IN

N this issue of the RECORD OF CHRISTIAN WORK we have given our readers a number of articles upon different phases of President McKinley's life. But one and all must be impressed with the emphasis which each writer has laid upon the character of the man. The exalted position in which William McKinley served his day and generation has attracted the attention of the world to his sad death. His real greatness, His real greatness, however, lay not in his position but in himself. Those characteristics which distinguished him among men were the outward expression of his inner Christian life. Recall the united testimony which is borne to his character by his associates in statecraft, as well as by those who knew him intimately in social life, and see how it compares with Christ's description of true manhood as defined in the Sermon on the Mount. With calm trust in God and quiet devotion to duty he served his fellowmen to the best of his ability, and found at last his greatest consolation in unruffled submission to His will. The simple but eloquent testimony of childlike trust expressed in his last utterances will live when even his wisest public addresses have been forgotten.

by the shedding of his life's blood. President McKinley belonged to no section of the country, and in his martyrdom the nation mourned a nation's loss. Thus, while by his life he taught the country not only to love all that

liberty stands for, but to esteem above self-interest the championship of all who suffer oppression and injustice, by his tragic death the nation has learned at terrible cost that liberty is not license, and that respect for law must be the basis of all true freedom.

"Know ye not that there is a prince and a great man fallen this day in Israel?" 2 Samuel iv. 38.

The heart of the nation is responding to-day to the noble message of President Roosevelt suggesting that, while the body of the last of our martyred presidents is being committed to the earth, the people should assemble in the courts of God.

But in a deeper sense it is not the proclamation which calls us together. The proclamation fixes a time, merely, for an act which would in any case be spontaneous. Some will remember that when our first martyr president, the great Lincoln, was stricken down, crowds resorted, in many towns and cities, without call, by a spontaneous impulse, to the churches. Why did they not seek the great halls of commerce, the exchanges, the theatres, and other accustomed places of popular gathering? Every one knows the answer-when a mighty sorrow overwhelms us we feel instinctively the need of God, of the consolations of the Gospel. There is no medicine for a sorrowing heart outside the pharmacopoeia of the Great Physician, and this sorrow has crossed every threshold, and sat down by every hearth. The nation mourns not so much collectively as personally. It is like the mourning predicted for Israel in the day when her Messiah shall again be manifested: "And the land shall mourn, every family apart."

But mere lamentations would be a poor exercise for such a day. Three times, in the providence of God, the American people have taken from among themselves and set in the most exalted office upon earth, illustrious citizens whose exaltation has but made them shining marks for the weapon of the assassin. Desiring to honor them,

Notes of an address delivered at the Congregational Church, East Northfield, September 18, 1901.

we have but put them in the place of death. Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley! Of the three greatest of our presidents-Washington, Lincoln, McKinley-two have been foully murdered, not because of personal enmity, but because they were presidents. No one supposes these great men would have been assassinated had they remained in private life.

Is there no meaning in this? In religion we say that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." Is the blood of the martyrs of patriotism to be infertile, barren, shed with no cry out of the ground which drinks their blood?

Assuredly, no. President McKinley, dying, left a great word for us to ponder to-day, "It is God's will; it is God's way." Did God direct the assassination of this third martyr? Surely not; but as surely He permitted it. Was it a cruel permission? Friends, there is a profound mystery in all martyrdom. Do we say it is cruel that God permits the death of the patriot on the battlefield? From the great sacrifice by which alone we are saved, down through every kind of vicarious dying, there runs this certainty-that so only is salvation. possible in a world like this-salvation for man from the guilt and power of sin-salvation for the social order from oppression and cruelty-salvation out of wrong and evil conditions to nobler and better ones. Is it without signification that three presidents have perished by assassination-two of them our very greatest?

For William McKinley, judged by any noble standard of greatness, was a great man. It cannot be necessary for me to recount the story of his life. During these sad days of interval between the wounding and the death, the public prints have brought again to the public mind the career of this illustrious citizen.

His story is not a striking or dramatic one, but such a story as American men and women take pride in, and justly so. He was a typical American. Born in the great central West-in that part of the country. which is to-day most distinctively American, he came of Revolutionary stock; and I do not know any nobler or better line of descent than that. Perhaps it is nothing of which, personally, to be proud, but, after all, there came a time in the providence of God and the history of this world when another great nation must be born, and the fathers had to stand forth and meet the test, and among the wars of history the cleanest, needfulest conflict ever fought was the American Revolution. And out of the suffering, and hardship, and heroism of that conflict came the stock from which our nation's noblest and strongest men have sprung. Surely it is matter for natural pride that one comes of Revolutionary stock. I would rather, if it were a matter of pride in ancestry, trace (as I can) my own line back to fathers who fought in that long and bitter struggle to make this country a land of liberty, of representative institutions, and to prepare it for its great destinies, than take my descent from any sovereign or princely line of the old world. I do not know any better ancestor than a Revolutionary soldier; and among soldier; and among McKinley's forbears were many such. Growing up from his boyhood in the middle West, he was better enabled to take that broad view which always characterized his statesmanship than if he had been in his youth swayed more by the local influences of sections of the country East or South remote from the centre. There he grew up, and there he developed along all the quiet and common ways of American life that character which, lifted into the great place of president, made him to be illustrious there, not by any one supreme quality of intellect, but by a splendid balance of all the qualities of intellect and of

character, so that he stood forth, and will ever stand forth, in our annals as a representative American of the very highest type.

First of all as a young soldier, when the country was in that great struggle to determine, as President Lincoln said, "Whether a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, could long endure," he fought for the Union, and he emerged from that war with an honorable name for soldiership. Then entering a profession, that of the law, again the same qualities of trustworthiness, of fine balance of all the qualities which go, to make strong manhood, lifted him into prominence in his profession. Seeking later a place in the councils of the nation, he made during his years of service in Congress the same impression which he had made in his community as a boy; which he had made in his regiment as a soldier; which he had made in his town as a lawyer; and by those qualities, solid rather than brilliant, he rose to great influence in national legislation.

He was also a typical American in a personal dignity and self respect which was ever characteristic of him. There is a quality of American selfconceit which is boastful and arrogant. It is a nuisance everywhere. But there is a form of personal self-respect which I venture to call characteristically American, and our president was not lacking in that noble quality.

As a congressman he dealt with large measures. His name will ever be connected with the great tariff legislation which said in effect, "This country's markets belong to this country first." His name was never associated with that kind of lawmaking by which men seek to advance their personal fortunes. As president, Mr. McKinley was called upon to face one of the most momentous crises of our history, and he will always be known as the president of the "expansion" period-the president who led nearly eighty millions