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SERMON PREACHED IN THE
FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, BROOKLYN, N. Y„
BY THE PASTOK,
KEY. OHAS. S. KOBIETSCXN",
ON THE MORNING OF
APBEL leth, 1865.

NEW YORK:
JOHN E. TROW, PEINTEB, 50 GKEENE STEEET,
1865.

Brooklyn, N. Y., April 17th, 1865
Eev. Chas. S. Robinson :
Dear Sir : As members of the congregation to which you minister, we wish
to indicate to you our warm appreciation of the discourse delivered in your pulpit
on yesterday morning, occasioned by that appalling dispensation of Providence
which has imprinted the deepest sorrow in every loyal bosom in this afflicted
land. We regard the Sermon as embodying a fitting and felicitous tribute to the
character of Abraham Lincoln, our late President, who has fallen an illustrious
martyr to the cause of constitutional government and universal freedom of man.
We respectfully request that you will furnish us a copy of it for the press,
believing that by its preservation in a permanent form it will embody a just record,
proper to be filed among the archives of the Church, and handed down to our chil
dren, of the unwavering loyalty of Pastor and people to the cause of national
integrity aud constitutional rule during these eventful and perilous years of con
flict with organized and armed rebellion.
With assurances of our cordial regards :
Fisher Howe, Henry Sheldon,
Cyrus P. Smith, Lowell Holbrook,
Silas H. Strlngham, Jonathan Ogden,
Samuel Hutchinson, Henry Bdtler,
Henry Ide, W. Hastings,
Henry K. Sheldon, Noah T. Swezey, '
Daniel Pomeroy, James E. Taylor,
Jonathan D. Steele, Eichaed J. Dodge,
Andrew A. Smith, Hobart Ford,
Alexander M. Earle, Abu ah Fisher.

First Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, April 18th, 1865.
To Messrs. Fisher Howe, Hon. C. P. Smith, Bear Admiral S. H. Stringham,
Samuel Hutchinson, and others :
Gentlemen : The Discourse which you request, prepared so hurriedly in the
midst of such confusion and excitement, takes all its value from your cordial en
dorsement of its sentiments.
We are just closing a four years' war ; the air is vibrating with tidiugs of vic
tory as I write. But we are beginning a new war of more than four years, the
weapons of which are not carnal.
Much of the peril of that conflict will be forestalled by a frank, firm stand taken
at the outset. And I am unaffectedly happy in your willingness to commit your
selves, as a church, now with me, to the truth, fearless as you all have ever been
in your steadfastness to the principles involved in the war.
Very truly and affectionately, Your friend and Pastor,
Chas. S. Robinson.

&f)e Jttartgrefc President.

He was a good man, and a just. — Luke xxiii : 50.
Oke other Sabbath like this I remember, and
only one ; that of which this is the exact anniver
sary, four years ago. What humiliated the nation
then is now measurably rectified. The ensign of our
country floats once more on the ramparts from which
it had just been torn by the fierce hand of treason.
The same batteries that hurled shot and shell at the
fortress, whose name has become historic, have been
forced to pour forth their empty salutes in honor of
the restoration. And the proclamation is already in
the air, which was to summon the grateful Republic
to a thanksgiving for the manifold mercy of Al
mighty God.
Eight in the midst of our rejoicing we are dashed
into sorrow deeper than ever. To-day it is not the
humbling of our pride that makes us mourn, but the
wounding of our hearts in their keenest sensibilities.
For he who has been our leader lies low in his cof
fin ; foul murder has been done at the capital'; and
the nation stands hushed in the presence of its un-
buried dead.

Have the old days of barbarism returned upon
us? Is assassination become civilized? Has the
bullet of a murderer recognition as a belligerent
right? In what age do we live? Is justice dead?
Where are we ? How happens it that the wires
quiver with tidings of deeds worthy only of the dark
est years of Venetian conspiracy and shame ?
I said, we have got the flag back again on Sum
ter. So we have. But only at half-mast. It reached
the staff just in time to droop. Men began to cheer
— suddenly they turn to wailing. The triumph seems
a mockery. Victory waits recognition unheeded, for
the bells are tolling. He who made our success wel
come is not here to share it. Abraham Lincoln,
the honored and beloved head of the nation, is no
more !
My brethren, bear me record here to-day. This
pulpit has never uttered one timid, troubled word in
these four years. I have not lost heart for a moment
in the essential righteousness of our cause, nor confi
dence in the final success that would come to it. You
will misunderstand my language now, and mistake
my temper, if you imagine I am cowed into any wav
ering, startled into any irresolution, or grieved into
any distrust, by the terrible events of the hour.
But I shall not attempt to conceal from you that I
am shocked more than ever before, and under the
cloud of God's providence as I never expected to be.
I do not know the meaning of this awful transaction.

I could almost wish it was the custom to wear sack
cloth, and put ashes on mourners' heads. All the
day would I fittingly sit silent under the shadow of
a common grief with you. I speak truly when I say,
I have met no greater sorrow in my manly life than
this. " I behave myself as though he had been my
friend or brother ; I bow down heavily, as one that
mourneth for his mother." And all this sensibility,
I know, you are sharing with me.
The feeling which rests on each mind and heart
to-day is not a simple feeling. To us all it is, in some
measure, undefined. I cannot be of any real help to
you, I fear, save in the way of giving you an analysis
of your grief, and suggesting the form of its expres
sion. I. — Let me say, then, that in this complex mourn
ing of heart is found, first of all, our admiration of
that great man's character, whose sudden death has
saddened the entire nation. Surely, you will not
need that I enter into argument to prove that these
words of the text I have chosen, applied to the coun
sellor from Arimathea in the inspired record, are
most fitting when applied to our late Chief Magis
trate. He was " a good man." Called by the great voice
of the American people to leave his rural home, and
assume the highest honors it could confer, his parting
request to his old friends and neighbors was only for
their continuous prayers. With the sincerest humil-

ity, he accepted his place as the minister of the
nation, and the servant of God. He had no higher
ambition than to know his duty and perform it. He
felt himself swept out into the current of a purpose,
as majestic in grandeur as it was celestial in origin ;
the sublime purpose of Him to whom nations belong,
to care for this western Republic in the hour of its
manifest peril. From that day to this, he has never
swerved from the line of his integrity. No man has
ever been maligned as he has ; no man has ever out-
Hved abuse as he has. When the nation shall have
laid his remains in the burial-yard of the village
where he lived, there will never be heard a hiss by
his tomb-stone, there will be no trail of any serpent
across his grave. Even now we have hardly ceased
to hear the dignified tones of his voice, wonderfully
pathetic, almost prophetic, as he told us, in the second
inaugural address, of the simplicity of his faith, the
humility of his estimate of himself, and his profound
reliance upon the infinite God.
He was a "just" man. Through all these years
it has been touching to notice how implicitly the
true-hearted believed Abraham Lincoln to be true.
The mean hirelings of place, and the mere parasites
of office, kept out of his way. The demagogues and
partisans grew passionate over his perversity to their
principles, and called him an impracticable leader,
because of his steadfast loyalty to truth, and fairness
as between man and man. When one received injus-

tice, and could not, in the confusions of the times,
make his righteousness appear, how instinctively he
thought of the President, and knew, if he could only
have a hearing from him, all would be well. When
military commanders failed, and popular clamor was
raised under the dangerous disappointment, calmly
and generously the good man waited till they should
make another trial. He stood true to those, who
were seeking to undermine his power, with a magna
nimity sublime. Oh, the patience of that great, kind
heart, in the days when it cost something to be con
siderate ! And now, after the smoke has cleared
away from two political battle-fields, fought more
savagely than any other such in our history, there
comes to view no one act of his at which a citizen
will blush. His sun went down while to us it yet
seemed day ; but at the evening time it was light.
He died at the height of his fame. All rancor of
party has disappeared. The clouds that dimmed
his noon gather now, at the twilight, to glow in his
praise. So much, then, is true ; " he was a good man, and
a just." But there is a question, which our intelli
gent, Bible-reading people are wont to ask, when any
one of their great men dies — was he a Christian
man ? There is no reason why we should turn aWay,
unanswered, an inquiry like this. It is not an im
pertinent and obtrusive investigation of his interior
life. He made no mystery of his faith. His own

8
tale of his religious experience is something like this
— coming in more than one way, and attested with
more than one witness :
" When I left Springfield, I felt my utter dependence upon God.
The responsibility weighed heavily upon my heart. I knew I should
fail without a divine help. But I was not then a Christian. When
my child died, I felt that I needed the comfort of the Gospel. It
was the severest affliction that ever fell upon me. Then I wanted
to be a Christian. But never did I feel that I reached the point,
till I wandered one day, alone, among the graves of the boys that
fell at Gettysburg. There, when I read the inscriptions, so full of
hope and faith, I began to think I loved and trusted Jesus as my
Saviour." Thus, our image of this humble, noble man, rises
on our vision complete. Gifted with great intellec
tual power; proverbial for his rectitude; bearing
"honest" for his title as Aristides bore "just" for
his; affectionate, with all the instincts of common
humanity, even to the lowliest ; fearless and brave ;
he added the crowning grace to his memory with his
unaffected piety as a Christian.
n. — For all this the nation mourns his loss. But
I am not mistaken in believing there is an element in
our sorrow here to-day, far more subtle and experi
mental than mere admiration of his spotless character.
There is, in the second place, a feeling of personal
bereavement. Singularly identified with us all has
this man come to be. Test your heart now. Tell
me, of all the leaders in civil life, of all the com
manders in the field, who has the hold upon your

9
manly affection that this great-hearted man of the
people had ? Your ideal of him was like that of a re
lative — one of your household. Never, till the hand
of an assassin struck him, did you know how dear he
was. I see, in all this, that which makes me happy
and hopeful ; here is a token of the infinite capaci
ties of tenderness in the spirit of the American
people. I think, to-day, as the fearful news is flashed
across the land, of the families that live in the val
leys, and among the hills, and over the prairies, to
some member of which he has been kind, and so has
endeared himself to all. How they will weep as for
a brother beloved ! Village bells are knelling all
over the continent. A great hand waved darkly
across the landscape, and swooped the banners down
from exultation into grief. Oh, we have never known
bow many letters his own pen has written to bereaved
wives and mourning mothers ! When news of a ter
rible death, in many an inconspicuous household, was
to be communicated, the President of the United
States took time, from his few hours of privacy, to
send an epistle, so generous, so full of grateful sym
pathy, so gentle and ' appreciative, that the wounded
hearts felt soothed, and bore the bereavement with
out breaking. He knew how to say kind things so
well, and loved to say them !
I think of the soldiers, also, whose interests he
watched like a jealous parent. In these trying times

10
of partisanship and confusion there was always a
likelihood of haste, and consequent injustice, in the
administration of military tribunals. Many a man,
innocent of alleged inadvertence or crime, was un
able to show it, and so was in peril of shame or death.
Patiently that busy President studied out complicated
accounts ; bent all his legal ability to the investiga
tion of contradictory testimony ; read the long, tedious
documents on either side; simply determined that
every man should get his due ; and then, beyond that,
as much leniency as was safe to give him. How the
soldiers loved him ! They are telling to each other,
this very day, stories of his kindness to them. Only
last week he spent the day that remained to him in
Richmond, going through the wards of the hospitals,
saluting, with his warm-hearted grasp, each wounded
hero in turn ; and, when they had no hands to offer,
he laid his big palm on their foreheads, and thanked
them in the name of the country !
I think, more than all, of the poor freedmen,
when they hear of the President's death. How they
will wonder, and will wail! They called him
" Father," as if it were part of his name. Oh, they
believed in Abraham Lincoln ! They expected him,
as the Israelites did Moses. Some, no doubt, imagin
ed he was a deity. They were unsophisticated and
ignorant, and that good, kind man seemed so like a
being from heaven. They said he would come.
They prayed he would come. They waited for him

11
to come. And then he came! When those untu
tored sons of slavery saw him in the streets of the
rebel capital, after its capture, they fairly blasphemed,
without being aware of it. He seemed to them and
their children a second Messiah. He never broke a
promise to their hope. When they were certain he
had uttered one word, they rested on it, as they
would on God's. He stood by the poor creatures
his hand had freed, under all obloquy and suspicion.
He put his signature to a parchment that made them
men and women with souls and bodies. Then the
enfranchised millions opened their very souls to him,
as if out under the sunshine. His name was a spell
to quiet or to rouse them. What will they do, now
he is dead ! Alas ! alas ! for the weeping and the
wonder they will have, when they know how he
died! Thus, we all weep together. Christian resignation
offers its high consolations, and we have no spirit of
murmuring or complaint. Yet, none of us will deny
that this is the severest blow, which, as a great
people, we have ever received. The nation has,
twice before, lost its Chief Magistrate by death ; but
there has been no mourning like this to-day.
III. — A third element in our grief, under this
afflictive dispensation of Providence, is the fear of
impending calamity. It is impossible to free our
minds of the deepest solicitude for the future. Alas !
we say, for the nation bereaved of its pilot, when

12
out in the midst of such a sea as this ! Palinurus
has been suddenly swept, by a wave, from the helm.
I suppose this anxiety is natural ; and yet, I am
sure, it is needless. Difficult questions are coming
up. The practical wisdom of our recognized leader
was cutting knots which men's perversity kept tying.
We trusted him. We were knitting ourselves to
gether in closer confidence in his decisions. That
shrewd, native judgment, that clear-sighted penetra
tion, that incorruptible integrity — oh, how we used
to throw ourselves back upon qualities like these,
and feel secure ! We found fault with him more
than once; but, eventually, he was justified in his
course. We said he was slow ; but he went as fast
as God did. He reasoned with logic that events
taught him. We were inordinately cast down under
defeat; he kept us cheerful. We grew boisterous
under victory ; he was calm himself, but glad to have
us so happy. He was never disheartened, never un
duly elated. When he failed, he became humbler ;
when he succeeded, he thanked God. When the way
was open, he was as alert as anybody ; when the way
was hedged up, he was strong enough to sit still.
By and bye we learned to know him well and rest
in him sublimely. Meantime, he urged us to look
beyond him. He made us devout. Put a man on
the busiest street-corner, and let him keep looking
upward, and he will gather a crowd that will all be
looking upward. So our President gave unaffected

13
praise to God, until we all began to sing with him.
Spectacles like these, which have been witnessed daily,
have never been known in this land before ; Mammon
has learned the doxologies belonging to God.
When such a leader is taken suddenly away, there
is nothing unphilosophical in the feeling of utter dis
may and apprehension that men are apt to experience.
But, in our case, all this is needless. My brethren, I
commend to your calm consideration, one solemn
thought, concerning the lessons of all history. Men
are nothing but instruments in the hands of their
Maker, in working out his purposes. Just as a sculp
tor needs now a chisel, now a file, now a graver, and
never thinks he must apologize or explain to us, who
stand by to watch him, why he drops one tool, or
takes up another ; for he is making a statue, which he
intends for a worthy immortality, — so the all-wise
God, carrying out his vast plans, assumes one man
and lays aside another, and never answers any of our
curious questions, while his " eternal Thought moves
on his undisturbed affairs." We are to blame seri
ously, if we allow ourselves to be depressed with
forebodings. God's rule, in all this four years' war, has
been, to bring to nought the things that are, not by
the things that are, but by the things that are not.
We have lived under the unvarying discipline of
surprise. By this time, we ought to have learned
our lesson.
With courage undiminished, therefore, let us be-

14
lieve that God will fit this coming man for the duties
of his unexpected office. Be on the alert now for
the discovery of some new purpose. The infinite
plans of the Almighty are shifting their phase for
some disclosure that will relieve our embarrassment.
It is expedient that even such offences as these should
come. There can be no doubt that God means to
make good out of this evil. And the question is
this : Will you and I be quiet in all the pain of our
bereavement, if we are only sure that the event will
be overruled to the benefit of the cause, the race, the
nation ? Will we accept the counsel of Caiaphas as
possibly adapted to our crisis : " Ye know nothing
at all ; nor consider that it is expedient that one man
should die for the people, and that the whole nation
perish not?" Perhaps, in this very alarm for the
future, there will be found a healthier spirit for us all.
IV. — For, in the fourth place, I remark, we find,
as an element in our mourning to-day, a deep-seated
indignation at the horrible crime which has been
committed. Humanity sickens and shudders at the
diabolical ingenuity, the malignant hatred, of this
culminating act of the rebellion. If there ever was a
time in which to obey the command, " Be ye angry,
and sin not," that time has come now. " There was
no such deed done nor seen from the day that the
Children of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt
unto this day ; consider of it, take advice, and speak
your minds."

15
Let a vast public sentiment be aroused and or
ganized, that shall exhibit this vile wickedness in its
true light. Let us invoke Christendom to make it
an eternal hissing. With a recoil of feeling so vio
lent that it wearies my will, and shocks my very
being, with uttermost loathing for an offence so
abominable ; seeing in it that keen, fine relish of
depravity that marks it not only as devilish, but one
of the master-works of the prince of devils, I stand
simply appalled — wondering, with unspeakable won
der, how it can be accepted by any creature wearing
the form of civilized humanity ! It is an outrage on
the community, whose tolerance it defies. It is an
insult to decency, a rebuke to forbearance, an offence
unto God. It is without the power of language to
reach the condemnation it merits. The words of
denunciation die on my lips in their own feebleness.
It is with an affecting sense of gratitude to God that
I discover the positive poverty of my mother-tongue
in epithets of vileness befitting its description. As
much as in you is, live peaceably with all men ; but
there ought to be a voice of opinion so stern, so out
spoken, that no man of credited decency should stand
tamely by and hear a crime, so unparalleled in its
baseness, even extenuated.
Is the world going back into savagery ? Is this
Christian land to become the rival of Dahomey?
This is no isolated act. The history of this slave
holders' rebellion is full of such. Again and again

16
have the lives of our chief men been threatened with
the dirk, the bullet, and the knife. Poison has been
put in their food. Their homes have been entered
by spies. Their steps have been way-laid in the
streets. And our common people have fared no
better. Quiet villages have been invaded, and women
and children shot down with fiendish glee. Cars,
crowded with unsuspicious travellers, have been thrown
from the track. Public buildings have been fired
over a whole city at once. And all this under the
shadow of authority claimed through a paper com
mission. Yet the nation has kept its temper. The
spectacle of a great people, thus outraged beyond a
parallel, yet so patient and forbearing, has been sub
lime enough to make our enemies wonder. They
have called our magnanimity meanness, and compli
mented us upon our manifold spaniel-like virtues,
with sarcasm that burnt in upon manly sensibility
like fire.
This assassination is the earliest reply which chiv
alry has had to make to forbearance unmeasured and
friendliness almost fraternal. Now, let us have done
with it ! Talk to me no more of " our misguided
brethren." Some are misguided — and it is those
who misguide them I denounce. Cain was brother
to Abel. Relationship is a perilous thing when it
says, "Art thou in health, my brother," and then
stabs under the fifth rib. Talk to me no more of the
"same race, educated at the same colleges, born of

17
the same blood." Satan was of the same race as
Gabriel, and educated at the same celestial school of
love and grace ; but one became a rebel, and between
them ever thereafter was " a great gulf fixed." Pie
cannot be brother of mine, he belongs to no race of
mine, who, in the foul cause of human bondage, fights
with a rural massacre, makes war with midnight
arson, and crowns his unmanly barbarity with stab
bing a sick man in his bed, and shooting an unarmed
husband in the very sight of his wife !
Let no one deem this violence unnecessary. They
tell us that none of our utterances are lost ; the
vibrations of the air on which they fall perpetuate
them into an eternity of circles, spreading wider and
wider. If I am ever again to meet these denunci
ations of mine, conscientiously spoken in this Christian
pulpit, let me find them in company with a declara
tion that will explain them. There are, in this com
munity, to-day, men and women — God forgive them ! —
nurtured under the hot debasements and vile luxuries
of the slave system, sojourning here on our charitable
sufferance, in order meanly to escape the perils of
the ruinous war they have helped to incite, who
clap their hands in applause of this murder ! I think,
in serious self-defence, we are to see that this thing is
ended. This wickedness clamors for retributive
judgment, and invokes the wrath of God.
V. — Thus I am led, naturally, to speak of a fifth
element in our feeling of mourning to-day ; the pro-

18
found conviction of necessity that the law of the
land should now take its course in relation to all the
aiders and abettors of this infamous rebellion. There
was, perhaps, needed one more proof of the unutter
able sin of treason. Here has it been flashed out
upon us, like the final stroke of a departing thunder
storm, the least expected, but the most fearfully
destructive of all that have fallen. We have been
growing more and more loose in our estimates of
guilt. We were catching from each other a spirit of
sentimentalism that boded no good. Tired of war,
longing for quiet, eager for trade, sickened with
bloodshed, we were ready to say, let the criminals be
pardoned, let the penalties of law be remitted. The
next act in our national history was, in all likelihood,
to be a general amnesty proclamation. Suddenly,
the hand which would have signed it was smitten
down into death. Then our eyes were opened to the
fixed, unalterable malignity in the temper of our foes.
A great conspiracy is disclosed. Murder is done at
the capital. Our beloved President becomes a victim
to the very magnanimity he was inculcating. Warn
ed fully of the peril, he would not believe human
nature could be so base. He trusted, and was be
trayed. The entire government was menaced, in the
moment of its open-hearted proffer of good will.
We are satisfied that all this is perilous pusilla
nimity now. There is no fitness of generosity to
malignants venomous as these. So, while our hearts

19
are chilled, their affections hurried back on them
selves in curdling horror, with pity ineffable, and
sorrow that cannot be repressed, we are united in
saying, let the will of the law be done ! When
there was rebellion in heaven, the rebels were pun
ished. God sent the fallen angels to hell. We are
not to find fault with that kind of administration.
Men can forgive. I do not believe there is one
unkind sentiment in any heart in the house of God
this day. We draw a distinction, world-wide, be
tween a crime and a criminal. The one we denounce,
the other we pity. But the majesty of law must be
vindicated. No puritan had a right to be the de
fender of Guy Fawkes. No patriot had a right to
screen Benedict, Arnold from justice. Let there be
now no violence. Let the common people be spared.
But, on the track of the villains that have opened
this insurrection, and urged it along its bloody track
even to this dreadful consummation, let the footsteps
of justice follow swiftly, relentlessly.
It may, possibly, be said, by some, that this assas
sination of the officers of government is a mere act
of madness done by a brace of frantic fanatics ; and
that it is not equitable and fair to hold a whole peo
ple responsible for its wickedness.
Let it be said, in reply, that the tidings of this
murder, going into the ranks of rebellion, will be
hailed with a howl of gladness and satisfaction, equal
to the yell in Pandemonium, when Satan seduced

20
Adam, and buried a race in ruin. It will never be
disowned, save by a few of the most exposed leaders,
who, seeing in it their own ruin, will repent, not like
Peter, for sin, but like Judas, for the results of sin.
Even now, the instincts of every rebel sympathizer
are on the alert to befriend the assassins, and block
the way of justice. Furthermore, let it be said, that
this crime happens to be conspicuous and heart-rend
ing, because it has marked the nation's idol for its
victim ; but it is only one of fifty thousand murders,
actual, intelligent, committed during the last two
years by the parties in power through the revolted
States. And these murders in the prisons are, every
one of them, just so much the more diabolical, as
starvation slowly is more horrible than the quicker
death of the bullet. The spirit is the same in all
cases. This wickedness is the legitimate outgrowth
of that system of slavery which originated the rebel
lion, and debauched, from time immemorial, all the
finer instincts of man.
Hence, there is no revenge in the popular heart
to-day, but only retribution. We pity the malefac
tors ; we pray for them ; but in this determination
we are fixed — let the majesty of the law be vindi
cated upon them as traitors ; let justice pursue them,
one by one ; let the gates of the world be closed to
their search for asylum ; let judgment follow on as
implacable as a doom.
VI. — I might well pause here, in the enumeration

21
of elements in the feeling we are all cherishing under
the pressure of this heart-rending sorrow. But there
is one more, which I detect in my own heart, and
know is in the hearts of my hearers. We desire to
know what instruction the all-wise God has intended
us to receive. We would inquire for His counsels, and
humbly learn of Him. My office, as a Christian
minister, will be discharged this morning, when I
have sought to point out to you some few of the les
sons forced into vivid illumination by this terrible
dispensation of Providence.
1. First of all, then, let us learn here how history
is composed. I am certain we have no proper con
ception of the magnitude of an event like this. We
are too near it to discover its proportions. Travellers
tell us they are always disappointed with the earliest
glimpse of vast mountains. Standing close under
the shadow of awful forms, so peerless in majesty,
they have no adequate notions of their loftiness and
amazing mass. These need distance on the landscape
to be truly appreciated. So an event like this is
never really reverenced as it should be. It needs
time for the free play of the imagination. We are
all unconscious of the spectacle we are to present to
posterity. The dreadful deed, which has filled our minds
with horror, will be a growing vision of weird wick
edness, shining with a strange luridness of its own, as
one of the wildest tragedies of the world's most un-

22
welcome remembrance. It ranks with the suicide of
Cleopatra, the death of Csesar, the murder of Wil
liam the Silent, the conspiracy of Catiline, the gun
powder plot of Guy Fawkes, the imperial incidents in
the wide empire of crime. To us the event seems
simply personal ; our views of it are necessarily nar
row. Our leader has fallen. Our government has
been menaced. But we only speculate upon its im
mediate results. The criminals will soon be appre
hended. The insurrection will end, and all the ex
citement will subside. But when the mighty future
shall receive the inheritance, it will be weighed by
other balances, and estimated more truly.
Thus history selects and perpetuates its own ma
terials. Each thought, each word, each deed, each
flash of sentiment, each outbreak of passion, each
exercise of influence, enters into the grand aggregate
of human recollection and intelligence, which we call
our Age. Out of this the pen of unerring history
compiles its annals.
i; For Humanity sweeps onward ; where to-day the martyr stands,
On the morrow crouches Judas, with the silver in his hands ;
Far in front the cross stands ready, and the crackling fagots burn,
While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return
To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn."
2. In the second place, let us learn the essential
iniquity and barbarism there is in any system of hu
man oppression. It was long ago remarked by La-
martine, that no man ever bound a chain around

23
the neck of his fellow-man, without God's binding a
chain of equal links around his own. Whoever de
bases the image of God will certainly become debased.
This thought receives an illustration here that amounts
almost to a demonstration. This crime is the mani
fest outshoot of American slavery.
I suppose no one remains now who doubts that
all this aggregated mass of abomination, this summa
tion of viUanies, whose tide of murky violence is
rolling itself along before our weary eyes, had its
fountain-head in the malignant ambition of a few
men, who started the stream of revolution in order
to waft themselves into continuous power. These
miserable criminals, whom justice is pursuing with
eager scent, are but the merest minute-hands on the
outermost dial of that popular sentiment which they
represent. The spring that has set them in motion,
the mechanism that gave them all their power, even
the delicate balances that have timed their present
success, are out of sight, yet easily discoverable in the
dark intricacies of that domestic and political life
based on the humiliation of a feebler race. You
may tear these index-pointers away, but the clock
work will run on. There will still remain the secret
progress of debasement, on the bold face of which they
have happened to become conspicuous. You will
gain nothing till you tear the hideous system to
pieces, and break the spring that lies coiled within, it.
What is this crime ? Nothing new, surely ; only

24
more public. It is one of a million crimes, each of
which God has seen. The same reckless imperi-
ousness of will, that has so many times struck at
laws, has now struck at the Executive of law — that
is all. The same thwarted passion, that has more
than once shot a slave unpunished, now has shot a
President — that is all. That same spirit is unsub
dued. It is ready to fly in the face of anything that
stands in its way. To continue a system of social
life that now has become a necessity in a measure, as
a minister to laziness and lust, these people have dis
membered the church, divided the republic, fought
their own brothers, and at last taken to murder and
assassination. No one can fail to see that there is
one single line of connection running all through the
history of this infamous rebellion. The pride of
power, engendered by the tyranny, petty at first,
over the unprotected black race, has betrayed these
miserable wretches into the mistake of supposing
they could lord it over the white race — that is all.
This latest crime is more showy, but the hearts
are no blacker than before. And the hearts have
been made black, by the system. How else will you
explain this appalling fact; there are women, with
babes in their arms, who will declare that this murder
in cold blood of a man in the presence of his wife is
chivalrous! This is monstrous, when judged by any
system of philosophy. There is but one solution of
the mystery : underlying all the ferocity of such a

sentiment, is found the subtle working of mere pride
of caste. Slavery has debased the feminine and hu
man sentiments with which they were born. That
code of morals always did tend to barbarism. The
young men of the South were corrupt before the war.
The women were brutalized in the finer feelings of
natural decency. They would send women to be
stripped and whipped by men for a price. Passion
grows wild with mere indulgence. Hence it is that a
deed combining so much of execrable meanness with
so much of hellish cruelty, finds women unsexed
enough to applaud it ! Home on the diabolical sys
tem it represents, do I soberly urge the responsibility
of this murder. It is high time to have done with
it, root and branches.
3. Once more : Let us learn here to-day the
power of martyrdom in fixing great principles. Pres
ident Lincoln has been useful in his life, far beyond
what falls to the common lot of even the most
patriotic and public-spirited men. But his death
has confirmed his usefulness — made it illustrious,
influential, and immortal.
In the natural course of time his period of official
service would have ended. His administration of the
government would have been canvassed cautiously,
and, perhaps, uncharitably criticised, and, by some
parties, condemned. By this sudden, tragic close of
it, however, it has been forced into prominence. It
will now be marked forever. All the principles it

26
has aimed to establish are settled hereafter beyond a
peradventure. The documents he has added to the
archives of the nation are sealed with blood. This
republic will take no step backwards from the vant
age-ground to which he had led the banner of its
sovereignty. Even his policy will have weightier
influence than that proposed by any living man. The
noble archer has fallen in death, before he could
really know how princely were the shots he made ;
but the arrows he sped latest are yet out in the air,
over the sea, and will strike unerringly the mark.
And when they who stand nearest to the spot where
the shafts hang quivering, look around to discover
whose was the sinewy strength that sent them so
forcefully and so true, they will find that another
hand, just as firm, has assumed the bow, and another
eye, just as keen, has discerned the same target.
They who oppose an honest man living, are ever
among the first to honor him dead. Nobody dares
uproot a standard planted by a loved leader who
poured out his life at the foot of its staff. Perhaps
it was this which was needed to bring our people
together permanently. Perhaps this was the essen
tial condition of our restoration to unity, that we
become reconciled over an open grave. It may be
that party-spirit will yield now, and bury the bitter
ness of its animosity in a martyr's tomb.
You will recall the touching fable of Roman his
tory. A vast seam opened in the land, in the very

27
midst of the Forum, disclosing a yawning abyss
which they could not fill with rocks or with soil. At
last the soothsayers declared that the commonwealth
could be preserved only by closing the gulf; and
the gulf could be closed only by devoting to the
gods, who had opened it, what constituted the prin
cipal glory and strength of the people. At this all
stood aghast. But there was one Curtius, a youth of
high birth, who, hearing the deliverance, demanded
of his countrymen whether their arms and their
courage were not the most valuable possessions they
owned. They gave him assent with their silence.
And then the heroic warrior, arraying himself in full
armor, and mounting his horse, rode headlong into
the chasm ; whereupon the earth immediately closed,
and over the memorable spot swept a placid lake
bearing his name.
Shall we say that now our divided country will
come together again, when he who seemed the glory
and strength of the American people has gone down
in the breach? Shall not his sacrifice avail for
propitiation to that foul spirit of sectional pride
which rent the land asunder ?
4. And this leads me on to mention a final lesson.
We see now the inevitable triumph and perpetuity
of our cause. We are not hero-worshippers in any
degree. We never were. But we believe in God.
We entered upon this war not willingly, not of our
own accord. We have been fighting for a principle.

28
That we have never surrendered nor forgotten.
What we loved this leader for was what we deemed
truth to our cause.
What is our cause ? It is easier to say what it is
not; for its essence is negative. Whatever this
crime of assassination is, whatever it represents,
whatever it aimed at, whatever was the spirit that
prompted it, whatever may be now wickedly offered
in its apology — just not that is our cause. And as that
crime, in spirit, in purpose, in instigation, was all in
the interest of human bondage, so our cause embraces
all that is antagonistic to that system. There never
has been but one issue in this terrible contest. Un
derneath all these evident questions has been lying
one which some of us studiously labored to ignore ;
and that was concerning the dignity of universal
labor, and the absolute equality of all races before
the common law. He who, at this late day, shuts
his eyes to this fact, is neither inteEigent nor wise.
We have fought for an open Bible, a free school, an
unfettered press, and a Scriptural pulpit.
In all the doctrines ostentatiously put forth by
our foes — States' rights, uncontaminated blood, family
pride, sectional independence — there has ever been
this keen, sharp liking for slavery as a social system.
They recognized it as a kind of secret zest among
themselves ; as voluptuaries recognize, with an under
stood leer, a favorite lust ; as wine-bibbers recognize
the subtle flavor of an indescribable liquor. Our

29
cause consists in precise opposition to that. We,
therefore, have stood for the rights of men, the truth
of the Gospel, the principles of humanity, the integrity
of the Union, the power of Christian people to
govern themselves, the indefeasible equality of all
the creatures of God in natural conditions of exist
ence, no matter what may be the color of their skin.
So the nations of the world have looked upon us, and
held us responsible. We were the enemies of all
class-systems, castes, and aristocracies. We were the
champions of manhood in all that was noble, of wo
manhood in all that was pure. This has been, and
still is, our cause.
And what I call you to learn now is, that this
cause is safe. A martyr's blo^r has sealed the cove
nant we are making with posterity. Oh, the glories
of our immediate prospect of usefulness in the years
to come ! The republic is secure. The Union is
confirmed as a perpetual federation of States. The
peril through which we have just passed has no par
allel. Our government, as an entirety, was aimed at
with one savage blow. Such a stroke, on any other
nation, would have rocked Christendom to its centre.
Yet our nation is untremulous as the primeval granite.
The most delicate balances of commercial life show
not even the semblance of noticeable variation, even
when this violence of a ton's weight all at once jars
the beam ! Our cause is eternally secure !
Think, then, as we close our meditation upon this

30
martyr-life, how strangely God has overruled much
that seemed so destructive to our good. On that
very day — they call it Good Friday — there is annually
represented, in the Sistine Chapel, at Rome, the dis
aster of the world when the Redeemer was crucified.
Thirteen lamps are lit in the darkness, ranged in
pyramidal form, the topmost one conceived to be the
symbol of Messiah. A low, mournful chant from the
Lamentations continues to echo through the building,
while one light after another is extinguished at inter
vals, until twelve are gone out. Only the loftiest and
the brightest remains ; and still the chant moans on.
Then the last one is struck, and every glimmer per
ishes in total gloom. Thereupon the music ends. A
moment succeeds, of unutterable oppression — rayless
and stifled — and then one voice breaks the silence ;
a voice wailing, piercing, as if from a crushed and
broken heart, lifting the burden of the Miserere;
the grief of the race over its Helper and its Hope.
Fitting seems the symbol to us now, as we look
only on the earthly side of this tremendous loss ; on
that same day, while the shadows were gathering in
the chapel of that seven-hilled city, our light ap
peared to go out, and the nation was in the gloom.
But to day, let us look on the heavenly side. How
sweet and calm it is to think of that great, brave
heart, this Easter Sabbath! He is not here, but
risen. Far beyond the sound of battle, far beyond
the turmoil of state, in the infinite realms of gladness,

31
that troubled mind has found its rest. Mourned, as
never before martyr was mourned ; loved, as never
before statesman was loved ; honored, as never before
patriot was honored ; he has gone down to a spotless
grave. High over all human passion that disem
bodied spirit stands, free as the thought that follows
him ; the eye of faith seems to behold him even now
on the radiant plain of eternity ; on either side falls
away every official adornment ; the soul of the
Christian man bends in all humility before his
Maker's presence, saved by grace ; saved, not because
he wore the robes of the highest station on the
globe ; saved, not because of his rare gifts of affec
tion or intellect ; saved, not by reason of the blessed
deeds he had done; saved, merely because of his
faith in the Saviour, that he learned by the graves
of the boys that fell at Gettysburg; and, as you gaze
after him, with a subdued and tearful heart, you can
only pay him the tribute that trembles on the lip
that speaks it —
" He WAS A GOOD MAN, AND A JUST ! "

YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

Gift of
STUART W. JACKSON
Yale 1898