rms
and grasp our whole land into freedom; sterner to sweep the last poor
ghost of Slavery out of our haunted homes. But while we feel the folly
of this act, let not its folly hide its wickedness. It was the
wickedness of Slavery putting on a foolishness for which its wickedness
and that alone is responsible, that robbed the nation of a President and
the people of a father. And remember this, that the folly of the Slave
power in striking the representative of Freedom, and thinking that
thereby it killed Freedom itself, is only a folly that we shall echo if
we dare to think that in punishing the representatives of Slavery who
did this deed, we are putting Slavery to death. Dispersing armies and
hanging traitors, imperatively as justice and necessity may demand them
both, are not killing the spirit out of which they sprang. The traitor
must die because he has committed treason. The murderer must die because
he has committed murder. Slavery must die, because out of it, and it
alone, came forth the treason of the traitor and the murder of the
murderer. Do not say that it is dead. It is not, while its essential
spirit lives. While one man counts another man his born inferior for the
color of his skin, while both in North and South prejudices and
practices, which the law cannot touch, but which God hates, keep alive
in our people's hearts the spirit of the old iniquity, it is not dead.
The new American nature must supplant the old. We must grow like our
President, in his truth, his independence, his religion, and his wide
humanity. Then the character by which he died shall be in us, and by it
we shall live. Then peace shall come that knows no war, and law that
knows no treason; and full of his spirit a grateful land shall gather
round his grave, and in the daily psalm of prosperous and righteous
living, thank God forever for his life and death.

So let him lie here in our midst to-day, and let our people go and bend
with solemn thoughtfulness and look upon his face and read the lessons
of his burial. As he paused here on his journey from the Western home
and told us what by the help of God he meant to do, so let him pause
upon his way back to his Western grave and tell us with a silence more
eloquent than words how bravely, how truly, by the strength of God, he
did it. God brought him up as he brought David up from the sheepfolds to
feed Jacob, his people, and Israel, his inheritance. He came up in
earnestness and faith, and