ADDRESS. I AM unable to give, and you perhaps indisposed to receive any regular preaching to-day. If I can but tell you what is in the air; if I can voice your feeling and my own, still more that spirit of God which is ready to be voiced by human lips, the real end of our meeting will, however informally, be reached. I lay aside therefore my written discourse. Though it be ecclesiastically a festival this morning, no Romish or other rubric has a right to prescribe our theme. I take no text save from the Bible of providence, the great book of events, God's finger is still writing in burning words every hour. I accept his subject, and defer my own. I need not even tell the youngest of you what has occurred. How all too suddenly it was known! How on the wires it flashed, how in the atmosphere that overhangs, and in every wind that sweeps across our borders, it brooded and was borne! The craped and drooping flag, the slow-sounding bell, the minute-gun told it; and had the ocean-telegraph, yet to succeed, only served, the brain and heart of the world would be trem bling, with one sympathy. California, from our farthest bounds, is with us in the same sensation to-day. I shrink from naming the deed by which we are so stirred. An actor in a theatre performs a part, in a scene of real life, which extinguishes all the interest of the mimic stage. What a contrast the last tragedy to God seems to have chosen sacred our late jubilee! days for his messages, on two successive Sundays appointing celebrations of victory, and now giving to Good Friday and Easter a new association indeed in Christian minds! But, on this dark day, my purpose with you is not a lament, but comfort. Let me try to mention some consolations. First, though our chief magistrate-all of him that could die is dead, THE NATION LIVES. "What is your first impression?" asked a brother clergyman, adding that his was, the line must be drawn stricter between the friends and enemies of this country. A second said his first impression was, that an era of misrule had come. I said, my first impression, after the shock of grief, was, though the President is gone, the nation lives, and will live more vital and vigorous for this blow. What did the madmen, that struck at the Chief and the Secretary, so meanly—at the one from behind and the other in his bed-think to do? To kill the nation, to assassinate liberty, to cut the throat of law? What a mistake! This blow will hurt, not our cause, but only the hand that struck it; and no mischance to the truth be suffered by Him without whom not a sparrow falleth. But we know It is not from It is one consolation, too, that slavery died more swiftly and surely by this very stroke. Most important is it, that the act should be traced. We should not connect it with any quarter without proof. its general and most authentic origin. any individual alone, but from the barbarism of slavery. That demon whispered in the actor's ear! That dragon fired his passion, and nerved his arm! His birth and breeding were in the hot-beds and centres of slavery, slave-breeding, and slave-trading. With indignation for the crime, mingles in my mind infinite pity for the criminal, whose personal guilt has what palliation depravity so deep can find in early nurture, bitter prejudice, or constitutional bias. He impersonated slavery itself in that theatre, which will hang henceforth, one of the most terrible pictures of history, on the walls of time forever. The horror affords this solace; that it hints the deathagony of the deadly foe of our republic. The monster, pursued in northern seas, is never more dangerous than in his dying struggles. Let the boat beware, that approaches him, lest the last lashing of his tail mix the blood of its crew with his own! With a worse monster than ever swam the deep, this new evidence of malignity should move us to keep no terms. Let this last precious life-current it has caused to flow be the mordant to set and seal the color of our eternal hatred, not to its misguided supporters, but to itself! Now that the assassination, which has been for four years and more after our Head, has accomplished its end, let our consolation be in the slavery's own unsparing destruction. |