rld, as a
present and real supremacy over the race of man and all human affairs.
He was all his life a great student of the Scriptures, and no modern
speculations ever shook the solid reasons of his belief. When he entered
the city of Washington, fresh from college, "the earnest prayer of his
heart was, that God would give him work to do, and success in doing it."
When he was laying out the plans of professional life, on his first
establishment at Cincinnati, his invocation was, "May God enable me to
be content with the consciousness of faithfully discharging all my
duties, and deliver me from a too eager thirst for the applause and
favor of men." All through the successive and manifold activities of his
busy and strenuous life, when, to outward seeming, they were all worldly
and personal, the same predominant sense of duty and religious
responsibility animated and solemnized the whole.

At this point in his life we may draw the line between the period of
education for the work he had before him and that work itself. What Mr.
Chase was, at this time, in all the essential traits of his moral and
intellectual character--in his views of life, its value, its just
objects and aims, its social, moral, and religious responsibilities; in
his views of himself, his duties, obligations, prospects, and
possibilities; in his determinations and desires--such, it seems to me
from the most attentive study of all these points--such, in a very
marked degree, he continued to be at every stage of his ascent in life.

What, then, shall we assign as the decisive elements, the controlling
constituents, of character--and what the assurance of their persistence
and their force--which this youth could bring to the service of the
State, or contribute to the advancement of society and the well-being of
mankind?

These were simple, but, in combination, powerful, and adequate to fill
out worthily the life of large opportunities which, though not yet
foreseen to himself, was awaiting him.

The faculty of reason was very broad and strong in him, yet without
being vast or surprising. It seized the sensible and practical relations
of all subjects submitted to it, and firmly held them in its tenacious
grasp; it exposed these relations to the apprehension of those whose
opinion or action it behooved him to influence, by methods direct and
sincere, discarding mere ingenuity, and disdaining the subtleness of
insinuation. His education had all been of a