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THE CHRISTIAN UNION.
VOL. XXIV., No. 13.

Removed not in the course of nature, but vilely done to death by a miscreant, all the more generous feelings of the alienated brethren of the South and the tender feelings of the North have come into perfect harmony and unison.
The wounds of disruption and war, slowly healing will be mollified.
There has been no division of our people in this great sorrow, none that rejoiced, none that silently were not sorry.
For once the heart of the whole nation has beat together, and on a point most generous and pure and noble.
Along the lines of march around the fields where fiercest battles were fought, in cities where secession ruled, there has been one common sorrow: as much in Charleston as in Philadelphia; as real in New Orleans as in New York.
Nor have party lines, in all this land, divided or confined this sympathy.
As before the coming rains of autumn the clouds disdain all boundaries, and know no States, but spread their drops wide abroad, so the tears of our citizens have fallen in a universal and undivided sorrow.

Still more striking, I think, has been the unity of mankind made manifest in all the sickness and in the death of our illustrious sufferer.

When Lincoln died, the world was more shocked than grieved.
England was not yet enlightened.
The hands of France were yet wet with the blood of Mexico.
Other nations were waiting to see the unfolding of the great drama of war.
But now there is no nation so obscure, there is no nation so imperial, or so different in language, institution and government, but that there has been a common expression of sorrow and sympathy and love.
From the crown of the Czar, from the crown of the Empire of Germany, from the crown of the Queen of Empires, from the Pope in Rome, and from the home of the Mussulman in Constantinople, yea, and from the islands of the sea, and the far off nations China and Japan, there has been common fellowship.
I think the drops of blood never before in the history of mankind have been driven by the heart of a common feeling throughout every part and realm of the human family.
If this is the first time it is not the last.
This is the sign that days are drawing near of a common fellowship among nations, and that the human family is not far from that point in which mankind shall be dear to every man.

And yet, no one can say that this has been a feeling simply of ordinary sympathy; it has been a feeling that surrounded his couch, of the deepest moral import.
Was there ever before so much prayer uttered?
Was there ever before prayer from so many differing views in religion.
The pagan prayed to God as he named Him; the Mohammedan prayed to God as he thought of Him; the Roman Catholic prayed to God as He lay in his schedule; the Protestant prayed to God as he thought of Him; innumerable prayers in every language jostled each other at the narrow gate which leads to the ear of God; and God heard them.
Did he not answer them?
In the lower sphere, no; in the higher sphere, yes.
Shall the prayer of faith, then, be counted as a fiction, as an invented device to comfort men in adversity?
Though he wait long, God will avenge his own elect.
He will come quickly, suddenly and powerfully, we are taught.
Is there no answer to these prayers other than simply the continuance of life?
If we are made wiser, and deeper, and stronger, and better, if this nation is fortified by his going more than it could have been by his remaining among us, if his administration not only was a blessing, but was to become a blessing to all the nations of the earth in his dying, is not this the sublimest answer to prayer?

Why do we pray?
What is it to us that one man more dies?
Men are dying everywhere, every hour.
There is scarcely a neighborhood where some creature is not dying.
Men must die; to die is as natural as to be born; and while if death comes near to us in kindred or in affection, we feel it, yet in respect to those that are disunited from us more widely we scarcely feel the presence of death to be a great affliction.
So men are born of the dust to return to the dust.

Why should Garfield not die?
It was because his life seemed to be to us as the life of a tree broad of branch, from every bough of which dropped down food and fruit for the needs of this nation.
But if from those boughs, raised to a higher sphere, God can give the leaves which are for the healing of the nations over the whole earth, has he not done better than we asked or thought?
It is good to pray, and it is good to have a faith that pierces beyond the rind, and opens the very pulp and substance of things.

There are some lessons to be derived from this national experience: one that I would wish to be universally studied and believed by the young and the ambitious that turn their faces toward public service.
If this nation is as a stately mansion, then it has its beautiful front door where it receives those whom it would honor.
It also has its doors behind through which are borne supplies of food, and out of which come the refuse to a very great extent.
Millions of our young men seek to enter into the stately mansion of Government by the obscure and dishonored doors of the rear.
The time has come when the young men should believe that to serve the country is better than to serve themselves; that honor is better than wealth; that fidelity is better than praise; that to have deserts is better than to have all coronation without deserts.

It is inherent in all government that we should send men to represent us in legislatures, and to be our rulers, who approve themselves to the judgment of those who elected them; and if the great crowd are themselves uninstructed, ignorant, it is of necessity the case that we shall send forth into our halls of procedure men often vile, often foolish, often wicked; and this can be borne; but we cannot bear to have the ideal of integrity destroyed, nor to have it go forth into the public apprehension that he that would be a politician must lay aside and disown honor and truth; that he must cease to be a man; that he must become drawn out like a thread, thin enough to go through the smallest hole.
We must disabuse the heroic young men of the thought that ambition of public service has to be bought with base compliances.

When we behold a man, therefore, struggling by normal and honorable ways from the lowest position to which any are born in this life, equipping himself by the most self-denying and studious hours, and then taking his place first among the most brilliant of our statesmen, and the most noble and successful of our warriors, as the Chief Magistrate, honored of all nations; and when we behold that he has gone up to this eminence without complying with base devices or listening to the voice of the passions and appetites of men, it is a warrant of success in the right way; and his example shall be to all the young—as is the example of Washington, and many of our earlier rulers—a testimony that integrity and cleanness and honor are combatible with advancement, and with political power and success.

Shall I be stepping aside from the service of the day by saying that, in the simplicity of our habits hitherto, there has been no need either of guardianship around about our chief officers of Government; that as they came from the people, and were approved by the people, so they were nowhere as safe as in the hands of the common people?
This is yet true.
No European police can make kings so safe as public sentiment makes our officers in America.
The temptation which the sense of wrong, long continued and hereditary, the sense of injustice and oppression that puts at defiance armies and guards and guardians and police forces, and that smites monarchs in their palaces, or on the thresholds of them, has no existence among us.
Our laws are our own, and are subject to change any year when they cease to be beneficial.
Our institutions are channels through which liberty runs.
Our magistrates, borne with for a few years if they are less than good, revolve, and others take their place.

And yet, our legislation is incomplete.
I would not have military guards about the President; were I in his place, I would rather take the bullet or the stiletto than walk forth day after day guarded from my fellow citizens; but, it seems to me, when the whole commonwealth has committed its interests to the Governor, the judge or the President, that any attempt upon his life is treason to the welfare of the whole community, and that death should wait even on the attempt at treason.
If death is to follow crime it should be administered by the hand of the law.
Assassination is a poor testimony to the abhorrence of assassination.
Because Guiteau slew the President, no man in this land has a right to slay Guiteau.
For our own sake, for the honor of our institutions, for the world's sake, that is tormented incessantly by irregular violence, let us stand for the administration of justice by its appointed instruments.

Not by any battle will this Republic win so great an estate of honor and of repute among the nations of the earth as by the fact that though the war had slain thousands and thousands, and squandered uncounted millions of our treasure, and enriched our land with the blood of our children, yet, when once the battle ceased, neither bullet nor sword nor halter slew one single man.
The temperateness, the self-control, the loftiness of spirit that this nation manifested made a moral impression upon mankind that all the exhibitions of its physical and warlike strength failed to do.
In this hour, if Guiteau suffers except in the course of law, duly administered, then we shall have a spot resting upon our escutcheon that neither you nor I can endure for one single moment.

I know what the feeling is of generous but untamed good, of unregulated justice; I know what it is to feel in my own bosom the impulse to rend the wretch limb from limb; I have fulfilled to the uttermost the command, "Be angry;" and I am prepared also to fulfill the other command, "Let not the sun go down upon your wrath."
Indignation has had its day; now let law have its day.
Then let no man talk, nor favor those who talk of violence, whatever may be the ends and the issues of justice in the case of this miscreant scoundrel.

I have a right to speak of him.
He once was of us; he once, rather, was among us, but not of us.
He sat in the classes of our schools.
He thronged with others this sanctuary.
I cannot dismiss him without a sense of mourning and of sorrow.
I am sure that we should not be behind the immortal poet Burns, who in his address to the Devil, moved with compassion, at length hoped that in some way even he might turn a corner, and yet he saved.
As Christian men, and men, let us hope that the dark and dismal tragedy of this man's life may not have an extension by any crime committed upon him by wanton citizens encouraged by a wanton public sentiment into which you have blown your breath.

And, lastly, what shall one say for that group of mourners who sit to-day together in a sorrow which may be somewhat alleviated, but which cannot be removed?
The heart has no ears in its deepest moods.
The mother should have been followed by her son.
He has preceded her.
The wife—who shall be to her the ideal hero?
Though he be honored of this great people, though Garfield glorified must needs move her heart with gladness, alas! in this life love asks presence, sympathy; and chastened as she is, saintly as she is, as a Christian woman, in full faith, is there any other woman that more than she needs the prayers and upholding sympathy of this great nation?
If her husband has laid down his life for us, we have poured forth day by day, in the most sacred places of our lives—in the closet, in the household—prayer that God would be more than a husband to the widow, more to the mother than any human being can be; and may the blessing of God, wet with the tears and enriched by desires of this whole great people, descend and rest upon the heads of his children; and may their father's name be to them a guiding light and a shield against all temptation, and an incitement to all honorable endeavor; and may the day come when the sons shall take their father's place, and the nation shall delight to honor them not only for the heritage of their name and lineage, but for the renewal of those qualities which have made Garfield a martyr, and added him to the galaxy that already shines so brightly of our great and noble citizens in heaven.

LIVING WORDS OF THE DEAD.

"Individuals may wear for a time the glory of our institutions, but they carry it not to the grave with them.
Like raindrops from heaven, they may pass through the circle of the shining bow and add to its luster, but when they have sunk in the earth again the proud arch still spans the sky and shines gloriously on."

"Sir, there are times in the history of men and nations when they stand so near the veil which separates mortals from immortals, time from eternity, and men from their God, that they can almost hear the beatings, and feel the pulsations of the heart of the Infinite.

"Through such a time has this nation passed.
When two hundred and fifty thousand brave spirits passed from the field of honor through that thin veil into the presence of God, and when at last its parting folds admitted the martyr President to the company of those dead heroes of the Republic, the nation stood so near the veil that the whispers of God were heard by the children of men.

"Awe-stricken by His voice, the American people knelt in tearful reverence, and made a solemn covenant with Him and with each other that this nation should be saved from its enemies; that all its glories should be restored, and on the ruins of slavery and treason the temples of freedom and justice should be built, and should survive forever."
—[On the Anniversary of Lincoln's death, April, 1866.

[On the eve of his inauguration President Garfield addressed a meeting of his classmates assebled to do him honor, and in the light of these past few weeks his words, which we printed two months ago, seem to have received fulfillment, complete even beyond his anticipation.]

"Classmates: To me there is something exceedingly pathetic in this reunion.
In every eye before me I see the light of friendship and love, and I am sure it is reflected back to each one of you from my inmost heart.
For twenty-two years, with the exception of the last few days, I have been in the public service.
To-night I am a private citizen.
To-morrow I shall be called to resume new responsibilities, and on the day after the broadside of the world's wrath will strike.
It will strike hard.
I know it, and you will know it.
Whatever may happen to me in the future, I shall feel that I can always fall back upon the shoulders and hearts of the class of '56 for their approval of that which is right, and for their charitable judgment wherein I may come short in the discharge of my public duties.
You may write down in your books now the largest percentage of blunders which you think I will be likely to make, and you will be sure to find in the end that I have made more than you have calculated—many more.....
This honor comes to be unsought.
I have never had the Presidential fever—not even for a day; nor have I to-night.
I have no feeling of elation in view of the position I am called upon to fill.
I would thank God were I to-day a free lance in the House or the Senate.
But it is not to be, and I will go forward to meet the responsibilities and discharge the duties that are before me with all the firmness and ability I can command.
I hope you will be able conscientiously to approve my conduct, and when I return to private life I wish you to give me another class meeting."