leaves, the chaplets and flower-wreaths of peace, for they lie all about us. Let us drape it with scrolls on which admiring angels shall see mercy and forgiveness written in unfading letters of love. Then let us sing! yes, sing! sing in a low, soft, clear voice, as a fitting requiem for such an hour as this: "They rest from their labors and their works follow them. Peace on earth, good will toward men.' "Hush that sobbing-weep more lightly, On we travel daily, nightly, To the rest that they have found. On more holy, happy ground?" SERMON XXI. REV. HENRY B. SMITH, D. D. "I am the Lord, and there is none else; there is no God beside me. I girded thee, though thou hast not known me."-ISAIAH xlv. 5. WE are apt to believe that man makes history. We look at the outside of events, and see not the secret springs that move and guide their progress. We judge them as they affect our transient feelings, interests, or plans. We measure them as they appear in time, and forget the past eternity in which they were all determined, and the future eternity in which they will all be interpreted. But there is one who seeth the end from the beginning. There is a God who hideth himself, and only now and then revealeth himself. He alone fully knows what all things are and mean. He setteth up one, and putteth down another; and none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou? The lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord. In his hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind. At one time he setteth every man's sword against his fellow, even throughout all the host (Judges vii. 22); at another time he leads us to say, Thou Lord wilt ordain peace for us; for thou also hast wrought all our works in us. So that in self renunciation we are compelled to acknowledge, that now, O Lord, thou art our Father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hands. The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord; as the rivers of water he turneth it withersoever he will. In our text he says of Cyrus, as may be said of all great rulers guided by his providence in ways they knew not: "I girded thee, though thou hast not known me; that they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the Lord, and there is none else." And there are times in every individual, and in every national history, when these majestic and awe-inspiring truths underlying all events and all religion, are brought so distinctly home to every mind and heart, that they could not be made more impressive if written in lines of light upon the canopy of heaven. There are times when we must flee to the refuge of God's providence, if we would avoid the blindness of chance, or the despair of fatalism; for between these three, lawless chance, pitiless fate, or Divine providence, we must all at last choose in estimating the events of time. In the great crises and junctures of history, in its staggering vicissitudes, when viewing the hecatombs sacrificed upon fields of carnage, when bowed down by the stroke of speechless private woe, or mute with horror before appalling crime committed against the embodied majesty of the State, at the moment when a nation's destiny seems trembling in the balance-how deeply, how solemnly is the conviction forced upon us, that if there be any comfort, any refuge, it is only under the shadow of the Divine wings; it is only in the belief, that He who ruleth in the heavens ruleth also upon the earth, and that the wrath of man. shall praise him. But as for you, said Joseph to his brethren, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass as it is this day, to save much people alive. And if ever a people were called upon, by an unparalleled concurrence and combination of circumstances, to recognize the hand of God in history, the hand of him who both forms the light and creates darkness, who maketh peace and createth evil, it is surely this American people under the present conjuncture of events, some of which have so recently filled us with thankful exultation, while others have plunged us in the depths of national grief, mingled with awe, as if the very contradictions of destiny were at the same instant appointed to be our lot. An all-wise and inscrutable Providence has been guiding us in ways we knew not of; girding us for a work which no man could foresee, or which, if foreseen, no man would have dared to attempt; enabling us, with faith and patience and sacrifice, to pass through all the vicissitudes of the greatest civil war in history, unexampled in its intensity, tenacity, resources, and cost both of treasures and men, until we had just come to see, as from the summit of another Pisgah, the promised land stretched out, inviting us to enter in and make of it a goodly land in the name of the Lord of hosts. And then, just at the moment when all hearts were jubilant with the hope of a quickcoming peace; when the great rebellion was staggering and crumbling down under the quick and sharp strokes by which alone it could be felled to the earth; when the nation was awaiting its jubilee, and the very air was ringing with the glad acclaims of myriad voices of the freemen and the freed; and when many, too, in the fulness of their too exuberant joy, had begun to forget justice to the wrong-doers, and were speaking of an almost total |