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.

homage of greatness, nor is the loss of a great man to the world the chief calamity in his death. Not greatness but grandeur is the fitting epithet for the life and character of Abraham Lincoln; not greatness of endowment nor of achievement, but grandeur of soul. Grand in his simplicity and kindliness; grand in his wisdom of resolve and his integrity of purpose; grand in his trust in principle and in the principles he made his trust; grand in his devotion to truth, to duty, and to right; grand in his consecration to his country and to God, he rises above the great in genius and in renown, into that foremost rank of moral heroes, of whom the world was not worthy.

Had the pen of prophecy been commissioned to delineate his character and administration, it must have chosen the very words of my text; "just," so that his integrity had passed into a proverb; "ruling in the fear of God," with a religious reverence, humility and faith marking his private life and his public acts and utterances; bright as "the light of the morning," with native cheerfulness and the serenity of hope; and with a wisdom that revealed itself as "the clear shining after rain ;" and gentle withal 66 as the tender grass springing out of the earth;"—such was the Ruler, whose death the Nation mourns.

The life of Abraham Lincoln, the life by which he has been known to the people, and will be known in history, covers less than five years from the day of his nomination at Chicago to the day of his assassination at Washington. Before this brief period, though he had been in posts of public life at intervals during thirty years, and had gained a reputation as a clear and forcible political debater, evincing also a comprehensive faculty for statesmanship, he had done nothing, said nothing, written nothing that would have given him a place in history or have caused him to be long remembered beyond the borders of his adopted State. And yet for that brief historical life which is now incorporated imperishably with the annals of the American Republic, and shall be woven into the history of the world while human language shall remain, he was unconsciously preparing during fifty years of patient toil and discipline.

Those seven years of poverty and obscurity in Kentucky, in which he never saw a church or a school-house, when he learned to read at the log-cabin of a neighbor, and learned to pray at his mother's knees; those thirteen years of labor and solitude in the primeval forests of Southern Indiana, when the axe, the plow, and the rifle trained him to manly toil and independence; when the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, and Æsop's Fables, his only library, read by the light of the evening fire, disciplined his intellectual and moral faculties, and a borrowed copy of "Weems' Life of Washington" acquainted him with the Father of his Country; and when the Angel of Death sealed and sanctified the lessons of her who taught him to be true and pure and noble, and to walk uprightly in the fear of

God; that season of adventure in the rough and perilous navigation of the Mississippi, when the vast extent of his country, and the varieties of its products and its population, were spread out before his opening manhood; the removal to the fat bottom-lands of the Sangamon, in the just rising State of Illinois; his further discipline in farming, fencing, rafting, shop-keeping, while feeling his way towards his vocation in life; his patient self-culture by studious habits under limited opportunities; his observation of the two phases of emigration, Northern and Southern, that moved over the prairies side by side, along different parallels, without mingling; his brief but arduous campaign in the Black Hawk War; his studies in law and politics, and his practical acquaintance with political and professional life;-all this diverse and immethodical discipline and experience was his unconscious preparation for leading the nation in the most dark, critical and perilous period of its history.

Abraham Lincoln was a "self-made man; " but in just the sense in which any man of marked individuality is self-made. So far was he from affecting superiority to academic culture or independence of the schools, that it may be said of him as of his great counterpart in character, in aims, and in influence, the plebeian sovereign of England, Richard Cobden, that while he was "a statesman by instinct," and was calmly self-reliant upon any question that he had studied or any principle that he had mastered, he always deferred greatly to those whose opportunities of information and means of culture had been better than his own. The true scholar is "self-made;" for he is a scholar only so far as he has digested the works of others