ited country.

He is gone now. But, short as his life was, its heaven-born mission was
fulfilled; the dream of his childhood was realized; for he had been
appointed by God to carry a message of peace on earth, good will to men,
and, this done, he vanished from the sight of mortal eyes, even as the
dove from the ark.

Grady told us, and told us truly, of that typical American who, in Dr.
Talmage's mind's eye, was coming, but who, in Abraham Lincoln's
actuality, had already come. In some recent studies into the career of
that man, I have encountered many startling confirmations of this
judgment; and from that rugged trunk, drawing its sustenance from
gnarled roots, interlocked with Cavalier sprays and Puritan branches
deep beneath the soil, shall spring, is springing, a shapely
tree--symmetric in all its parts--under whose sheltering boughs this
nation shall have the new birth of freedom Lincoln promised it, and
mankind the refuge which was sought by the forefathers when they fled
from oppression. Thank God, the ax, the gibbet, and the stake have had
their day. They have gone, let us hope, to keep company with the lost
arts. It has been demonstrated that great wrongs may be redressed and
great reforms be achieved without the shedding of one drop of human
blood; that vengeance does not purify, but brutalizes; and that
tolerance, which in private transactions is reckoned a virtue, becomes
in public affairs a dogma of the most far-seeing statesmanship.

So I appeal from the men in silken hose who danced to music made by
slaves--and called it freedom--from the men in bell-crowned hats, who
led _Hester Prynne_ to her shame--and called it religion--to that
Americanism which reaches forth its arms to smite wrong with reason and
truth, secure in the power of both. I appeal from the patriarchs of New
England to the poets of New England; from Endicott to Lowell; from
Winthrop to Longfellow; from Norton to Holmes; and I appeal in the name
and by the rights of that common citizenship--of that common
origin--back of both the Puritan and the Cavalier--to which all of us
owe our being. Let the dead past, consecrated by the blood of its
martyrs, not by its savage hatreds--darkened alike by kingcraft and
priestcraft--let the dead past bury its dead. Let the present and the
future ring with the song of the singers. Blessed be the lessons they
teach, the laws they make. Blessed be the eye to see, the light to
reveal. Blessed be Tolerance