Excerpt from A Great Man Fallen: A Discourse on the Death of President Harrison, Delivered in the Third Congregational Church of Portland, on Sabbath Morning, April 18, and on Thursday Evening, April 22, 1841, The Day of the Annual Fast

The hand of the Almighty has smitten the nation in the person of its Chief Magistrate, and the shock has been felt from the shores of the Atlantic to the banks of the Mississippi. During the fifty two years which have passed away since the organization of our national government, thirteen terms of the Presidency have been occupied by a succession of most distinguished individuals, each of whom outlived his allotted period of public service and men accordingly 'were uncon sciously adopting the idea, that the President of the United States was not to die. Hope and fear, the spirit of party and the spirit of patriotism, the man of the world and the Christian, were all largely crediting this delusion, when with searcely a note of warning the blow was struck, and the Head of the nation was lifeless in the dust. So sudden and crushing has fallen the thunderbolt, that men have been generally stunned and scarcely able to draw their breath, and now that they are beginning to recover their self-pos session, they can look around them only in astonishment and awe. Party strifes have for the moment slept, the ordinary currents of thought and feeling have, as it were, ceased to ¿ow, and multitudes who had all but forgotten that there is a God, have been compelled to look upward and acknowl edge His resistless hand.

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