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Some great cause, God's new Messiah"

MESSIAH PULPIT

NEW YORK

OCT 4 1901

(Being a continuation of Unity Pulpit, Boston)

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Entered at the Post-office, Boston, Mass., as second-class mail matter

WILLIAM MCKINLEY.

AN APPRECIATION.

President McKinley of blessed life is now, and, more and more as time goes on, will be of blessed memory. The asperities which afflict a public servant during his official career, but which have been much less attendant upon President McKinley than upon other Presidents of like prominence, notably Lincoln, will quickly be forgotten; and the calm just verdict of history will pronounce him a man of ideally pure, true character, a patriot of single and disinterested devotion to his country, and a statesman unexcelled for tact, prudence, and practical competency. His domestic life is one of the precious sanctities of American sentiment. His amiability, poise of temper, and genuine sympathy, not assumed, but instinctive, with his fellow-men identified him with them, and put him in kinship with them to an extent never surpassed. His long legislative career, in which he rose to leadership, not only gave him facility in that line of work, but enabled him, when he became President, to put himself in such relation with Congress that no other President ever had with that co-ordinate branch of the government such influence and such responsive co-operation as he had. As an Executive, his Administration has been a series of remarkable achievements. It has been attended by great military successes, by an abounding prosperity, by the revival of business and industrial enterprise, and by the practically unanimous approval of the whole country. It has put out the last embers of sectional bitterness. It has been marked by appointments of high character and especial fitness to places of great trust. The tone of the public official, the efficiency of the civil service, the integrity and fidelity of all departments and branches of its executive government were never so high as to-day.

President McKinley leaves an unblemished record in public and private life. And a record not merely free from blemish, but bright with good deeds done, with great services rendered. The world is better because he lived in it, and his country greater and happier because, giving it in war and in peace his youth and his manhood, he was its citizen, its servant, and its President.-John D. Long.

What constitutes political greatness? If to be patient, calm, sagacious, resolute, and enduring is to be great, then William McKinley was a great statesman. If to have been the ruler of a mighty empire at the moment when, passing from youth to maturity, it broke with its early traditions, and, in a perilous juncture, to have enunciated the principles which must probably be accepted as fundamental in the future, is to be great, then William McKinley promises to leave for posterity a reputation which can only rise. And, like certain other great men, the late President was as fortunate in his death as in his life. Having enjoyed all of honor which the world has to give, in the meridian of his powers, at the summit of his fame, to perish like a general on the field of victory, amid the lamentations of an entire people, having stamped a great epoch of history with his name, is a lot reserved only for those few favored mortals who are not born to die.- Brooks Adams.

OUR DEAD PRESIDENT.

IT has seemed to both Mr. Collyer and myself that we could not devote this opening service of the year to any other theme than that of our dead President.

The text which has been selected you may find in the Second Book of Samuel, the third chapter, and part of the thirty-eighth verse. Abner, a famous man, had died. David, speaking concerning him to his friends, uses these words: "Know ye not that there hath a great man fallen this day in Israel?"

A revolver shot, and the President, surprised, hardly conscious of what had happened, at last waking up to the fact, says to the excited crowd, "Don't hurt him," and then "Don't tell Mrs. McKinley"; and he sinks back into the arms of those around him, and is carried away to the house of a friend.

The nation, forgetting all past differences of opinion, all criticisms of person or policy, is shocked, grieved, heartbroken, angry. The word comes first that he has gone, and then a great relief as the message is sent out that he may after all recover; and then, day after day, breathless millions waiting for word, alternate hope and despair; but by and by, after we had been led to believe that we could count on his certain recovery, a sudden relapse comes, medical skill has done all possible, and the President breathes his last.

Let us, as calmly and simply as we may, review some of the phases of this man's life, private and public, and see if we can learn some of the lessons of the situation.

Mr. McKinley was born, as thousands on thousands of boys are born in this country, of the common people, nothing remarkable about his ancestry, nothing remarkable

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