baptism of blood, as he had already given it to the cause which he represented, and so translated him into the list of the world's leaders, deliverers, emancipators, who plead more mightily from their graves than living rulers from the seats of power. Let us not doubt, then, that a great man has passed from us into history, and joined the powers which cannot die. Let us not doubt that our time of sorrow has brought forth a character worthy to enshrine its immortal issue. This man has gone from us. He needs no other monument than the race whom he led forth from bondage, and the country saved, under God, by his guidHe has been followed to his grave by such majesty and sincerity of grief as never yet waited upon king or conqueror, and his memory may be safely left to the keeping of all lands and ages.

ance.

We have lost the mortal. We have gained the immortal. We have lost a Chief Magistrate. We have gained one who shall henceforth be known among the world's benefactors. We have lost a virtue subject to change. We have gained a virtue which shall be the same until the heavens shall be no more. We have lost a voice that might have faltered and a will that might have fallen away from its task. We have gained both, exalted and consecrated to a wider and nobler mission. We have lost a rare combination of gifts. May it not be that we have gained another, which, in view of emergencies yet to come, shall prove the foresight and adaptation of God's. We have lost a man built up into greatness by the institutions of liberty and law. We shall gain another proof of the power of those institutions to repair all damage and waste in the life committed to their keeping.

I have spoken of the man, his character, career, and services; I have sketched his place in history, and shown why the gratitude and love of this bereaved people should cherish and venerate his name. Permit me, in conclusion, to indicate what God teaches us in this sorrow. Once more he admonishes us that our strength is not in chariots or horses, or men of war, or an arm of flesh. Once more He tells us that in the development of His plans there is no necessary man. Again He interposes to check the instinctive gravitation of mankind toward great personalities, and to strike at the root of all civic and military idolatries engendered by illustrious fortune or commanding genius. Again He shifts from shoulder to shoulder the mantle of the ruler, the statesman, the conqueror, the prophet, to show us that it is only in His wisdom and might that we can safely glory. "The earth is weak and all the inhabitants thereof. I bear up the pillars of it.” "God is the Judge. He putteth down one and setteth up another." Once more, too, amid the far-sounding joy and the waving of multitudinous banners, He suddenly opens at our feet the path of humiliation winding on into the valley of the shadow of death. Thus, by a calamity and bereavement which have pierced the common heart, He has seen fit to set up another check to the pride and self-confidence of a great people flushed with victory. May these admonitions not be in vain. May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be so poured out to-day upon the weeping, prostrate millions of this land "that peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and piety, may be established among us for all generations."

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 Coligny.

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 of 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 American 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 both 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