here was no man in the city whose evening hours
were worth more in solid gold than his. It is said that he was once
called upon, in the absence of his minister, in a Universalist Church,
to go into the pulpit. He did so, and delivered a very pungent sermon on
the text, "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God." The
strongest points made by Mr. Greeley in the best of his printed essays
are those which emphasize the authority of God. A letter in his
characteristic hieroglyphics, the last one he ever wrote to me, and
which now lies before me, was in reply to one of mine, criticising the
_Tribune_ for speaking of Dr. Tyng's as a "church" and of Dr. Adams's
house of worship as a "meeting house." I told him if one was a church,
then the other was equally so. He replied: "I am of Puritan stock, on
one side, in America since 1640, and on the other since 1720. My people
worshiped God in a meeting house; they gave it the name, not I, and they
called the body of believers who met therein 'a church.' Episcopalians
speak otherwise. It is a bad sign that we do not seem disposed to hold
fast the form of sound words."

I am not aware of any Scriptural authority for calling a steepled house
"a church."

The last evening I ever spent with him was at a temperance meeting of
plain working people, to which he came several miles through a snow
storm. He spoke with great power, and when I told him afterwards it was
one of the finest addresses I had ever heard from him he said to me: "I
would rather tell some truths to help such plain people as we had
to-night than address thousands of the cultured in the Academy of
Music." As he bade me good-night at yonder corner of Fulton Street, I
said to him: "Uncle Horace, will you not come and spend the night with
me?" He said, "No, I have much work to do before morning. I am coming
over soon to spend a week in Brooklyn with my brother-in-law, and I will
come and have a night with you." Alas, it was not long before he came to
spend a night in Brooklyn,--that night that knows no morning. On a
chilly November day, towards twilight, I was one of the crowd that
followed him to his resting place in Greenwood, and I always, when on my
way to my own plot, stop to gaze on the monument that bears the
inscription, _"Founder of the New York Tribune."_

CHAPTER XI

THE CIVIL WAR AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

An enormous quantity of books, historic and reminiscent, have been
written about our Civil War