but in vain." It is possible, clearly, to have a confidence in ourselves or others, which does amount to a repudiation of all dependence upon God. We see, or we make exemplifications of it every day. And, whenever this is the case, the Bible principle, just stated, warns us that our spirit is construed by God, as an expression of hostility to himself. Now, shall I err in the conjecture, that this strange, this appalling "destroying of the foundations," wrought though it has been by wicked hands, has been suffered to befall us, in part at least, to remind us as a people, that our spirit has reached this interdicted point? The man, who from his position, more remarkably perhaps than any one who has lived within our day, had come to verify the figure of " a pillar of the State;" upon whom, at the moment the whole people, with one hearty consent, were resting the entire weight of their interests and their hopes; who, in a long and arduous struggle, had achieved such results as seemed to prove him competent to achieve all else that needed to be done, with infallible success, is suddenly cut down, and his earthly work closed. Oh, does it not seem as if there were a voice in such a providence, saying in tones of thunder, "Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils! I am the Lord, and my glory will I not give to another"? Does it not seem as if such a rebuke indicated such a fault, as the precise mark at which it had been levelled? As if it were meant, beyond a doubt, to startle the nation into a sense of its undutiful and offensive bearing towards God, in its habitual adulation of itself; its magnifying of its own resources; its charting out its own future, as if its destiny were in its own hands; and its almost deifying its own institutions and men? The righteous man, as he sits awe-struck and subdued to-day, I am sure, will feel that there is serious ground to think so; and, over the. shattered column of his country's—perhaps—idolatrous trust, will try to accept for himself and others the admonition to maintain.

henceforth, between the Creator and his creature, that just relation and proportion which cannot be denied, without affront to the majesty of the former.

And then, following upon this, is there not a ground, which the righteous man with his scriptural perceptions may discover, for hope for a better and a healthier day for the country, by reason of the very fact of its present afflictions? When the foundations were destroyed, and the tempter would urge the Psalmist to despondency, and a desertion of his faith in government and society, he makes his answer, "In the Lord put I my trust." If faith in human means and dependencies has been checked by this great national exigency, faith in the Lord has been challenged and encouraged by it. "Whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth," may be applied, I presume, as well to communities as to individuals. The Father's stroke that has wrath in the manner of it has mercy in the design of it; and the smartings which the wrath occasions, are intended to prepare the way for the offices of mercy. The Christian, at least, will so reason, and will look through and beyond this dark day, and cheer himself with the prospect of sunshine and repose again. The Lord reigneth, and can make the wrath of man and of devils to praise him, and to work out his benevolent designs towards those who fear him. A harsh school we have been passing through, and a strange process of trial has been allotted to us at the end; but is it not all meant to make us a wiser and a better people? Is it not all proof, that God has a ministry for us to fulfil yet in the world, and would educate us for it? Are not the very pains he takes to keep us from forsaking him, to bring us to an humbler and deeper acknowledgment of him, evidence that he has not for*saken us?

And once more: in confirmation of this hope, may I not remark, that, to the righteous man, God, through the instrumentality

of this fearful catastrophe which we are deploring, is holding out inducements and persuasives to aid in the restoration of that unity of heart and feeling, which is so sorely needed in the land? Where is the righteous man who does not find his state of heart and feeling, in view of this catastrophe, reflected in every one of his class? Righteous men if we mean by this term no more than right-thinking and right-judging men must be alike in their sentiments here; and alike too in the depth and vehemence of their sentiments. However much divided they may have been on other points; however hard they may have found it to come together on other grounds,—they are at one here. Sympathy has fused their minds into harmony here. Bending together over the bleeding body of the Head of the nation, a body made sacred, I may say, without irreverence, by the sacredness of the symbols it wore, and the office it represented, - there can be no more discord between righteous men. Heart must beat with heart, and feeling must melt into feeling, here. In the crucible of a common sorrow, a common indignation, a common prostration of soul under the mighty hand of God, animosities must dissolve and disappear. Righteous men, everywhere, will say it ought to be so, - it must be so. And righteous men will thus begin to knit again the dissevered threads of national concord and fraternal amity, and unite on the spot where the sanctity and dignity of the Government received the stain of the assassin's desecrating blow, to build up, in a new fabric of popular virtue and religion, the true monument of the country's glory. Such shocks, sending such wide-spread and such accordant emotions throughout the land, cannot be meant for nothing. They are meant to leaven, to impregnate, the whole mass, with a common influence and a common inspiration. They are meant to throw thought, feeling, temper, life itself, I may say, in one word,- into a new and common channel.

Oh! surely, on this solemn occasion, my friends, I may ask you all, if the time has not come, when Ephraim should no longer vex Judah, nor Judah Ephraim? Behold to what we have come! Behold the horrid apparition which has suddenly started forth upon the canvas of our country's history! behold a bloodstained monster, reeking with the ferocious passions of the dark ages, striding across this Christian, American soil! behold the sad chapter which these last few days have added to those public annals whose opening pages our fathers' glorious deeds had made so bright, and see to what we have come! And whither, by these tokens, are we likely to go, if we give ourselves up to blindness and infatuation? God has shown us what prodigies of wickedness, what enormities in crime, may be generated in the heated air of civil strife; and he has shown it to us,—I would persuade myself, that he may constrain us to stop, and yield ourselves to his healing monitions. And is it not time? Oh! my countrymen — my fellow-Christians - is it not time? Is it not time for the minister of God to rush in, with the censor of gospel love in his hand, and, standing between the living and the dead, plead for the staying of the plague? Is it not time for all contests among us to cease, but those of peaceful enterprise and honorable ambition? Is it not time for all strife to be suspended, but that holy form of it in which we shall provoke one another only “to love and good works"? Is it not time that our war-wasted and war-shattered land should at last have her sabbath's rest? Is it not time that those illustrious shades, the fathers and sages of our country, whose fame is the heritage of us all, who, during these years of fraternal discord, have hovered about the halls of the Capitol, with their heads drooped, and their pale hands veiling the eyes which would not look out into the atmosphere, darkened by the smoke of battle-fields, where their children were shedding one another's blood, is it not time, that the tidings

of peace and reconciliation should come to throw radiance upon those clouded faces, and lift again those drooping heads, and kindle again the light of hope and joy in those veiled eyes? Is it not time, that we, their degenerate offspring, should come together, with softened and penitent hearts, to receive the benediction which their shadowy arms are stretching out to give us? Oh! it seems to me, the righteous man, the righteous woman, everywhere, will cry out, "Yes, yes! as God whom we serve, and in whom we trust, and to whom we have been taught to say, every matter, Thy will, not ours, be done,' -as he shall offer us peace, we will accept it! His terms shall be our terms! His shall be that which we will choose! and, in humble dependence upon his blessing to come with the peace he gives us, we will henceforth drop the instruments of war from our hands, and drive the spirit of war from our hearts!"

in

way

Oh! for a victory - a surrender-like this, all over the land! May the Spirit of God achieve it! and follow it with other victories and surrenders, until iniquity, in all its forms, and wherever it lurks in the corruptions of Government, Church, or people, shall disappear before the power of the religion of Jesus; and, on our broad territories, shall break the dawning splendor of that long day of righteousness, beneath the dome of whose benignant sky the regenerated earth shall enter into its millennial rest!

Courier, Natchez, Miss., May 6, 1865.