Morning journal and courier., 1881-11-26

eeds us. If we thus pray, our daily bread | s Gods answer to our daily prayer. True, 1 le feeds the ravens also that have not sense snough to pray, and he feeds myrlads of men that never pray But those men, sense ess of God as the ravens are, live on lower eye1 of existence than that on which men walk with God. Here is the true idea of prayer. If we pray in spirit and in truth, prayer brings us into communion with God and into a familiar friendship with him.. It is a mi stake to think that an outburst of re- ligious feeling or any glow or rapture of meditation is prayer. The man who prays has something to ask for-business, as it were, to be transacted at the throne of grace. He has need of Gods help in relation to this life and in relation to the life hereafter; he has work to do he has duties, cares, affec- tions hopes and fears and he brings them to his Father: That Father knows him, cares for him, listens to him, and answers him with blessings. God is his friends with him in his daily life-is taking care that all things shall work together for good to him. Gods friendship isworth more to him than the utmost prosperity of those who are without God in the world can be to them
 The friendship of God is as important to nation as to an individual or family, and as God befriended Israel of old so he has be- friended this nation-hitherto. And may we not accept it as a token of his friendship that he had so loudly and sharply reused us to Bn6 QubJ du0 bA0 pE1NA0R0 Ol prayer AOA those to whom the great trusts of govern ment are committed. That sort of religion which is too spiritual to pray for anything so mundane and secular as civil government in the nation is too spiritual for this world of work and conflict. Let 1t retreat into cells and cloisters, let it hide itself in caves and deserts, but let us have religion: that can pray as God would have us pray for all that are in authority, ,sfor the Sovereign People, for the President as the peime minister of that sovereign, for Governor and legislators, for senators and judges. Woe to this land of ours, with all it's riches and all it's historic glory, when the notion shall have prevailed that government in this nation, with allIthat concerns our political existence and activity, is too profane 8 thing, too much within the jurisdiction of the god of this world, to be prayed for or thought of in the churches God has warned us to pray and faint not Let us be thankful for the warming.
 Another and more obvious effect of our na- tional sorrow may well be regarded as ben eft for which the nation should give thanks. The murder of the President, with that long suspense between the shooting and the death, has made the nation more conscious of it's unity than ever before. The shock of that great crime was felt with equal horror on the shore of either ocean, and through all the States from the. northern frontier to the southern. It was felt-may we not say with confidence and therefore with thanksgiving ? it was felt not more in New York than at New Orleans-not more in Boston than in Charleston-not more in Chicago than at Mobile-not more here in New Haven than in Richmond. Twenty years had passed since the outbreak of civil war that was to dissolve the Union, and sixteen years since the surrender of s'the lost cause" The pro- cess of reconstruction with all it's painful and exasperating incidents had been completed. The South and the North were slowly yet manifestly coming into relations of amity and mutual respect. But still there seemed to remain some hot. embers in the ashes of old enmlty, and there was the possibility that those embers might by some malignant breath of faction be kindled into rage. May we not say to-day that the last embetA of enmity between the North and South have been extinguished in the common sor- TOW? Among the people who, only sixteen years ago, laid down their arms before the victorious forces of the Union, there was no other feeling than that horrible crime had been committed against them. Their Presi- dent had been shot and not merely North ern President the horror and grief was theirs and not ours only. The negroes of the South and those who had been their masters mourned together, and lifted up their hands in prayer with one accord. In the first horror, in the long anxiety, in the national grief and funeral, there was an awakened conseiousness-thrill from the North to the South and from ocean to ocean, that we are one people.
 Thus when to the industrial exhibition in the chief city of Georgia there came the products of the South and the machinery of the North, all saw, all felt and all rejoiced to feel that in this great Union of States there are no antagonist interests, that the prosper ity of each contributes to the prosperity of all and that If one member suffer all the members suffer with 1t.
 There is yet another consideration press ing upon us. Can we forget the expressions of international regard and sympathy that were called forth by our af11ction? There is ne need of my telling you what they were Let me rather ask, What did they signify What do they signify to us as we remember them? When the sovereign of the British empire-Queen and Empress-was sending her messages of tender and anxious inquiry, those messages told us indeed that ia true woman's heart was beating under the royal purple" but that was not the whole signif- canoe to us. When all the potentates of Christendom and the rulers also of Moham- medan and Pagan empires sent through their ambassadors and ministers the homage of their sympathy, what was the reason-what the signifcation of the fact? When, at the teIe- graphic announcement of the death of James A. Garfield, the bells of old cathedrals and parish churches in England and Scotland were tolled as if responding to the bells that were tolling on this side of the Atlantic when, on the day of our Presidents funeral, the symbols of mourning were hung out in London as if London itself were one of our cities-when that widowed Queen Cat the mention of whose name American hearts reply 'God bless her'' more fervently perhaps than if there had been 8 Declaration of Independence) sent her loving words of condolence to the widow of our President, and to his venerable mother the backwoods farmers widow,-what was the meaning to us of all this international sympathy?
 The circle of hundred years has just been completed since that surrender which en- sured and virtually certified to the world the independence of the United States. Between that 18th of October, 1791, which saw the surrender at Yorktown, and that 18th of Oc- tober, 1881, which saw our national Salute to the imperial flag of Great Britain on the spot where it had been struck in acknowledgement of defeat, there has been century of prog ress. International animosities are losing their old bitterness. International sym pathies are growing stronger. We see this and it is much to be thankful for-in the ex- pressions of regard and sympathy which have come to us in our national aff1iction. But we cannot fail to see that they signify to ,is more than this The feeble Union of thir- teen States as they were in 1781, with their population of less than three millions scat tered along the Atlantic Coast, has become the firmly compacted Union of thirty nine States with a population of fifty millions. We have become-let us not say the foremost but one of the fore most powers of. the world. All nations are looking toward us, not in fear, God forbid that they should have reason to fear us ), but in wonder at our advancement in popu- lation, in wealth, in all the elements of civil ization, and as they look they are learning how great blessing from God 8 government like ours, self-government, may be to a peo- pie capable of self goverl mept
 Remember, then, our national responsibili- ty; that is the thought whether my service here to-day A national thanksgiving ought to quicken the sense of national responsibili- ty. What the twentieth century, now. draw ing near, is to be for the millions upon mil lions that are to inhabit this land of ours, what it is to be for the whole world, will be deter mined largely by what the peopl in the Unit ed States are and what they do, in the nine teen years that are yet to be numbered in the nineteenth century
 In that national responsibilit yeach ndivid- ual citizen has his part.
 Amusement Interests. An Interview With Manager Near Something New-A ssNeyv Departure',-