avoided it. Not for a moment did he yield to the false counsels of the treacherous, the bribes of the corrupt, or the weak fears of the desponding. Abraham Lincoln's religion, as far as the world saw it-lay in two cardinal principles-a rigid sense of right-and an unfaltering faith in the Providence of God. He was a child of Providence. "If I did not seek help from God every morning I could not stand up under the load laid upon me," was the substance of a remark made to an intimate friend

during a gloomy period of the war. What was the degree of our President's heart-faith in Jesus Christ is known only to the Omniscient. He worshiped in God's sanctuary; he once taught in the Sabbath School; he was rigidly moral; he practised abstinence from the wine-cup as well preached it; he set a noble example of industry, continence, fortitude and integrity. He never made any public confession of his faith in the Redeemer. This I regret from my inmost heart. Would to God that the lofty philanthrophy which made him our Wilberforce, had also been coupled with Wilberforce's devout, tender and fervid piety! Praises be rendered too unto God for the faith in an overruling Providence which dwelt in Lincoln's great kindly heart; and for the beautiful law of right which guided his glorious career! Never had a public man a harder path to tread; but he never lost his wayfor he simply and steadily kept to the straight road. After issuing the proclamation of freedom he said to a friend, "I did not think the people had been educated up to it; but I thought it was right to issue it, and so I did it.”

And now that great, generous child-like heart has ceased to throb! Those deep, melancholy eyes-deep wells of

sorrow as they always looked to me--are dimmed forever. Those gaunt ungainly limbs with which he strode along his patient way under the burthen, are laid to rest. The hand that broke four million of fetters is lifeless clay! Lincoln in his coffin has put a world in tears. Never was a man so mourned; never before did all Christendom stand mourners around one single bier. That pistol-shot at Washington echoes round the world in the universal wail of humanity. God pity our noble friends abroad when they hear the tidings! Kossuth will weep as he wept for the lost crown of Maria Theresa. John Bright's heart will bleed as it bled but yesterday over the grave of Cobden. Garibaldi will clasp that little grandson to his bosom with a tenderer love, that the child bears the name of "Abraham Lincoln." Our missionaries in Syria and China and the Pacific Isles will drop warm tears on the pages of those Bibles that they are rendering into heathen tongues. Here at home I see the sorrow in every eye; the air is heavy with the grief; "there is not a house in which there is not ONE dead."

Intense as is our grief, who shall fathom the sorrow of those to whom he brought the boon of freedom, when they shall learn of the death of their liberator? What wails shall mingle with the voices of the sea along Carolina's shore! Miriam's timbrel in a moment drowned in Rachel's cry of anguish !

Last Saturday morning I addressed one thousand freed men's children in the doomed city of Charleston. When I said to them, "May I invite for you your father Lincoln to come to Charleston and see the little folks he has inade free?" a thousand black hands flew up with a shout. Alas! at that moment a silent corpse lay in the East Room

at Washington. On reaching Fortress Monroe,-under the first stunning blow of the awful tidings, I went aside to a group of poor negro women who were gathered about a huckster's table, which was hung with a few coarse strips of black muslin. "Well, friends, the good man is gone." "Yes, sah," spake out a gray-haired Aunt Chloe-" yes, sah! Linkum's dead! They killed our best friend. But God be libin yet. Dey can't kill Him. I'se sure of dat!" How instinctively the childish faith of those long-suffering hearts reached up to the Almighty arm! In that poor freedwoman's broken ejaculation, "Linkum dead-but God still libin," I find the only solace for your smitten heart and mine.

Did Lincoln die too soon? For us and for the world he did; but not for himself. It is all sadly right. God's will be done! The time had come when, like Samson, our beloved leader could slay more by his death than in his life. He has slain the accursed spirit of slavery yet lurking in the North. He has slain the last vestige of sympathy with the discomfited rebellion in every candid foreign mind. That pistol's flash has revealed the slavedrivers' conspiracy to the world—

"Not only doomed, but damned."

Our father died at the right time; for his mighty work was done. He lived to see the rebellion in its last agonies; he lived to enter Richmond amid the acclamations of the liberated slave, and to sit down in the arch-traitor's deserted seat; he lived until Sumter's flag rose again like a star of Bethlehem in the southern sky, and then, with the martyr's crown upon his brow, and with four million broken fetters in his hand, he went up to meet his God. In a

moment his life crystallizes into the pure white fame that belongs only to the martyr for truth and liberty! Terrible as seems the method of his death to us to-day, it was after all the most fitting and glorious. He fell by the hand of the same iniquity that slew Lyon and Shaw, and Sedgwick and Rice, and Wadsworth and McPherson. In God's sight Lincoln was no more precious than the humblest drummer-boy who has bled away his young life on the sod of Gettysburgh or Chattanooga. He had called on two hundred thousand heroes to lay down their lives for their country; and now he too has gone to make his grave beside them.

"So sleep the brave who sink to rest

By all their country's wishes blest."

When that grave that now opens for its illustrious victim on yonder western prairie shall finally yield up its dead, glorious will be his resurrection! Methinks that I behold the spirit of the great LIBERATOR in that judgment scene before the assembled hosts of heaven. Around him are the tens of thousands from whom he struck the oppressor's chain. Methinks I hear their grateful voices exclaim, "we were an hungered, and thou gavest us the bread of truth; we were thirsty for liberty, and thou gavest us drink; we were strangers, and thou didst take us in ; we were sick with two centuries of sorrow, and thou didst visit us; we were in the prison-house of bondage and thou camest unto us." And the KING shall say unto him, "inasmuch as thou the least of these my brethren, thou hast done it unto me. Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of thy Lord."

hast done it unto one of

SERMON X.

REV. JOSEPH P. THOMPSON, D. D.

The God of Israel said, the Rock of Israel spake to me, He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God. And he shall be as the light of the morning when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds; as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain.* II SAMUEL Xxiii. 3, 4.

I COUNT it one of the noblest acts in the history of the race, an impressive proof of the progress of human society, that a nation has rendered its spontaneous homage,-a tribute without precedent in its own annals, and hardly equaled in the annals of the world,-to a man whom it had not yet learned to call great. It teaches us that there is something greater than greatness itself. No inspiration of genius had enrolled him among the few great names of literature; no feats of arms nor strategy upon the field, had given him a place among military heroes; no contribution to the science of government, no opportunity of framing a new civil polity for mankind, had raised him to the rank of publicists, of philosophers, or of founders of states. Great he was in his own way, and of a true and rare type of greatness-the less recognized and acknowledged the more it is genuine and divine;-but the people had not begun to accord to him the epithets and the

*Preached in the Broadway Tabernacle Church, April 30th, 1865.