Excerpt from A Sermon on the Death of President Garfield: Preached in the First Church of Hartford

"Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils."
"His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth: in that very day his thoughts perish."

How solemnly these words utter themselves in our hearing to-day, sounding out of the cloud which darkens all the land! The frailty and vanity of human power, the might and mystery of mortality, the greatness and awfulness of Divine Providence, how they echo and reverberate in the events which crowd upon the Nation's thoughts this funereal Sabbath morning!

And what a tremendously added emphasis do these facts and monitions derive from the sharpness of that contrast between what seemed less than seven short months ago, and what indubitably is to-day!

Not seven months ago a man in the full vigor of physical and intellectual strength stood up at our National Capitol and took the oath of office as President of fifty millions of people: to-day a flying car has just borne along the lines of one of our inland railways a shrunken and mutilated form, to be deposited in six narrow feet of Ohio burial-ground.

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