not often heard and even recited the scripture from Ephesians about serving “not with eyeservice” but “from the heart”? When these admonitions failed to mend the boy's conduct, Brown devised an account book in which John's faults or debits—disobeying mother, telling a lie, unfaithfulness at work—were each assigned a number of lashes, which could be cancelled by credits earned by his acts of obedience and diligence. One Sunday after the morning service, Brown quietly informed John Jr. that his account was hopelessly overdrawn. The time had arrived for reckoning.

Father and son walked together from the house to the tannery and climbed the ladder to its second floor, where the tanned skins hung on hooks to dry. Brown carried the pocket-sized account book—coarse, grainy squares of paper stitched together along their left edge—in which John's liabilities had been tallied in pencil. John carried a long blue-beech switch, already peeled, that his father had handed him in silence. In the tannery's finishing room, they sat side by side on a bench-high stack of cured hides. Holding the book before them, Brown reviewed the entries in John's debit column one by one, reciting the circumstances of each offense in calm, methodical detail. After each recitation, he looked into his son's eyes and asked him whether the account was fair. Did John wish to offer any amendment? Any explanation? Any unrecorded worthy actions to help balance his ledger? The boy at first responded with half-hearted attempts to cast his conduct in a less unfavorable light, attempts that led to discussions in which his offered excuses and extenuations were agreed, in the end, to be poor ones. In the latter stages of the audit, John Jr. responded to his father's questions only with mournful shakes of his head and a steady flow of tears.

“Is a reckoning justified, then, John?” asked Brown at last.

“Yes, Father.”

John Jr. stood in front of the hides and bent over them. His forearms rested on the top of the pile, supporting his weight. He clenched his fists against the coming pain. His brain had not yet registered the high, thing whistle when he felt the first sting of the beech switch. He gritted his teeth as more strokes fell on his buttocks and thighs. Six. Seven. Eight. His thin trousers did little to cushion the blows, but he was thankful that Father had not asked him to remove them. He wondered if they would be torn and need mending. Then he realized that the strokes had stopped at eight. He had been due twenty-five. He turned, dry-eyed, and looked back over his shoulder. His father had put the switch down and was removing the worn, shiny high-collared coat in which he had preached the morning's sermon. Brown folded the jacket carefully and proceeded to unbutton and remove his white linen shirt, laying in on top of the coat. Picking up the switch, he told John to rise and handed it to him. Then he knelt and bent his bare back over the hides.

“Seventeen more lashes are due, John.” he said, “and I will take them myself. I am your father, and it is on me that blame must fall for failing to teach you your duties.”

Grief and guilt rose in John Jr., and he begged his father to let him bear the full amount himself, but Brown was resolute.

“When you know that I suffer in body as well as in mind for your faults, perhaps you will learn to be more careful,” he said. “Now, lay it on John.” The boy burst into choking sobs, but when the command was repeated, applied the switch reluctantly to his father's back. “Harder! harder! harder!” Brown instructed him. Beads of blood from the cutting tip of the switch trickled down his back when Brown raised himself from the floor once his son had delivered the final stroke. “After that,” John Jr. concluded his last retelling of the story sixty years later, “nothing could ever persuade me that my father could possibly do anything wrong.”
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- from Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America, by Evan Carton