-

"If it be thought advisable that the name of the lectureship, as was
suggested, should be the Morse Lectureship, I wish it to be distinctly
understood that it is so named in honor of my venerated and distinguished
father, whose zealous labors in the cause of theological education, and
in various benevolent enterprises, as well as of geographical science,
entitle his memory to preservation in connection with the efforts to
diffuse the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, and his
gospel throughout the world."

Curiously enough I find no reference in the letters of the year 1865 to
the assassination of President Lincoln, but I well remember being taken,
a boy of eight, to our stable on the corner of Fifth Avenue and
Twenty-first Street, from the second-floor windows of which we watched
the imposing funeral cortege pass up the avenue.

The fifty-fifth reunion of his class of 1810 took place in this year, and
Morse reluctantly decided to absent himself. The reasons why he felt that
he could not go are given in a long letter of August 11 to his cousin,
Professor E.S. Salisbury, and it is such a clear statement of his
convictions that I am tempted to give it almost in its entirety:--

"I should have been most happy on many personal accounts to have been at
the periodical meeting of my surviving classmates of 1810, and also to
have renewed my social intercourse with many esteemed friends and
relations in New Haven. But as I could not conscientiously take part in
the proposed martial sectional glorification of those of the family who
fell in the late lamentable family strife, and could not in any brief way
or time explain the discriminations that were necessary between that
which I approve and that which I most unqualifiedly condemn, without the
risk of misapprehension, I preferred the only alternative left me, to
absent myself altogether.

"You well know I never approved of the late war. I have ever believed,
and still believe, if the warnings of far-seeing statesmen (Washington,
Clay, and Webster among them) had been heeded, if, during the last thirty
years of persistent stirring up of strife by angry words, the calm and
Christian counsels of intelligent patriots had been followed at the
North, and a strict observance of the letter and spirit of the
Constitution had been sustained as the supreme law, instead of the
insidious violations of its provisions, especially by New England, we
should have had no war.