sadness sat upon every face. Strong men wept, and the waving flags, which were still floating in triumph from every spire and masthead, were lowered, and the people commenced to drape their dwellings, and put on the garb of mourning.

"He lived to see the Republic's success, and to feel his veins swelling with that rich joy which swept like a current of quickening life throughout the land, and then died a martyr to the cause he had championed, sealing his service with his life, leaving the Nation which he had rescued in the wildest grief; throwing the shadow of a strange sorrow over lands which he had never seen, and seeking the rest denied him here in the presence of Him who had raised him up."

Our citizens were appalled by the dread intelligence, and speechless and sad, mused upon the event that had no parallel in our history. All cherished feelings of honor and affection for the martyred President, and but one sentiment pervaded the hearts of the loyal masses. The city itself was filled with gloom, and the long, grief-ful day will not soon be forgotten. Hon. L. F. S. Foster, who was now President of the Senate, Governor Buckingham, and others of our leading men, started for Washington, to be of such service as might be possible in this unlooked-for emergency, and also to represent the State at the funeral solemnities in the Capital.

On Sunday, April sixteenth, all the churches in town were dressed in mourning, and discourses appropriate to the sad occurrence were preached. It was Easter Sabbath, and the white festal flowers with which the pulpits and altars in many of the sanctuaries were adorned, stood out in their sweet symbolism against the draperies which memorialized the Nation's departed chief. Large congregations and the marked solemnity of the usually joyous services of this

festival Sabbath, showed how profoundly the hearts of our citizens shared in the universal grief.

As indicating what the voice of the Norwich pulpit on the grievous event was, we give here the following very brief abstracts of the sermons preached :

At Trinity Church Rev. John V. Lewis took for his text Psalm lviii. 10: "The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance; he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked." The preacher began with an acknowledgment that he had an unusual text for an Easter sermon. It was not the text he had chosen, but God himself had chosen it and preached a sermon to the nation. And when he heard that text announced yesterday morning, he thanked God that the Gospel had a strong side, a sternly retributive side; that it was a Gospel of vengeance upon the evil-doer, no less than of peace to the righteous. He thanked God that the risen Lord rose a conqueror as well as a saviour, to put all enemies under his feet. He thanked God for the Psalms of David, with their religious intolerance of the workers of iniquity, and for the Revelation of St. John, which truly shows us there is such a thing as "the wrath of the Lamb." The resurrection of Christ proclaimed undying war upon every form of evil. The risen Lord is irresistible. He will make no unholy compromise with sin offering pardon to the misguided and repentant, he offers only vengeance to the obstinate rebel. The remainder of the discourse was an exposition of the necessity of executing vengeance legally and by lawfully constituted authority. The great Easter of the Resurrection will redress all grievances.

Rev. Mr. Graves, in the Central Baptist Church, spoke as follows:

"I cannot proceed further with these services without alluding to the event which crowds all other thoughts from our minds,

which has draped our sanctuaries, and filled the hearts of the nation with sadness. Abraham Lincoln is dead. The people's President. The man whom God had raised up to guide this nation through its great life struggle. Dead by the hand of an assassin. Murdered in the Capital by the spirit of secession, which for four years has been deluging our land in blood. It is a tragedy without parallel in the world's history, since the assassination of Julius Cæsar in the Roman Forum, and a crime surpassed only by the crucifixion. God, 'who maketh the wrath of man to praise him,' has suffered this for some end, wise in his inscrutable providence. Perhaps it is to teach us in this most critical juncture of national affairs the utter folly of trusting in man, however tried and trusty that man may be, and to make God our refuge, who is a very present help in time of trouble. Perhaps because he saw that the executive administration, in the hands of this kind, this tender-hearted man, would not mete out to treason the justice which is its due, and which He, as the God of justice means it shall have at the hands of a sterner man. His work is done, and well done. He lived to see the spirit of rebellion broken, and the glad dawn of peace. Abraham Lincoln is saved to history, and to-day he takes his place among the great and good of all times. Let us bow with reverence and submission, even in the depth of our grief, to the will of God."

In the Universalist Church, Rev. Mr. Ambler announced as his text Job v. 8: Affliction cometh not forth of the dust."

“Our hearts are all clothed with the drapery of sadness. The circumstances attending the death of our President were such as to render the shock to us more than ordinarily terrible. If his frame had been wasted by disease, if he had been taken from us by some gradual and invisible process, we might have bowed more easily to the Providential decree. But that he, a leader of the people, the President, not of a party but of a nation, a friend no less to the South than to the North, whose sole desire

was to promote the common good, and whose official labors have been honestly and wisely designed to secure the best interests of this Republic — that he should have been coolly assassinated in the very Capital of the nation, with no provocation except that which may be supposed to be in the venom of rebellion—is a circumstance which has no precedent in history, and which may call forth not only the lamentations of the American people, but the universal execration of mankind. It is not now a proper time to say much about the punishment which ought to follow an act like this, though some punishment, severe and signal will, in the course of justice, be visited not only on the actual perpetrators of the deed, but on the no less guilty instigators of it. At present we can think of little else save our loss. The hand which guided the Ship of State in its peril, till we could see the haven of peace, is powerless; the wise counsels, tempered always by humane feeling, will no more shed their light upon us, but as records of the past; the cheerful spirit which kept up the courage of the people, and which for their sake never allowed itself to be entirely overcome, even in the darkest period, will now smile upon us only from the heavens, where we shall turn for consolation in our bereavement. Let us find

it in the providential care and government of God. The proclamation of liberty has been sealed with blood. Henceforth let it be sacred in the eyes of the American people, and may He who inspired the martyr's soul on earth help us to guard aright those principles of justice and freedom which have been left to us as our legacy."

In the Broadway Church, Rev. Mr. Gulliver took for his text Psalms xlvi. 10: Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the heathen; I will be exalted in the earth." The preacher remarked :-

"That he would be glad to obey the first injunction of the text literally. It was a task any man might well shrink from, to give expression to the feelings of horror, indignation, and grief, that fire all our hearts. But the second injunction, contained in the

latter part of the text, is one that can be more easily complied with. We may be still, so far as any attempt to give an adequate utterance to our emotions is concerned, but we are bound to see God in what has occurred, and to know what He is designing to teach us. The first point of instruction is, that God is an absolute sovereign. He asks counsel of no map! He doeth all his own will. No man can say unto Him, 'What doest thou?' Men would not have selected Abraham Lincoln to be President of the United States, if it could have been known that he would be called to pass through such an ordeal. But the history of the past four years shows that he was precisely the man to do a great work of philanthrophy, and to lead a nation divided in sentiment and interest, wild with alarm and doubtful of the future, to unanimity of opinion and action. But the same sovereign God who put Abraham Lincoln into the seat of power has taken him out of it. He has not consulted us. We mourn and we wonder. But God has done it. Perhaps there was a radical defect in Mr. Lincoln's character, which unfitted him for the closing up of the war. He lacked the early religious instruction which would have given him very different views of law and penalty, and the relation of mercy and justice, and the necessity for the general good of individual retributive suffering.

"Just at this point a new man is brought forward, certainly not the man we should have selected. This too, is God's work. And at the end of four years we may rejoice as much in the elevation of Andrew Johnson, as we now do in that of Abraham Lincoln. He certainly has had a peculiar experience of the rebels, and of his own frailties. Let him have a generous support, and be received as the Lord's anointed, appointed by Him to this high position.

"These events also teach us that God purposes all, even the most minute events, and even the wicked acts of wicked men. They show also why God hates, and so severely punishes slavery, whose spirit and character reached a culmination and fit expression in this assassination. Finally, they show each one of us the 'plague of our own hearts. The selfishness of slavery is essen