heralded and its departure signaled by tolling bells and booming cannon. By day it flies through cities and villages covered with weeds of woe, and by night, flaming torches mark its course and show the tears glittering like blood drops on the bronzed cheeks of rural populations. Everywhere flags at half mast, dirges by martial bands, and requiems at the stations sung by young men and maidens. Everywhere weeping and eulogies, music and flowers. Was there ever such attendance upon the relics of one not regally born? It is a nation's tribute to a citizen ruler whose firmness and integrity, quaint shrewdness and blunt common sense have carried it through a terrible crisis in its history and given liberty to millions.

The nation is right in paying the highest funeral honors to our late departed Chief Magistrate. We owe it to our national self respect. Shall the head of the family, the father, the Saviour of the nation die, and the children not mourn?

The nation thus reproves crime. Slavery, secession, treason, assassination, barbarism, stand aghast in the presence of this sublime outburst of national sorrow. The bloody corpse of Lucretia expelled the Tarquins from Rome. The bloody fragments of the murdered wife of a Levite thrilled all Israel with horror, and they well-nigh exterminated the tribe of Benjamin for abetting the murder. The bloody corpse of our murdered chief, carried in solemn procession through the country, will leave in its funeral train the solemn

purpose to visit vengeance upon traitors and treason. By these rites the nation honors goodness, honesty, integrity. Abraham Lincoln was not a church member, but he was a Christian and led a life of virtue and a life of prayer. He was the Christian head of a Christian nation, and deserves Christian burial.

His sudden and tragical death has inspired the nation with mutual forbearance, sympathy, unity, fraternity. Political papers have moderated their acerbity. Opposing parties shake hands over the coffin of their common father, and agree to bury past animosities and to stand nobly by his successor in this hour of trial. It is due to the idiocy and malignity of human nature, that a few pitiful souls spit upon his bier, and trample on these universal weeds of mourning, but the grand record of history will be "A devout nation carried ABRAHAM LINCOLN to his burial, and made great lamentation over him.”

SUBSTANCE OF A SERMON PREACHED AT THE UNITARIAN

CHURCH.

BY REV. EDGAR BUCKINGHAM.

We trusted that it had been he which should have redeemed Israel.LUKE, Xxiv, 21.

We are not required by public proclamation, nor induced by general expectation to spend again our Sunday hour in lessons drawn directly from the death of the President. The hearts of the people are full with this single subject of thought, and it is well to

continue our more careful consideration of it. I have drawn a text from the disappointment experienced by the veneration, the love and tenderness of the disciples, at the death of Jesus Christ. Not that a comparison could be suggested with the Divine Master. The great hopes which are before us, and the pleasure we should have enjoyed in arriving at the fulfillment of them with him for our leader who has been our leader through the depths of our anxieties, call to mind peculiarly the sad disappointment of great hopes expressed in the language of the text.

The minds of the people cannot fail to be long and deeply affected. From so lofty a position, such a sudden removal! So great responsibilities, so suddenly laid down! Prospects so bright, to human view so suddenly darkened! The great dependence of the nation, so suddenly transferred to another, who had never expected to bear it! An event so sudden in private life, or to a man respected only for superior powers of mind, would have been fearfully impressive. If the President had been no more to us than a common statesman, or one only in the common line of the chief-magistracy, or if he had died wearied out with his great labors, after long sickness at the executive mansion, the community would have been religiously impressed. How much more are we likely to be so, under the existing circumstances, and for such a man!

I do not mean to speak additional words of eulogy.

But few men in public station have ever inspired so much confidence and secured so much attachment and love. We cast about in our minds, to study into the feelings with which he has affected us. Prominent among the influences with which his exalted life and character have wrought upon us, seems this:- in his justice, he made integrity seem more true. If, in the rivalships of the world, its covetousness, its overreachings, its other various transgressions, we have ever indulged the common sentiment, that honesty was rare, or that it was feebly lived, or have felt that, perhaps, because it was rare, it had less intrinsic worth than nature or religion seemed to assign to it, we felt, on the other hand, that Mr. Lincoln was a living example of the value of it. Through him, it seemed to be gaining a new life for the world. The life of it, which he lived, outweighed in our minds the example of millions on the other side. In this way, he, with the broad bulwark of his personal character, helped to sustain the general morality. Temptation has less power, honesty arrives at more honor, integrity holds a more substantial life.

There circulates, we have found, through the public prints, some mention of professions or acknowledgments made by him, corresponding to the usual professions in the church, of religious faith or religious experience. Of the full truth of such accounts, or whether only partially or in some sense true, we have to-day and here no means of determining. But this

may be known by all. A spirit of religion, not a conventional religiousness, not one artificial or imitative, but a simple, natural appeal to God, to his presence and his law, we find underflowing through all his conduct, and making its appearance in all his public writings. And such has been the impressiveness of his simplicity, and such is the confidence reposed in his truth, that thousands will become reverential and obedient through the influence of his public religiousness.

In the homeliness of his conversation, the playfulness of his talk has endeared him to people's hearts. Much as his jests have been questioned about, they have had a great value. They have showed to us that he was at home with himself, not acting a part. For though laughter is sometimes affected, yet it is among the sincerest of all things; and when it is not assumed for show, to secure applause, or made use of for ridicule or bitterness (and when it it is used for such purposes, its character is easily seen through), it is like sunrise on the brook, which proves that the ripples are not frozen, or flowers of the forest, that prove the richness of the soil. It cannot indeed be financially reckoned, or arithmetically, nor can the sweep of the swallow, or the chattering on the trees, which tell the beauty of the year and announce the summer. So in the nature of man, the overabundance of power in the ease of his work shows itself, at last, in playfulness. When a friend smiles upon us, we know that