'V' A DISCOURSE ■5?' rr- fKKAl IIRD IN rfommemoratioii n[ the jfiilc jjrcfiidcnt, FIRST PARISH CHURCH. FRAMINGHAM, SEPTEMBER 25TH, 1881. By Rev. CHARLES A. HUMPHREYS. Thk J. C. Clark Printinc. Co., Souni !■ k \mi>'.ii.\m. Mass. iS8i. A DISCOURSE PREACHED IN l^ommemonifion of i\\{ |jiti^ ;-lrcHi(1enf, FIRST PARISH CHURCH, FRAMINGHAM, SEPTEMBER 25TH, 1881. By Rev. CHARLES AV HUMPHREYS. The J. C. Clark Printing Co., South ]''ramingham, Mass. 1881. By Transfar. DISCOURSE. NEHEMIAH, VIII : 9. — '* AND WHEN NEHEMIAH SAW THAT ALL THE PEOPLE WEPT, HE SAID —'MOURN NOT NOR WEEP ; THIS DAY IS HOLY UNTO THE LORD.' " " There are times in the history of men and nations when they stand so near the vail that separates time from eternity that they can ahnost hear the beating and feel the pulsations of the heart of the Infinite. Through such a time is this nation now passing, when that vail has parted to admit our martyred President to the company of the dead heroes of the Republic." These were the fitting words with which James Abram Garfield interpreted the nation's tears when it stood in terror and dismay by the bier of Abraham Lincoln. How much more fitting are they today when the nation stands by the bier of that prophet-soul himself, not as then a divided people just lifting itself from war's gory dust, not as then in terror and dismay lest the whole harvest of patriotic self- sacrifice and glorious achievement should be blasted just when it was white for the garner, but a united and prosperous people, sure that though the first and the noblest fall, the Republic will suffer no detriment ! In today's calm and submissive grief I feel that the nation stands closer to that mystic vail where — as President Garfield said — " the whispers of God may be heard by the children of men." And if he could look down from his ascended height upon the nation's tears, and see how proportioned to the depth of its grief is the height of its resolve that the pure and noble purposes to which he gave his life shall not by his death fail of their fru- 4 ition, then I think that he would take up the strain of that elder prophet Nehemiah. who — in the words of the text — when he saw that all the people wept, said — "Mourn not, nor weep ! this day is holy unto the Lord." How certain we are that our loved President in his backward look would find the brightest part of his vision in the fact that all the people wept! How quick he w^ould be to see that that ruler dies not in vain about whose bier party spirit is breathless, and all dissension hushed ; along the track of whose solemn and silent march to the grave all the people stand with uncovered heads, and strew the flowers of a newly-awakened charity ! So, in foreign lands, the people stand in mute reverence, when some saint, canonized by the church and accredited with supernal powers is borne in effigy through the street. But here no superstition has made that corpse other than common dust, no church has issued its decree of canoniza- tion, no authority has ordained these shows of reverence. They are the spontaneous offerings of the universal heart. The child that can remember this day, will never cease to be thankful. The aged who have been spared till now will think they have not waited in vain. For generations yet to come, it will be told how the brave life and heroic death of one man lifted the nation to heights of pure thought and noble resolve unattained before ; how when the visible head of the nation's sovereignty fell by the blow of an assassin, then you and I and all of us fell down ; how there w^ere no sinccrer mourners for his loss than they who once had been arrayed against him in mortal combat ; how between the death and the funeral, there met at Chattanooga the representatives of those who had fought with and against him, and common memorial services were held, while a Union and a Confederate officer together seized the halyards and lifted the Union colors to the half- mast ; how President Garfield had awakened the confidence of the whole country in the soundness of his judgment, the integrity of his purpose, and the moderation of his policy; how he made such a brave battle with death that the world looked on with unstinted admiration — not only the fifty mil- lions of his fellow citizens whose morning and whose evening prayer for eighty days went up for him in constant supplica- tion, but the electric cords woke the silent caverns of the sea with their throbbing pulsations of sympathy, and stirred all Europe and the ancient empires of the East to an unwonted intensity of interest ; and how when death at last gained its poor victory over his torn and wasted body, his soul seemed transfigured before the nations, representing all the lofty hopes and noble ideals for which he had in life manfully striven, and lifting with itself the common level of humanity's struggles to heights of more hopeful resolve and more daring achievement. May we not then well repeat the reassuring exhortation of Nehemiah — " Mourn not nor weep, this day is holy unto the Lord." The midnight bells that rang out to the silent stars the tidings that that one human life was closed to earth, " rang: in the laro:er heart and kindlier hand " for millions who still live and will see to it that their loved leader did not die in vain. Witness, that most stirring bugle call to a nobler citizenship and a purer civil service, from the Mayor of the city of New York ! Witness, the felicitations on every hand that the bitterness of party spirit had been buried in such a broad flood of noble sympathies welling up from the deep places of our common humanity ! Witness, the extra- ordinary manifestations of fraternal feeling in other lands — over all England the parish bells, " whose frequent curfews have knelled reluctant generations to the grave," ringing now for the first time their sympathetic sorrow for their brothers across the sea ; the half-masted flags of mourning lifted on the cathedrals that, in the long centuries of their watch over the national destinies, never before wept for a foreign ruler ; the ancient minster, where lie the ashes of the nation's most honored dead, black today with the sym- bols of mourning for our President ; the Queen herself laying a flower of admiring remembrance upon the bier. Even the Irish malcontents, meeting in hot debate, and eager for re- venge, stop for a moment in their defiant wrath and send a 6 message of sincere regret for the stricken hero at Elberon. Nor are the seats of the elder civilizations silent. Rome sends her message of condolence, and the seven-hilled city that has lost its ancient empire of the world takes a loftier position in this empire of sympathy. Even the Sphinx that antedates the Pyramids, breaks for the first time its silent watch by the Nile to speed a message of fraternal feeling from the oldest to the youngest of states. And still farther East stretch the vibrating cords of sympathy. Indeed they circle the earth and for the first time in all history this great globe is bound together by the magnetic attraction of one humble life. — Do you ask me to explain this marvel ; these world-wide demonstrations that " pass the customary shows of grief ? " Partly it is due to the new facilities for intercourse that practically annihilate time and space, and by bringing the ends of the earth into momentary communication, make the interests of each a common possession. While the President was sick, the slightest variations in his symptoms were watched by both hemispheres, and when he breathed his last, it was as if the messenger of death w^ere knocking at all our doors. Before an hour had passed, millions of homes waked the midnight with the sounds of woe. This possibility — which this generation has realized for the first time in history — of almost instantaneous acquaintance by all the world with what is passing in any part, is one element of the marvel which we witness to-day. But the larger element grows out of the fact that, for the nrst time since it was possible for the ends of the earth to be in such close communication, there has been exhibited, upon the loftiest pedestal yet raised in sight of the world, the finest exemplification of the common virtues that underlie our whole humanity. It is not because of his exceptional quali- ties that the nations have been moved to applauding admira- tion — his powers of debate that have made him a master easily pre-eminent in the presentation of the issues of the last twenty years ; his eloquence that transfigured everything he touched with the transparent clearness of a prophetic insi:j;ht, and the healthy glow of a cultured imagination ; his breadth of experience compassing the varied occupations of a career from the log cabin of a pioneer through hard toil to the col- lege, the professorship, the service of his state, the defense of his country in the field, her counsellor in the halls of legisla- tion, and at last her executive head. No President ever took the oath of office with so broad an experience and so thorough a preparation in statesmanship. But it was not for these exceptional qualities that our nation and the world have been moved to such unwonted unanimity of admiration. It is rather for those qualities which are common to all healthy natures, to all true souls — his simple honesty, his warm affections, his faithful friendships, his robust manliness, his devoted patriotism, his cheerful hope in presence of death — it is for these qualities that dignify and exalt our common humanity, that the common heart has been stirred to such acclamations of praise. You call it grand and sublime, the exhibition that our President has displayed before the admiring world of a brave fight with death ; and I agree with you. Nothing grander nor more sublime has modern history furnished. Before it pale the lurid glories of martial valor. He who saved the day at Chickamauga more bravely lost it at Elberon. But 1 will take you to many a humble home unknown to the wide world, and with no outward attractions to make you linger, and you shall see a nobility of soul, a patience of fortitude, a struggle with death, no less grand and sublime. We admire those things of which we have some element in ourselves, that stir the nobler impulses in our nature and make us feel a not unworthy satisfaction in our common humanity. Pres- ident Garfield was the exalted impersonation of the best qualities which become a free man in a free state ; his life was a typical example of an ideal Republican citizenship, so humble in its beginnings that no peasant would be abashed in the comparison, so lofty in its attainments that no king could boast any superior dignity. He displayed in his varied 8 career the limitless openings that in this country are offered to all who wish to serve their fellow men, to all who, con- scious of large endowments, are nobly ambitious to use them in directing the larger interests of the people. He was not ashamed to exhibit his loyalty to the humble sentiments of filial affection and conjugal devotion — senti- ments which, thanks to our common human nature, are almost universal, but which through their world-wide recognition in his later career, have exalted domestic life to its essential dignity in the eyes of the nations, and have displayed before them in an unwonted glory the tender beauty of motherhood, and of wifehood the clinging grace and heroic helpfulness. And of his public life, the best part was not its exceptional success in whatever he undertook, but his simple trust that if he did his duty manfully, a finer wisdom would shape its ends. Fidelity to the present task was his guiding star. So, everything he touched turned to the advantage of others and his own promotion. His first boyish handling of tools trans- formed his mother's log-cabin to a neat and convenient home. His first sally into a broader world along the tow-path of a canal made him feel the need and usefulness of a broader education, and he works his way through college. Then as if instruction were to be his profession he makes the best use of his acquired knowledge and becomes the President of a college in his native State. Then his fellow citizens asked him to serve them in the legislature and he accepted, and soon made himself a master of legislation. Then the tocsin of war sounded its stirring call and he enlisted and did the same faithful work in the field not knowing, nor over anxious, as to whither it would lead. Thence he was called to serve his fellow citizens in a higher capacity, in the halls of national counsel, and following again an unknown destiny, he kept clearly before him no lower aim than absolute fidelity to his opportunities of service, and at last was unexpectedly called to take the highest place that his countrymen could offer. Thus gi^'ing parts of his life to these various fields of labor, all was given to humanity ; ami following always a loftier 9 leading than human foresight could supply, he found, at last, that the path of his destiny was to be consummated in a simple and natural extension of the trust with which he had met the calls of his fellow men, to a trust that if he gave himself submissively to this final call of God his life would not be in vain. This latter trust was the source of his exu- berant cheerfulness through the deeply darkening stages of his pilgrimage to death. He knew that God ruled, whoever held or dropped the reins of earthly authority. But he could not have known, neither did any of us suspect, how much more speedily his chosen ideals would be realized by his death than by his life; how the common human heart, that has been touched as never before by his exhibition of its most ennobling qualities, has been lifted to finer resolves than were likely to be attained though he should live to a full term of service, and bring to their achievement an ever-ripening wisdom, and an ever- increasing persuasiveness of eloquent appeal. The cold silence of those lips is now more warmly eloquent. The chill touch of death has wakened to a new and grander life the aspirations that he sought to stir in the hearts of the people, and the principles that he sought to embody in their political legislation. His simple Christian manliness in those weary days of sickness did more to elevate the tone of public sentiment than the most splendid efforts of his robust health ; and now that he has gone, his remem- bered virtues will be more persuasive than could be his living voice, and the ideals that in life he could but poorly embody will now be invested with immortal charms. Such trans- forming and transfiguring power has death when it touches a life that is pure and true. " What is excellent, as God lives, is permanent." So, while today we must, as a people with common human sympathies, grieve for our common loss, we can also see that that prophet would be justified in his exhortation who should say with Nehemiah — " Mourn not nor weep ; this day is holy unto the Lord." God has made the wrath of man to praise him ; he has made that vile dastard who fired the fatal shot, 10 the un\vittin<;- instrument of his largest beneficence, in prov- ing to the world upon an arena that commands respect, that character is the only invulnerable shield, and that virtue wears the only unfading laurels; that the madness of selfish- ness is impotent though it strike down the head of a nation, while a pure devotion to noble ends will reach its reward though its career of earthly ambition be cut off midway to the goal. If, as Garfield said in the dumb dismay at Lincoln's death, " the whispers of God could be heard by the children of men," do we not now, in the hushed stillness of submissive sorrow, hear trumpet tones of divine inspiration, calling us to recognize that this day is holy unto the Lord ; a day to lift up devout thanksgivings that, though a life which cornmanded a nation's reverence and the admiration of the world has been so regretfully cut off, yet God reigns, and the nation lives stronger than ever in the bonds of fraternity that have been newly welded by the common sympathies of the people. And may we not take up the strain of glorified sorrow that Milton has put in the mouth of the aged Manoah, when, hearing that his son lay slain among the slaughtered Philis- tines, he lifted up his eyes, and behold ! all the people wept. " Come, come, no time for lamentation now, Nor much more cause ; Samson hath quit himself Like Samson, and heroically hath finished A life heroic, and to Israel Honor hath left and freedom ; to himself Eternal fame ; and, what is happiest yet, All this with God not parted from him, But favoring and assisting to the end. Nothing is here for tears ; nothing to wail, Or knock the breast ; no weakness, no contempt, Dispraise, or blame ; nothing but well and fair And what may quiet us in a death so noble."