ers.

Which obey most strikingly those commands of the Gospel, "When ye are reviled revile not again; Bless them that curse you, and pray for them that despitefully use you; Love your enemies?" I have talked with many a fugitive and freedman, and never heard one breathe a word of harshness against his oppressors. When telling the story of their sufferings, horrible as they were, no railing accusation was raised, none was felt against those worse than murderWhat does all this betoken? It shows us where the sweetest fountains of grace are in this land. It shows us who are most like the apostles and martyrs of the primitive ages. These did not surpass our martyrs in faith and love, as they could not in suffering. They shall be exalted into equal honor. God intends to make that the choice blood of America. Not our proud Anglo-Saxon, not the Celtic, or German, or any other of the representative races, shall climb to the top of American society, but the African. He has the most of Christ. He is the nearest God. If he maintain his piety in prosperity that he has in adversity, if he grows in grace as he grows in culture, then shall he be the leaven of our too hard and impious mass. He shall season our worldliness, selfishness, and irreligion with his heavenly salt. In humility shall he be raised to sovereignty.

As the Israelites were delivered, not merely because of God's hatred of slavery, and sympathy with its victims, but because they were His chosen people, out of whom He intended to make for Himself a name in all the earth; so has He delivered these from their house of bondage, that He might set them among princes; that He might make for Himself a people humble, holy, faithful; the best expression on earth of His divinest nature.

3. He has emancipated them in order that He may thus reunite all mankind in one blessed brotherhood of blood and love. A descendant of this same Pharaoh gladly accepted

the hand and the throne of a descendant of these same slaves, and lives in history only because of this alliance. So shall it be in America. The daughters of these haughty Southerners, who have shrunk from their touch as leprous, shall yet gratefully accept the offers of the sons of their father's slaves, and their parents and themselves shall feel their house exalted by the alliance. That day is near at hand. Not ten years may pass ere such marriages will be frequent. So completely will society be reversed, and the true relations of humanity appear in that clime.

In fact, their independence could have hardly delayed this result, so ripe was that region for that change. It will be precipitated with a rapidity that will astonish all scoffers and infidels when once peace resumes her sway, under the banner of Union and Abolitionism. Gentlemen and ladies, as well as the poorer classes, will delight in such legal, happy, God-appointed relations. And the despised blood will become the honored and even enviable blood of all that region. Thus will He who has delivered them crown them with abundant honor.

Let us fear and praise the God of these Hebrews. Let us be of those Egyptians who joined themselves to them. Let us behold the clear revelation of His will and purpose in the rapidly unfolding events of the hour. Those who four years ago were slaves, are now free; who were forbidden in Massachusetts to bear arms, now hold Savannah, Charleston, and Richmond under their guns; who then were shut out from the alphabet, are now the hungriest and most progressive students in the land; who then were not accounted men, are now demanding their equal rights as citizens, and will soon enjoy all the prerogatives of manhood.

Be valiant in this cause. Let not the mistaken policy of our President, as revealed in his speech of this week,*

The last address Mr. Lincoln made only advocated partial and very limited negro suffrage. It was the indorsement of Governor Banks's policy in New Orleans instead of General Butler's.

become the law of the land. May he who will be always known as the Liberator, be also known as the Regenerator. Let not those rebellious States be reorganized without conferring the right of suffrage on every loyal man. Twelve thousand half loyal whites of Louisiana refuse the petition of six thousand thoroughly loyal colored men to give them equal suffrage. Shame on this nation if, after having been led so far in the way of duty, when the moment of success dawns, it shall cast itself, back into the mire of its own sins. Shame on it, if having won its triumphs by the valor of men of color, it shall refuse those men that franchise which it bestows on any Northern traitor who has done his uttermost to oppose the government, and even upon the Southern rebel, on his taking the oath of allegiance -an act of easy and frequent perjury.*

Shame, too, on the Church that seeks to separate these best children of God from their prouder but less pious brethren. South and North, in Boston and Charleston, there should be no such thing known as a white or a colored Church. All should be knit together in love. must be, all will be.

All

Let us then, my friends, hail the future. Our Pharaoh is perished. He steals, a homeless wanderer, through the regions he so lately ruled. He is of the past. We are of the future. The redeemed Israelites remain - the redeemed nation. May we not, because of our unbelief and unwillingness to obey God's most clear commands, be compelled to wander forty years in the wilderness, as we have for the seventy years that are past; but may we instantly recognize and obey His will, so that our Canaan shall be speedily gained, and our rest shall be glorious.

*This was the policy so persistently and fatally followed out by Lincoln's successor.

"THY GENTLENESS HATH MADE ME GREAT." - Ps. xviii. 35. "HE SAVED OTHERS, HIMSELF HE CANNOT SAVE."- Matt. xxvii. 42. "ALL NATIONS SHALL CALL HIM BLESSED." - Ps. lxxii. 17.

HE appalling deed of the last Good Friday begins to put on the fixed lineaments of the past. As that face and form, then so full of life, are frozen in death, so he who animated them is fast becoming solidified and shapen in the unchanging marble of history. Still standing in the horrible shadow, how can we carve the features of the immortal dead? The chisel shakes in our trembling hand. The rain of sorrow blinds our eyes. In the ghastly darkness, we but faintly discern the spiritual form that has so suddenly and forever vanished from the eyes of man. He, who but yesterday was the center of all human observation; whose every word, as he himself declared but three nights before his death, was in no unimportant sense a national decree; from whom were the issues

A Memorial Discourse on the Character and Career of Abraham Lincoln: delivered in the North Russell Street M. E. Church, Boston, on the Occasion of his Assassination, Sunday, April 23, 1865.

of life and death to the imperious leaders of the rebellion and their too willing subjects; upon whose course foreign potentates fastened watchful eyes, and foreign peoples were yet more intent; the foremost man in all the world, lies he low in his shroud of blood. A nation weeps around his bier. The world bemoans his fate.

now

Never before did so wide and bitter a cry pierce the skies. Never before were the heads of so many millions waters, and their eyes fountains of tears, weeping day and night for the slain of the daughter of their people. The great day of the Church has become yet more solemn in the annals of America. Let not the 15th of April be considered the day of his death, but let Good Friday be its anniversary. For then the fatal blow was struck. He died to the conscious world ere the day had died. We should make it a movable fast, and ever keep it beside the cross and the grave of our blessed Lord, in whose service and for whose gospel he became a victim and a martyr.

That crime I cannot dwell upon in such an hour. The criminal is not the object of my revenge. Justice will demand his death, to whom no less would it be a mercy; for it would shut him from the sight of the race he had dishonored and the earth he had polluted. Not the awful transgressor nor his crime, not even the gigantic abomination of which this deed was the natural and inevitable fruit, shall becloud the hour. Let us look the rather upon him whose earthly work is done; not upon his form, laid out in "longstretching death," that is slowly moving amid tearful myriads, through mighty cities, by the side of inland seas, across yet vaster seas of billowy or level green, to its beloved home in the heart of the land, fit resting-place for him who shall ever live in the heart of the nation; but upon the features of his life, that we may learn why he grew to such a hight, and how we may, in our humbler sphere, attain an equal perfection.