Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1895-02-25


key, taking the text, 'Alleluia for the Lord
God omnipotent reigneth, from Revela-
tons 1876. Upon this, he said that Mr..
Beecher for half hour went into history,
facts, as Mr.. Beecher could. When 1 arose
from there said Mr.. Douglass, arose a
changed man. Now I am in the trade
winds of the Almighty
Mr.. Douglass has several times within
a few months expressed to me the joy of
his soul that he experienced in God and in
spiritual life.
"He had several times, after listening to
sermons here in this church at the morning
hour, grasped the speakers hand, saying:
L have been greatly instructed, edited and
inspired this morning.
Several times he has told me how mis-
soul has been thrilled by DR.. J. w. Beckett
when singing the hymn:
Jesus my Savior, to Bethlehem came,
Seeking for me; for me-
LOSS ITO His People.
Death has ended the earthly care of
Tie long and useful life of this great anu
good man. We can't say that he has
fallen, but in a greater sense he has risen.
By his death his true merits and character
will be revealed.
THE hearts of the people will be
cemented in closer bonds of sympathy fer
that and those for which he SO ably
labored Douglass, the success, the stu
uOils lAC WSlhClS plhAdAtHl opAot, poIiiot
and leader. was given us of God and God
has taken him.
Blessed are the dead who die in the
Lord; yea. saith the Spirit; they rest from
their labors and their works do follow
Them
Upon his return from the National Coun-
Gil of Women last Wednesday the chariot
of God met Mr.. Douglass in the hallway
of his own home. Without a struggle the
spirit. from the presence of his beloved
wife, who was all alone, passed into bette
land, in the seventy-eighth year of his
age, leaving two sons and a daughter, with
several grandchildren, to mourn their loss;
leaving the race in grief, the world of
mankind regretful, but heaven and earth
unite in saying, Well done. thou good and
faithful servant; enter into the joy Of thy
Lord
Father, brother, leader, farewell! Dear
family, sons. daughter, grandchildren, dear
wife, your great and devoted husband has
gone, but look to the God of all comfort
for aid and succor. You will ever be an
object of the people and God.
BE you assured that you will never
cease to have the deepest sympathy and
the profound respect of grateful human
ity, for whom your great head gave his
life and best efforts.
DIR. Rankin's Address.
DR.. Rankin recited as his text Psalm CIV,
1910. He sent man before them. He
was sold for a servant His feet they hurt
iron. Until the time that His word came to
pass, the word of the Lord tried him.
Then he said: There is but one parallel
to the life of Frederick Douglass, and this
is found in the Bible; the Bible, which sur
passes all other literature. There is no
narrative which in natural pathos and elo-
quence so reminds me of the history of
the favorite son of Jacob as the story of
Frederick Douglass. And l find God in
a &C ha nth AnI i1ly of
all the men in' his generation, mo-
mentous of great events. SO influential upon
the future of humanity, no man is more to
be congratulated-could human congratula-
lions reach him-than this man who now
sleeps in deaths marble before us. God
made him great; yes, but God also gave
him great opportunity. And that oppor-
tunity began when he was born slave.
Il feel the pathoS of it. in every fiber Of
my being, when this boy, without father,
without mother, save as once or twice in
his memory she walked twenty-four miles,
between sunset and sunrise to give her
son a few clandestine kiSseS-yes, without
beginning of days. for Mrs. Douglass never
knew the day of his birth, was in that
prison house of bondage, slowly emerging
to consciousness of himself and to con-
was his schooling for the years to come,
1t was the only way in which he could
become swift witness against the great
wrong which was crushing the bodies and
that prison house of despair which the
world needed to know. And God had given
him the tongue Of the eloquent to tell
them Fascinating as is the masterpiece CT
harriet Beecher Stowe, beautiful and
touching as are the scenes depicted, dra-
matte as are the movement, powerful as are
the delineations, We all know 1t is fiction
II Is founded on fact. But this narrative
is fact.
And say, that just as God sent Joseph
GOWN into Egypt preparatory to great
events which were to follow; to save much
people alive; just as His word tried him in
TIE house OF Potiphar and in the dungeons
of Egypt, so it was with the boy, the young
man Douglass. When he was praying there
with Uncle Lawson God was girding him
for that day when he was to so from town
TO town. from state to state a flaming
herald of Righteousness to cross oceans,
to gain admission to palaces, lifting up
that great clarion voice, which no one who
ever heard ever can forget forgot its
burden So that l say Frederick Douglass
was fortunate in the misfortune of his
birth. If he had not been born of a slave
mother, one potent factor in the great worth
put upon the men and women of his gen.
Grafton would have been wanting. God
wanted witness. After Dante wrote his
Inferno the people of Florence said as he
walked their streets, There goes the man
who has been in hell! What the cause of
in hell in the he'll of human slavery, an
eye witness of the dark possibilities and ex-
periences of the system into which he was
born; who had felt the iron enter his own
SOUL who knew what it was to be COM
PEELED to yearn in vain for mother-ove: to
fight his way, inch by inch, into the simz
plest rudiments of human Speech of hui
man knowledge; into any of the preroga-
tives of manhood.
The Beginning of the End.
ct do not at all underrate the work done
by those magnificent champions of free
dom, who took this young man at twenty
five into their charmed coterie of their
fearless eloquence; who gave him the
baptism of their approval. who laid their
hands upon his head, William Lloyd Car
risen, Wendell Phillips and their asso
cates. But they needed him as much as
he needed Them After their cool and elo-
quent logic, after their studied irony and
invective, which. mighty as it was, was
wanting in the tremolo of the voice of one
that has suffered, Of one whose very modu-
lations signifed more than their words;
when this man arose, as one rises from
the dead as the ghost Of one. the crown
and scepter Of whose manhood has been
stolen away, while he goes from land to
land proclaiming the wrong and asking
for Justice then the climax was reached
iS,is' man made the work of such men as
Garrison and Phillips and Sumner and
even Lincoln possible. do not wish to
use the language Of exaggeration. 1t is
t.