summer in
silence, I spoke a few times and to people of different nations, and
how soon I noticed that they were very much alike! If a man knows how
to play the piano, it does not make any difference whether he finds it
in New Orleans or San Francisco or Boston or St. Petersburg or Moscow
or Madras; it has so many keys, and he puts his fingers right on them.
And the human heart is a divine instrument, with just so many keys in
all cases, and you strike some of them and there is joy, and you
strike some of them and there is sorrow. Plied by the same motives,
lifted up by the same success, depressed by the same griefs. The
cab-men of London have the same characteristics as the cab-men of New
York, and are just as modest and retiring. The gold and silver drive
Piccadilly and the Boulevards just as they drive Wall Street. If there
be a great political excitement in Europe, the Bourse in Paris howls
just as loudly as ever did the American gold-room.

The same grief that we saw in our country in 1864 you may find now in
the military hospitals of England containing the wounded and sick from
the Egyptian wars. The same widowhood and orphanage that sat down in
despair after the battles of Shiloh and South Mountain poured their
grief in the Shannon and the Clyde and the Dee and the Thames. Oh, ye
men and women who know how to pray, never get up from your knees until
you have implored God in behalf of the fourteen hundred millions of
the race just like yourselves, finding life a tremendous struggle! For
who knows but that as the sun to-day draws up drops of water from the
Caspian and the Black seas and from the Amazon and the Mississippi,
after a while to distill the rain, these very drops on the fields--who
knows but that the sun of righteousness may draw up the tears of your
sympathy, and then rain them down in distillation of comfort o'er all
the world?

Who is that poor man, carried on a stretcher to the Afghan ambulance?
He is your brother. If in the Pantheon at Paris you smite your hand
against the wall among the tombs of the dead, you will hear a very
strange echo coming from all parts of the Pantheon just as soon as you
smite the wall. And I suppose it is so arranged that every stroke of
sorrow among the tombs of bereavement ought to have loud, long, and
oft-repeated echoes of sympathy all around the world. Oh, what a
beautiful theory it is--and it is a Christian theory--that Englishman,
Scotchman, Irishman, Norwegian, F