When did the fool stop saying in his heart, “There is no God,” and acting godlessly in the absurdity of his impiety?  The cause that Abraham Lincoln died for shall grow stronger by his death,—­stronger and sterner.  Stronger to set its pillars deep into the structure of our nation’s life; sterner to execute the justice of the Lord upon his enemies.  Stronger to spread its arms 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 he goes back in triumph.  As he pauses here to-day, and from his cold lips bids us bear witness how he has met the duty that was laid