refinement, and courtesy, left virtually in the avenging wisdom of God, to fill up before the nations of the earth, the measure of its own dishonor and their loathing? The cry of the assailant, as he brandished the knife, "Such be evermore the tyrant's fate," was not, as he intended it, the verdict of conscience and history against the murdered, but the assassin's self-recited verdict of that conscience and that history, and of the God who implanted the one and who shapes the other, against the murderers, and against the yet more tyrannous system that bred them. "To perish in their own corruption," is the fearful doom of Scripture against sinners-a rotting away in the leprous sloughing of their own vices. And the embodied Tyranny that, defiant, elate, and vaunting, wrote itself thus bloody, thus ruthless, and thus false, and then seemed to look round, assured of sympathy and applause, was in fact, but building its own gibbet by the feat, and writing in red letters its own death-sentence for the amazement of a gazing and loathing Universe; at the very same time, and in the very act, by which it supposed itself the rival of old Roman heroism and of old Hebrew devotedness, treading in the steps, as it thought, of Brutus and of David. In the mysteries of the Divine government, it is needed that a certain range and swoop be given for "sin" to show, in the affecting and inimitable language of Scripture, its own "exceeding sinfulness." And God may have given to rebellion and slavebreeding their long tether of domination and their high, broad stage of glorying, and this new glut of eminent victims, only in the just intent that thus they might earn a wider execration, and go down amid a more unanimous tempest of denunciation and abhorrence; the shriek of

their own frenzied triumph, but, in another and juster sense of it, the world's indignant acclaim over the tyranny that dealt so craven a blow, and contrived so dastardly and ferocious a treachery.

God, again, removes his own useful and honored instruments, at dates that to us seem untimely, and in modes, that, although painful and even shocking to themselves and to the survivors and friends who mourn them, yet do, in reality, round the course of the departed as into a more epic symmetry, and crown the hero's or statesman's career of enfranchisement and victory, as with something that resembles the palm of religious martyrdom. The successful policy, and the triumphant campaign might secure to him who had ordered the one or the other, a niche of honor in the nation's gallery of her chief worthies, who had deserved well of the Republic. An earlier assassination of this chosen ruler had been menaced and probably intended at Baltimore, when he was first going to be inducted into office. It was, in God's good providence, an utter failure. How much, in the interval between the two terms of the first, frustrated attempt, and the final consummation of the second attempt, had God permitted this chief of our people to witness and to accomplish? And all the intervening denunciation by frenzied opposers and now at last the bullet of fanatical hate, have served finally to give to the character thus developed, and the career thus suddenly shut, a yet loftier niche in the nation's grateful memory. It has now become shelved, apart from predecessors and it may be trusted, from successors alsothe name and fame of a vast revolt successfully quelledof a great social reform, that seemed to require centuries,

completed in a half decade-a name and fame safely sealed by so tragic and foul a death.

In the fierce hate of Catholic Spain against Protestant Holland the pistol of Balthazar Gerardt let out the life of Holland's noblest and ablest champion. But when the honored Prince of Orange, William the Taciturn, died, thus foully and suddenly, although Spain conferred patents of nobility as her guerdon for the act on the murderer's kin, did the death daunt and overwhelm the nascent freedom and the suffering Protestantism of the Netherlands? Has the world a literature or an ethical system that can long glorify our Balthazar Gerardt? In an early day of the European Reformation, one brother, in his frenzied detestation of the new doctrine killed another-under the guise of friendship-his own brother because a protestant heretic. The persecuting church applauded the new Cain who had thus struck down, by perfidy and fratricide, a new Abel. But did the honors of the church arrest the world's general judgment of the slaughter; or stay the contagious power of the faith professed by the martyr? The St. Bartholomew Massacre was, for the time, a sad discouragement of the Calvinists of France and Europe. But the field of Ivry, and the Edict of Nantes came in its ultimate train. And, meanwhile, did it most damage and blacken the victims, or the atrocious authors of the plot? And who of us would not rather choose to go down to posterity with the aged Coligny, with his white hairs bedabbled in blood, whom it sacrificed, than with the wily and ruthless Catharine de Medici, and her son Charles IX., who survived the butchery, and for the time chuckled and gloated over the success of their crime? It is the victim,

meekly faithful, in such a fierce collision, and such a solemn crisis, who, by the judgment of man's conscience, and the decree of the Divine Lord of conscience, remains the real conqueror, and not his unpunished slayer. As said cheerily the aged Latimer, when they had bound him to the stake and he turned to a fellow confessor with no wail in his tone, and no gloom in his eye: "We light this day, brother Ridley, a candle in England, which they will never put out." Many were the murders of that Marian era; but Foxe's Book of Martyrs which records them, remains to this day one of the bulwarks and safeguards of the National Protestantism. And so in later days of English history, the sufferings of Puritan and Nonconformist, at the hands of the Stuart line of kings, only served to bar, finally and effectually, the return of that royal house to the English throne. Talleyrand, a perspicacious observer of man's nature and of the currents of social change, spoke of guilty acts that were worse than crimes they were blunders. Now, really, and under the divine legislation, all crime is blundering. It blunders, as to its aims; it blunders, as to its methods; and it blunders, as to its results. But there are crimes of singular atrocity which have as much of absurdity as atrocity. The slaughter by Herod of the babes of Bethlehem was such a sin. Aimed at the absent and invincible Messiah, it immortalized the plotter, as one, who shrunk not from the massacre of innocent nurslings, in his most impotent hope of foiling the Infallible, and achieving a successful Deicide. Crimes that are of an especial zest to their authors and their patrons, may yet, before the bar of posterity, be adjudged incredibly foolish for the blindness that filled the contrivers

as to the inevitable recoil of their own effort. And so the men, who plotted this slaughter in our high places, when talking of tyranny as if that tyranny inhered mainly or only in the soul which they unhoused, were actually stabbing to the heart that form of society, that slavebred chivalry, which they affected to advocate, and expected, in this savage fashion, to illustrate and to vindicate. The curse invoked by the Jews on the head of the Crucified came, hurtling back, in bloody rain, on them and their children's children, through long centuries and across wide continents. Those old Hebrews denounced their victim as a deceiver of the people; but were in fact, themselves, the most deceived of all people, in thus rejecting their true Deliverer, and choosing to be thralled by the veriest delusions of the destroyer. So, in less degree, is it with lesser and later crimes. "The curse causeless" travels back, dire and swift, on the heads of its guilty shouters. The banner may or may not, have been that day, restored by its old defenders to the walls of Fort Sumter. But the pistol-shot, discharged that same day, in Washington, if we do not read all wrongly the omens of Providence, saluted another and more momentous flag-raising. The bullet-shot and the knife-stab, that evening delivered, have effectually nailed to the mast of the ship of state the banner of Emancipation-of universal-unconditionaluncompensated and unrepealable enfranchisement. This evil, Slavery, has been through our whole national lifetime the Achan, troubling our peace. We must bury it now, in this valley of Achor, the scene of our national mourning. Let them massacre without stint, the witnesses of Right at the North, wherever they may choose them, in