The Irish standard. [volume] (Minneapolis, Minn. ;) 1886-1920, 1901-01-19
the yery day of his death.

some of the ablest and astutest inter-
national lawyers in Europe, achieved
a result which, even by those of us
who do not approve the policy, must
be admitted to constitute signal tri-
umph of dialectic skill.
death found Cushman X. Davis at
the zenith Of his powers and at the
summit Of his opportunities. He stood
at the head of the committee which,
at the present critical juncture in our
history, is the most prominent COM
mittee of the highest governmental
body in the world.
IF the policy on which his party has
entered is to be pursued, the unexpired
portion Of his current term, comprising
the next four years, must be all-impor-
tant in the shaping and adjustment Of
that policy as related to numerous and
complicated international interests.
"This was situation calculated to
appeal to his highest ambition, to slim
nulate his greatest potencies, to spread
before his mental vision the most sat
isfying prospect of worthy and endur-
ing fame.
yet here, on the threshold of the
contamination of his career, at the
very entrance to that fair field for
whose delights and glories all his past
seemed to have been a designed prepa-
ration, inscrutable fate had ordained
that he should pause.
mo one realized the tragic pathos
of the catastrophe more fully than did
he; yet he bore the sorrow Of it with
a moral heroism equal to the physical
courage, with which he opposed the
stoutest assaults of pain. He might
vince, but he would not cry out; he
could express regret, but he did not
complain.
"And when his feet touched the wa
tiers of the river beyond which lies
that undiscovered country the glance
that sought inquiringly the farther
shore was a glance that felt no shade
OF fear.
GAS young man he had for time
yielded to- the influence of that irreli-
gious skepticism which was often the
too hasty refuge Of minds strongly i'm
pressed by the wonderful development
of the physical sciences shortly after
the middle of the nineteenth century.
But as he grew older, and as his
reading broadened and his habit of in
trospection strengthened, the thought
that all the preparation Of the centu-
rics is purposcless, and that the end
of innumerable universes is mere moth
ingness, gave no comfort to his soul
and found no justification in his rea-
son.
Familiar with the ancient philoso-
plies and with the general principles
of recent science, he found in both of
them that which, while it yielded no
exclusive basiso n particular creed, yet
gave ample support to the sweet as
surances of the Christian religion re,
speeding the future life.
"The Grecian thinkers had reached
conclusions summarized in the well
known lines Of Addison's Cato:
1t must be so:-Plato, thou reason'st
well;
Else why this pleasing hope, this fond
desire,
This longing after Immortality?
Or whence this secret dread and in
ward horror
or falling into naught? Why shrinks
the soul
Back on herself and startles ut de:
struction?
Ills the divinity that stirs within us
TITS Heaven itself that points out an
hereafter,
And intimates an eternity to man.
Modern cosmogony, in sweeping
away the ancient fond delusion that
the sun, the moon and the unnuln
bered stars still Quiring to the young
eyed cherubim, circle obediently about
the earth, the central home of specially
created man., merely to give him light
and to serve as pleasing objects Of his
aesthetic contemplation, has substitute,
ed doctrine infinitely more flatterine
to his consequence and in itself strong,
ly probative of his immortality.
''It shows the human drama to have
begun in the primordial chaos among
the whirling atoms Of di1fuscd uni
verses, the raw material Of unborn
worlds.
BY the operations of forces of whicl,
the finite mind cannot begin to grasp
either the subtility or the power,
through reaches of time for which
even the strongest symbols of our
speech are weak as aids to the falter-
ing Imagination, the laws of the Eter-
nal Beneficence evolved the order of
celestial systems and the mysterious
phenomena OF life.
eat the elimination Of the long as
cent of beings stands man, the con-
summate product Of creative process
that began before the morning stars
sang together
every resource and agency of ma
ture Is tributary to him: First to de-