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secession, and fomented treason and conspiracy and this wicked rebellion,-slavery, which has scattered families, and desolated homes, and starved prisoners, and shot down men and women in cold blood,-slavery, which has eaten up the wealth of the country, and murdered your sons, or sent them to you as living skeletons,-slavery, this fiend, has now slain your president. Slavery is the assassin. It is the same spirit that has ruled the rebellion from the beginning. It began with the hanging of John Brown, and it has gone on demanding ever fresh and greater horrors to feed upon, until it ends with the murder of Abraham Lincoln. The awful laws of dramatic unity, stricter in the actual than in any fictitious tragedy, could not spare it this result, even though itself may have begun to shrink from the horror of it. It could not be permitted that this war, originated and fed by such a spirit, could end, and leave even a tradition of chivalry or honor or heroism on the side of slavery. All Southern valor and skill and self-sacrifice and devotion, which might otherwise have challenged and won the admiration of the world and posterity, are now swept from human memory by the infamy of this transcendent crime. Henceforth, through all history, the rebellion is branded as assassin. And slavery, which instigated and sustained the rebellion, has, by the law of its own necessities, brought it helplessly bound to this infamous end; and so it is forever proclaimed before all the world how purely evil and inhuman and diabolical a thing slavery is. It is the divine law by which evil works its own destruction, and, in attempting to undermine the good, digs its own grave. "Their sword shall enter into their own heart."

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And is not this, my friends, a hint of the moral of this tragedy? Whether we needed the lesson or not, is it not clear to us now, that we cannot safely leave in the soil, anywhere in all the land, the smallest seed or root or filament or atom of that wrong against God and man out of which all this crime and curse of treason and war and assassination have grown? This may have been the last, desperate struggle of the monstrous wrong in its mortal agony, but it shows us that, until dead and utterly exterminated, it carries with it satanic stealth and violence and murder. And secondly, is it not plainly taught us that, if we cannot trust the spirit of this evil so long as the evil is anywhere above the ground, so we cannot safely trust, in any efforts at reconstructing the Republic, the men who have been conspirators for the defence and extension of this evil,—that we cannot trust them in any offices of the nation or the states? They must be outlawed. They challenged and defied the federal government, they threw down the gauntlet against justice and for slavery: they have failed, and now let them abide the issue. Let justice be done: pardon and freedom and suffrage for the mass of the people, for white and for black; the penalty of treason or the outlaw's fate for the leaders. Not alone justice, but gratitude and honor and a true magnanimity and mercy demand, that, in our reconstructed Union, we shall not hold off at arm's length those who have been our firmest and most faithful friends in the South, and refuse to them the equal rights of the government which they have helped to maintain, while we take to our compassionate bosoms the men who, so long as they were able, stood against us as our enemies, and who

even now may stab us as we lean confidingly upon them. There is room for honorable magnanimity and for christian mercy, without risking the very cause for which our armies have fought and our victories been gained. We want no unholy passion, no vindictive wrath; let the majesty of law be maintained; let there be no belittling of the great occasion by any assumption of the powers of retribution by private hands; but there are eternal laws of divine justice to be nationally vindicated for white and for black; and when we talk of magnanimity, we must not forget the race that has been waiting in patient suffering these many years for the magnanimity of this nation, and by whose help we have been lifted to a position where we have now the power to be magnanimous.

Is it possible, my friends, that we needed this awful calamity to teach us this lesson? to urge us to some duty that we were shrinking from? to push us to the full completion of this dire work of war by the establishment of absolute and impartial justice? Is it possible—is it not possible that even now we could not build a true and lasting Union without this sacrifice, the greatest and highest that we could make? that, even with these gates of victory open, we could not enter the temple of perfect peace, unless the blood of our president should sprinkle the threshold and consecrate the altar? Let each ask and answer for himself; and answering, heed the promptings of solemn duty. Christianity was only a partial reform of Judaism until its leader was put to death by the hands of wicked men on Mount Calvary. Then it was transfigured, and became a new religion. Jesus lived a holy and wonderful life, but not till

he was led to the cross did the hour come in which he was to be glorified. And this, O friends, may be the hour in which this nation is to be glorified. It may be, and God grant it, that half-measures of justice will now be swallowed up in absolute and complete equity; that partial reform will give way to thorough regeneration; and that the nation henceforth will be no more the same, but transfigured and impelled by a new spirit. Through our great leader, we are crucified. God grant that we may also be glorified, even as he is glorified! Of all the days in the year, the assassins chose Good Friday to strike their fatal blow,—the day that their brother assassins, eighteen hundred years ago, put to death the Redeemer in Judea. Auspicious omen! The tomb shall not hold him. The stone shall be rolled away

from this sepulchre also. And he shall appear among us again in another form, pleading for truth and justice and humanity, so that our hearts shall burn within us by the way; and in closet and council he shall still come to us, and speak Peace" to our troubled souls. One duty also, chiefest of all, will he enjoin: "Lovest thou me? Feed my lambs; feed my sheep,-the weak and little ones, the poor, neglected, oppressed, whose bonds I loosed."

Friends, this is Easter Sunday. Already it is time we were at the door of the sepulchre to await his coming, to listen for his higher bidding. Let the night of darkness. and distraction and fear vanish. Lift up your eyes; behold the glories of the resurrection morning.

April 16, 1865.

II.

DISCOURSE ON THE DAY OF THE FUNERAL RITES.

MY FRIENDS, this is not the hour for long or elaborate speech. We have come together by a natural and spontaneous impulse, that we may join, even at this distant point, in the funeral solemnities of our late honored President. Our hearts are too bitterly shocked and grieved, our souls too full of sadness, for many words: a sadness, not only for the great loss that our nation, and the world even, have sustained, but a still deeper sadness because of the infamous crime and lasting shame to our country through which this sudden loss has come; for not in the ordinary course of nature and Providence does the nation suffer this bereavement, but through the agency of a deed of the most atrocious wickedness. Providence permitted it,—but only as it permits, only as it does not interfere with, the freedom of the human will, even though, swayed by satanic purposes, that will should lie in wait for innocent blood, or lay its murderous hand upon the Lord's anointed. Providence permitted it and the infinite Providence will neutralize and transform it, as it does all evil, into final good and blessing, we cannot doubt that: and yet divine Providence, for the very reason that it is infinitely good and holy, must

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