as
they never were before; and the whole history of the last four years,
rounded up by this cruel stroke, seems in the providence of God, to
have been clothed now, with an illustration, with a sympathy, with an
aptness, and with a significance, such as we never could have expected
nor imagined. God, I think, has said, by the voice of this event, to
all nations of the earth: "Republican liberty, based upon true
Christianity, is firm as the foundation of the globe."

Even he who now sleeps has, by this event, been clothed with new
influence. Dead, he speaks to men who now willingly hear what before
they refused to listen to. Now his simple and weighty words will be
gathered like those of Washington, and your children and your
children's children shall be taught to ponder the simplicity and deep
wisdom of utterances which, in their time, passed, in party heat, as
idle words. Men will receive a new impulse of patriotism for his sake,
and will guard with zeal the whole country which he loved so well. I
swear you, on the altar of his memory, to be more faithful to the
country for which he has perished. They will, as they follow his
hearse, swear a new hatred to that slavery against which he warred,
and which, in vanquishing him, has made him a martyr and a conqueror.
I swear you, by the memory of this martyr, to hate slavery, with an
unappeasable hatred. They will admire and imitate the firmness of this
man, his inflexible conscience for the right, and yet his gentleness,
as tender as a woman's, his moderation of spirit, which not all the
heat of party could inflame, nor all the jars and disturbances of his
country shake out of place. I swear you to an emulation of his
justice, his moderation, and his mercy.

You I can comfort; but how can I speak to that twilight million to
whom his name was as the name of an angel of God? There will be
wailing in places which no minister shall be able to reach. When, in
hovel and in cot, in wood and in wilderness, in the field throughout
the South, the dusky children, who looked upon him as that Moses whom
God sent before them to lead them out of the land of bondage, learn
that he has fallen, who shall comfort them? O, thou Shepherd of
Israel, that didst comfort Thy people of old, to Thy care we commit
the helpless, the long-wronged, and grieved.

And now the martyr is moving in triumphal march, mightier than when
alive. The Nation rises up at every stage of his coming. Cities and
State