Connecticut western news., 1892-10-13

that he was the only one that could take, them back home in safety. The promise of silk waistcoat and forty dollars in money to the man who should first dis cover land appeased them somewhat, but the indignation and blasphemy and threats of assassination must have been awful. Yet God sustained the great sailor commanding the Santa Maria.
 Every evening on shipboard they had prayers and sung a vesper hymn. But after all the patience of those on board the ships had been exhausted, and the great captain or admiral had been cursed by every anathema that human lips could frame, one night sailor saw light moving along the shore, and then moving up and down, and then disap- bearing. On Friday morning at two o'clock, just long enough after Thurs day to make it sure that it was Friday, and so give another blow at the worlds idea of unlucky days-on Friday morn ing, Oct. 12, 1492, a gun from the Pinta signaled ''land ahead"
 Then the ships lay to, and the boats were lowered, and Captain Christopher Columbus first stepped upon the shore, amid the song of birds and the air a surge of redolence, and took possession in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Ghost. So the voyage that began with the sacrament ended with "Gloria in Excelsis Deo." From that day onward you say there can be nothing for Columbus but honors, re- wards, rhapsodies, palaces and world wide applause. No! mol On his way back to Spain the ship was so wrenched by the tempest and so threatened with destruction that he wrote brief ac- count of his discovery and put it in cask and threw it overheard that the world might not lose the advantage of his adventures.
 Honors awaited him on the beach, but he undertook a second voyage, and with it came all maligning and persecution and denunciation and poverty. He was called land grabber, 8 liar, a cheat, fraud, 8 deceiver of nations. Specu- lators robbed him of his good name, courtiers depreciated his discoveries, and there came to him ruined health and i'm prisonment and chains, of which he said while he rattled them on his wrists, ''l will wear them as a nemento of the gratitude of princes" Amid keen ap- preciation of the worlds abuse and cruelty, and with body writhing in the tortures of gout he groaned out his last words, "In manus tuas Domino com mendo spiritum meum"-"Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit"
 Of course he had regal obsequies. That is the way the world tries to atone for it's mean treatment of great benefac- tors. Many man has had fine ride to his grave who during this life had tc walk all the way. A big funeral, and instead of bread they give him a stone that is tombstone. But death, that brings quiet to the body of others, did not bring quiet to his. First buried in the church of Santa Maria. Seven year afterward removed to Seville. Twenty three years afterward removed to San Domingo. Finally removed to Cuba. Four postmortem journeys from sepul cher to sepulcher.
 wish his bones might be moved just once more, and now that they have come so near to America as Cuba they might during the great Columbian year be transported to our own shores, where they belong, and that in the fifth cen tury after his decease the American con- tinent might build mausoleum worthy of him who picked this jewel of hemi sphere out of the sea and set it in the crown of the worlds geography.
 But the bright monday sun of that old sailors prosperity went down in thickest night, and though here and there monument has been lifted in his memory, and here and there city called after him, the continent that he was the means of founding was named after an other name, and no fitting commemora- tion of his work has been proposed until nearly four hundred years after his body turned to dust. May the imposing dem- onstration now being made in his honor on the Atlantic coast and to be made next year in his honor midcontinent, be brilliant enough and far resounding enough and Christian enough and mag nifcent enough to atone for the neglect of centuries! May the good Lord allow that most illustrious sailor of all time to look over the amethystine battlements long enough to see some of the garlands wpeathed around his name and hear something of the hemispheric shout that shall greet h1S memory!
 What most impresses me in all that wondrous life, which for the next twelve months we will be commemorating hy sermon and song and military parade and Worlds fair and congress of na- tions, is something I have never heard stated, and that is that the discovery Of America was a religious discovery and in the name of God. Columbus, by the study of the prophecies and by what Zechariah and Micah and David and Isaiah had said about the lends of the earth" was persuaded to go out and find the lends of the earth" and he felt him self called by God to carry Christianity to the "ends of the earth" Then the administration of the last supper before they left the Gulf of Cadiz, and the evening prayers during the voyage, and the devout ascription as soon as they saw the New World, and the doxologies with which they landed confirm me in saying that the discovery of America was re- igious discovery.
 Atheism has no right here; infdelity has no right here; vagabondism has no right here. And as God is not apt to fail in any of his undertakings Cat any rate have never heard of his having anything to do with failure), America is going to be Gospelized, and from the Golden Gate of California to the Mar rows of New York harbor, and from the top of North America to the foot of South America, from Behring straits to Cape Horn, this is going to be Imman uel's land. All the forms of irreligion and abomination that have cursed other parts of the world will land here-yea, they have already landed-and they will wrangle for the possession of this hemi- sphere, and they will make great head way and feel themselves almost estab-