ment of his fiendish purpose, entered that private box and aimed the deadly weapon at the head of the President, God said, "Suffer it to be so now," and it was done, the fearful deed was done!

Abraham Lincoln's mission to this people may have been at an end. His death may serve the purposes of God with reference to the nation better than his life. Not that his life was unimportant, but it may be that we had come to depend too much on him, and God suffered him to be taken away, to show us that the salvation of the nation was in His hands, and safe; that He can carry on His work though His workmen fall.

Leniency to traitors was once necessary, and unavoidable, to a great extent. And although mercy should be shown by the government to the mass of those in arms against us, yet the time has come when the leaders in the rebellion must be punished. Of them it may be said, "Mercy to the individual would be cruelty to the state." Leniency to such would prove the curse of the country. We have not yet begun to punish treason. We scarcely appreciate the nature of the crime.

All through the north as well as the south are men unpunished, who have not only expressed sympathy with traitors, but have rendered them aid and comfort. God deals with rebels in a sterner way. Every account in the bible of his dealings with rebels proves this.

It is God's purpose that treason against this government shall be punished. President Lincoln's position of leniency seemed to be a necessity from which he could not well recede. He was suffered to be removed from that position, by means the best calculated to excite, not a spirit of revenge but a desire and determination on the part of the people that the penalty of the law should be inflicted. Now justice can be measured out. I pray that it may be. The psalmist prays with reference to his enemies, "Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into hell." His enemies were incorrigible. He saw no chance for repentance, and that in view of the mischief they were working, hell and the grave were the fittest places for them. Is there not an analogy between his enemies and ours?

Let treason go unpunished, let the leaders be scattered and these branches of the deadly Upas will strike themselves into the soil, become rooted, and again bring forth their hellish fruit.

Andrew Johnson is President. Our duty is now plain.

"Trust in God at all times." Such confidence will have the effect to calm our hearts and quiet our fears, to revive hope, to inspire confidence in our cause, and to insure the blessing of heaven. It will nerve the national heart for nobler achievements; and if need be, for deeper sorrow and intenser suffering and further sacrifice.

We have trusted too much in men and generals, in

numbers and skill. We have, to a great extent, ignored God. Let us now acknowledge Him. Our privilege is to pour out our hearts before Him. We are not merely to pray to Him, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, but to wrestle with Him. Did you ever go to God with any great desire? Did you feel that that desire was all absorbing, and uppermost in your heart? Did you feel that the granting of your request was in accordance with the will of God, and that you could not be denied? Did you allow no object to intervene between you and your God? Then you know what it is to wrestle with God. In like manner go to Him now. Pour out your heart before Him in behalf of the interests of this nation. God has already heard our prayer, and has averted many a sorrow that would otherwise have come upon us. He hath spared the

nation for the righteous' sake.

Let those who have vilified the President and cursed the government, go before their Maker and repent as in dust and ashes at his feet, if haply they may find Him, and be forgiven.

ADDRESS DELIVERED IN THE SECOND PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.

BY REV. D. S. GREGORY.

The event which has called us to these sad solemnities to-day, is one which has clothed the places of state in sackcloth and left a nation in mourning. It is always wise to give heed to the striking providences

which from time to time startle the nations as with an audible voice of God. Not to give heed to such a providence as this, not to permit it to settle in the heart and to leave its impress upon the character and life, would be evidence of a degree of insensibility which should arouse and shock every Christian man. These hundreds of cities draped in mourning, the silence in these millions of homes, these busy scenes of traffic hushed and darkened, these ten thousand sanctuaries clad in sable, these many eyes to which tears are no longer strangers, proclaim to day the deep and solemn feeling of a bereaved people. The greatness, the suddenness of the calamity, accompanied at once with circumstances of the most tender and affecting interest and of the most horrifying and revolting nature, speaks to the heart in irresistible language. Death is always a solemn thing, opening up before us as it does visions of the grave, of the judgment, and of eternity with its rewards and retributions; but it is made a doubly solemn thing to-day, by the circumstances in which it is pressed upon our

attention.

Nothing could bring home to us more forcibly the thought that we can never be placed beyond the reach of death. Greatness or eminence in position cannot give immunity from death. It would be vain to deny to him, whom this most atrocious murder of the modern ages has taken off, the title of great. True he may have had none of those qualities that dazzle, that

awaken the enthusiasm of an hour, but there was something more substantial than these in his charac ter which will cause his name to be written above all merely glittering names, on the scroll of fame. Called to preside in the grandest national crisis in the world's history, to guide this mighty nation in an overturning beside which all the other revolutions of the age are dwarfed into mere child's play, he has nowhere been found wanting. Entering upon his work in a capital, a very sink of corruption, he escaped the contamination. Beset from the first by political harpies, he cast them off and gathered around him the wisdom and strength of that party of many political creeds but of one heart, the mighty union party of the land. Slandered and maligned by radicals of every sort and all extremes, he took his stand like a rock for the right, seemingly insensible alike to censure and to flattery. And while the mighty struggle has been going on through the years, we have felt sometimes. how keen and piercing an eye has been fixed upon it to interpret the march of events, and how mighty a hand has been constantly shaping the policy of the nation. Future generations alone will comprehend it fully.

But one thing is plain even now, and that is, that the man of whom it can be said in such a mighty struggle almost mightier than the world has ever seen before the man of whom it can be said that he has not been found wanting, not wanting in insight