SERMON IX.

REV. THEODORE L. CUYLER.*

"And the Lord blessed Abraham in all things."-GENESIS xxiv. 1.

A FEW hours since, I came home from witnessing the resurrection of the flag over Sumter's walls, and on our way the arrow of fatal tidings met us and pierced us through. I came in tears to find you all in tears. And to-day I only seek to give utterance, in the broken language of grief, to the artless, spontaneous outgush of our every heart. "I cannot see to read in the valley of the shadow of death," said Christopher North to his class, when he returned to them their essays unread, a few days after the death of his wife. Nor could I see to write under the shadow of this overwhelming sorrow. Let me, in the most unstudied language, just talk to you about that dear departed father, whose form lies but a few leagues off to-day, on its way to the burial.

It is more than two centuries since the civilized world has received a shock like this. I open the page of history and read, that on the 10th of July, 1584, William the

*The above report of an extemporaneous discourse, delivered in the Lafayette avenue Presbyterian Church, on April 23d, is mainly recalled from memory.

Silent, the founder of the Dutch Republic, was passing from his dining-hall to his private apartments, attended by his wife. Near the stairway was an obscure arch sunk deep in the wall, and almost hidden from view. The Prince of Orange had just reached the second of the flight of stairs, when a hired assassin darted out from the dark archway, and standing within a few feet of the prince, discharged a pistol at his heart. Three balls entered his body; one of them rebounded even from the wall beyond! William exclaimed, as he felt the wound, "Oh! my God, have mercy upon this poor people!" In a few moments he breathed his last in the arms of his faithful wife, Louisa of Coligry.

Gérard. the assassin, dashed out of a side door and endeavored to make his escape by a narrow lane to a spot where a horse stood in waiting for him. He stumbled over a pile of rubbish in his path, and before he could rise again he was seized by several halberdiers who had followed him from the, house. He was brought at once before the magistrates, was subjected to the most excruciating tortures, and in a few days was condemned to die under the terrible triple agonies of burning, quartering, and decapitation.

No one can read the narrative of the murder of the deliverer o Holland, without being amazed at the coincidence between the crime of Balthazar Gérard and the crime of the brutal Booth. One could almost believe that the America miscreant had learned his horrible part from the Burgundian fanatic. The lofty and magnanimous character of the two illustrious victims-the same cowardly assault upon botn when unarmed and unprotected-the same wea

pon employed the fact that both the victims were attended by their wives-the method of attemped escapeall these furnish a resemblance that is as startling as if drawn from the realm of a horrible fiction. The crimes were not more coincident than the characters of those who figured in these two foremost assassinations of modern history.

William the Silent was a noble representative of Protestant heroism, Protestant faith, and Protestant liberty. Gérard was the fiendish embodiment of all that was crafty, bigoted, and revengeful in Spanish Popery. Abraham Lincoln was the representative of American Republicanism in its most pure and primitive type. In Booth, the butcher, was incarnated the diabolical spirit of Southern slavery. He is a specimen of the pupils which the "peculiar institution" has graduated for half a century. Proud, indolent, dissipated, licentious, a slave of the wine-cup, and accustomed to the unbridled indulgence of his passions, he was the very man to step forth as at once the representative and the champion of the traitor-confederacy. What Preston Brooks more feebly attempted in the "Freshman class" of slavery, John Wilkes Booth achieved in the "Senior year" of its matured iniquity. This astounding tragedy at Washington is but the legitimate product of the same accursed system that tore down the nation's standard at Sumter, that massacred the heroic garrison of Fort Pillow, that starved the thousands of Union soldiers at Belle Isle, Andersonville, and on the Charleston racecourse, and had been for a century, maiming, and branding, and torturing God's poor bond-children on innumerable plantations. Abraham Lincoln, holding the pen that

pierced oppression through with its edict of emancipation, is the embodiment of Christian democracy. John Wilkes Booth, wielding the assassin's weapon, is the embodiment of the bowie-knife barbarism of the slaveholding oligarchy. Thanks be to God that the days of that oligarchy are numbered!

But let us turn away from the harrowing crime to its illustrious victim himself. Let us, as a bereaved household, sit down and talk together, in the soft, low accents of affection, about the great, the good, the honest, the patient, the gentle-hearted, the beloved head of our national family, whom God has taken to himself. We are too near his coffin to criticise him; our hearts are yonder in that coffin with him. God knows that when the tidings of his murder first smote me through on that steamer's deck, I could hardly have felt a keener agony if I had heard that my wife or child were gone. So you felt; so millions feel; such will be the pang that will attend this tragedy in its circuit around the globe. No man of our time could be stricken from his orbit that would leave such a startling void; and no man of any time was ever followed to his burial by such myriads of mourners, or laid in a grave that was so literally drenched with a nation's tears. Yes! the poor ploughboy of a Kentucky homestead has a funeral that was not accorded to a Napoleon or a Wellington.

In selecting a passage for the motto of this unpremeditated tribute, I could find scores of lines in God's word that would be appropriate to the eulogy of our martyr-president. But none, perhaps, that could tell more briefly his history than these simple words" The

Lord blessed Abraham in all things." In blessing our Abraham, God blessed our regenerated country, and the whole household of humanity. Let me point you to some of the crowning mercies of the Divine gift-with devout gratitude to the Heavenly Giver.

I.—And first, God blessed our President with a lowly birth. Abraham Lincoln was thoroughly a man of the people. The common people of America saw the very best that was in themselves when they looked at him. So plebeian a President we have never had. Benjamin Franklin has hitherto been the type-man of American democracy. For remember that our Washington came of gentle blood, and belonged to the colonial aristocracy of Virginia. He had many of the traits of an English country gentleman; his associates were such men as Lord Fairfax, and the patricians of the "Old Dominion." But Lincoln was made of that homely stuff that was wrought into Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster.

Look for a moment at the career that is photographed in the following dozen lines:-Born in Hardin County, Kentucky, of farmer parentage, on the 12th of February, 1809; his boyhood spent in clearing forests with the woodman's axe; one year only spent in the rudimentary studies of a district school; at the age of nineteen toiling as a hired hand on a Mississippi flat-boat; then a clerk in a country store of Illinois; next a student of law from a few books borrowed in the evening, to be returned on the next morning; in 1834 a member of the State Legislature; in 1846 in the National Congress; through the year 1858 measuring weapons with Douglas in the most protracted and brilliant political canvass yet waged between Amer