Posted on Friday, April 11, 2025
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by AMAC, Robert B. Charles
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9 Comments
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Some truths are so simple. Stephen Grellet was…an extraordinary sort of revolutionary, the kind people gravitate to. He was authentic, a plain talker, able to make sense of a world fraying around him. Courageous, he wondered without limit, and then wandered where his wondering led. His life is worth revisiting; some of what he discovered and taught is timeless.
Born in 1773 to a French nobleman, Grellet was born into a nation about to go to war with itself, torn in all directions, preparing to riot, burn churches, kill nobles and Catholics, including their king.
Historians may shake their heads, since Grellet was not a traditional French revolutionary, beheading people for their faith, money, or status, rallying mobs to kill “in the name of democracy.”
You might call him a counter-revolutionary, since his guiding principles – even very young – were respect for life and institutions, a search for truth, seeking to act with honor, and defend the right.
Little known, he attended an elite military school and at 17, when the French Revolution broke out, he neither fled nor joined it, but volunteered to protect the King. In 1789, Louis XVI restarted the famed King’s Musketeers. Grellet was there.
As wild violence swept France, Grellet was captured, sentenced to be shot, but escaped. By 1795, he was in America, specifically in New York. George Washington was America’s sitting President, and he sat in what was then our capital, New York.
Grellet now began his second quest for truth. Swept by the Holy Spirit, as he later described it, he turned from Musketeer to Quaker, became a missionary, devoted his life to ministering in prisons and hospitals, saving and uplifting the condemned and dying.
Time now weighed on him. He felt an urgency to use it well, the sort of urgency we sometimes feel when the world closes in, pressures mount, and we wonder if we are living to our full purpose.
He got married, had one daughter, gave all he could to his family, and then looked wider. From the prisons and hospitals of America he returned to Europe, became a missionary, ended up praying with Pope Pious VII in Rome, himself once arrested and nearly killed. Grellet prayed with Russia’s Czar Alexander I, who was fighting the Napoleonic Wars, wanted to free the serfs.
In short, Grellet went where he felt he was needed, eventually returning to America, where he ministered in hospitals and prisons, spoke out against slavery. In 1855, the year Lincoln just missed being a US Senator, setting in motion his rise to the presidency in 1860, Steven Grellet died.
If nothing more, Grellet’s life was one of high purpose, lifted by helping others, distilling simple truths. He saw that quest as the “real thing” in a world of ideological disorientation and senseless violence, often no moral compass. He knew honor, service, peace of heart, being equal to his time.
And that, in a nutshell, is what the quest – even now – really amounts to, getting up each day, shaking off the aches and pains, giving thanks, and figuring out how we can be equal to our time.
Of all the words Stephen Grellet wrote, the ones that always stick with me are these. “I shall pass this way but once. Any good that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.” Some truths are so simple.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC. Robert Charles has also just released an uplifting new book, “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024).
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