care, waiting to fulfil in the experiences of this afflicted, storm tossed nation that benign promise which gleamed of old through the reft cloud of many a portentous night in the history of Israel, “Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me."

That word is as true to-day, and as apposite to our condition as if an angel were uttering it for the first time in the ears of the people, as a fresh message from the throne of the Eternal King. We are still in the keeping of our fathers' God, to whom, in the fiery trials of the revolutionary era, Washington was wont to pray in forest solitudes. As the ancient Psalmist said, we say, "He that keepeth us shall neither slumber nor sleep." The assassin's dagger cannot reach Him. And though the deadly stroke aimed at our chief ruler hath pierced the nation's heart, He liveth to parry the force of the blow, to heal the wound, to bring good out of evil, strength out of weakness, life from death, to make the wrath of man to praise Him, and its remainder to restrain.

All the events of our history, from the beginning even until now, tally with the hopes which these promises inspire. As a faithful woman in Israel said to her desponding husband when he trembled before the manifestation of the Divine Majesty, If the Lord had been pleased to kill us, He would not have received such offerings at our hands, nor would He have showed us such things as these."

Think of it. Can we, as a people, in this hour of trial, recall to memory the last four years of devastating

war, the superhuman malice of cunning foes acting in concert with the educated craft and wealth of the aristocratic powers of Europe, the era of successful treachery and intrigue, of victories over us on bloody battle-fields, the taunts of triumph like those of old Philistia's daughters in Gath and Askelon, rehearsed and wafted back from beyond the sea, and all the terrible scenes of national agony through which we have passed, along the verge of an unfathomable abyss, under the chosen leadership of Abraham Lincoln, without being assured to the utmost depth of our heart's capacity of grateful feeling, that God raised him up, "made him great," and then, at the set moment, GAVE him to us as an angel of deliverance, in order to work out for us that "great salvation" which has just now become the most amazing and hopeful spectacle of the nineteenth century in the sight of the whole civilized world?

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No, never these years are 'years of his right hand,"

the remembrance of which has called forth over the ricefields and cotton-fields of the emancipated South, and in the open streets and marts of Boston and New York alike, songs of praise that rolled in all the lyrical majesty of "Old Hundred," and sounded forth the joy of millions as in the deep thunder tones of ocean waves.

These grand anthems, God himself extemporized for us; He made the "logic of events" vocal with prophecies of our glorious future, as sure to us as any that ever came from Isaiah's lips, that were touched by fire from Heaven; and shall we now, in this hour of sudden gloom, be tempted to yield for a moment to doubt or fear or dark forebodings, like those who adore no God

but chance or fate, or blind, inexorable law? Oh, no! truth, love, faith, honor, gratitude forbid it.

I know how hard it is, at times, for the stricken heart, under the shock of terrible and scathing bereavement, to school itself (I will not say into submission, or resignation, for these are, comparatively, tame words) into joyous, hopeful, filial trust.

I know what extraordinary and mighty reasons there are to tempt us, in spite of all the signs of wise design and overruling Providence in the past, to treat this event as being too ill-timed to furnish occasion for the exercise of these Christian graces, or to be regarded as anything else than a bad chance-stroke, full of disastrous portent to the fortunes of our country.

I know how prone are the shocked sensibilities of some to arouse the fear of strange evils that throw their shadows before, (as a patriotic woman and mother expressed it yesterday,) of a Reign of Terror like that which racked revolutionary France in the days of Robespierre.

I know what a dreadful depression of spirit is likely to be produced by the contrast between the tone of the last public service in this sanctuary and the tone of the present; between the glowing scene of Thursday, when a Fast was turned into a Festival by that last triumph of our arms, which seemed like a new proclamation from the Supreme Governor of the world, and the more than funereal gloom that overcasts our lurid sky at this hour, and turns the greatest Festival of Christendom into a Fast, to the sickened heart of Christian patriotism. I know this, and I feel the oppressiveness of the murky air laden with rumors of coming trouble.

In view of all these things of sad significance I know how hard it is for some to interpret an event, that seems so mysteriously ill-timed, into harmony with a cheerful, hopeful view of those kind designs and wise forecastings of Divine Providence that insure our national welfare, and our progress in a bright national career of honor, glory, strength, freedom, and prosperity.

Nevertheless, I know at the same time what are the rocky grounds of our trust, and adopt the words of a French statesman, explanatory of his own conduct, amid the moral earthquake in his own country in 1848: "I believe in God!"

All these portents of evil are but as foil to the diamond.

I welcome the hope with which Moses inspired Israel when he said "God made him to suck honey out of the rock, and oil out of the flint."

I remember the machinations of assassins against the life of the President that were strangely baffled in those times when success would have been fatal, and turned the trembling scale of national destiny in favor of armed treason with a force that would have mocked resistance; when an announcement like that which flashed over the wires yesterday would have been the signal for the rallying of treacherous cabals, not only in the capital, but throughout all the North, from the St. Lawrence to the Potomac, and from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi.

In those days of disaster, despondency, and weakness, the faith of the people in our President was our great bond of union, and the bulwark of our safety against the complicated plots of open and secret foes. But now

he is gone; and who fears them now? Think of it: who fears them now, when the rebel power is crushed, its fortresses and cities and capital captured, its government dissolved, and its armies flying like chaff before the storm?

Surely, I know the answer that your hearts indite. What a difference between now and then! What a cheerful light gleams out from this comparison of the past and the present, spanning the dense cloud of our sorrow with the bow of promise, the sign of a covenant of hope, well ordered in all things and sure!

The death of those we love, honor, and trust, at the first sight, never seems well-timed; the parting pang is ever painful;

"The flesh will quiver where the pincers tear;

The blood will follow where the knife is driven";

the tear will gush from the depths of nature where the cherished ties of life are broken: but there is a time of separation set, and that time is adjusted to a perfect harmony with those far-reaching purposes of Our Heavenly Father, which, as Jesus teaches in the Sermon on the Mount, take within their scope the fall of a sparrow as well as the fall of an empire.

O, it is a consoling truth, "Our times are in his hand";

"The voice that rolls the stars along

Speaks all the promises."

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And yet, in the sweep of a great calamity like this which we now bewail, where the immediate cause is not