...... In connection with this momentous subject, the occasion on which we are now met together is full of more than ordinary interest and significance, such as may well invest it with the most profound solemnity for all who are here present.

We have before us, and will be called soon to follow to the grave, the mortal remains of James Buchanan, the fifteenth President of the United States; who, after taking an active part in the politics of this great nation for half a century, having filled the highest places of honor and trust in the gift of his country, and having represented her for a long time with prominent distinction in the diplomacy of the civilized world, has now, at the advanced age of almost four score years, been gathered to his fathers, and enrolled on the catalogue of the great and illustrious dead. His name has been famous, not simply through his own merits, but through association, also, with the leading political characters and the leading political interests of the times in which he lived.

He belonged to a generation of eminent statesmen, giants in their day, whose names were once household words in the land, but who, in him as their representative, we can all feel have passed away forever from the drama of our national life. There is something peculiarly affecting in this thought. He was the last link that held us in communication with that buried age; and in parting with Mr. Buchanan, it is as though we were called to part again with Clay, and Webster, and Benton, and Calhoun, and Jackson, and Cass, and the whole political world to which they belonged. Now, more than ever, their age has become to us, in view especially of the late war, like the years before the flood. Then the occasions with which he has been intimately connected, especially in the latter part of his public life, have been of the most momentous, as well as the most difficult and trying character, involving in the end a crisis which amounted to a full revolution for our own country, while it made itself felt, also, as of truly world-historical importance for the age at large.

This is not the place nor the time, of course, to enter into any consideration of Mr. Buchanan’s public career, or to pronounce any judgment in particular on the policy of his administration as President of the United States. The time, indeed, has not yet come for a fair and competent historical verdict on this subject, in any quarter. We stand too near the vast and mighty struggle through which we have just passed, and from whose surging billows we have not yet fully escaped, to understand it properly, or to estimate fairly its moral and political merits.

Only this much, in justice to the dead, I may be permitted to say, in the form of two general observations:

In the first place, we have no right to judge Mr. Buchanan’s conduct at the beginning of our late civil troubles by the course of events subsequently, when the contingent became actual, and the problematical certain, in many ways, which only the eye of Omniscience could previously foresee. How far this ex post facto judgment (cruel and wrongful in history, full as much as ex post facto statutes in legislation), has been carried in the case before us, all who care to look into the matter can easily see and know. Every man, every public man especially, has a right to demand that his opinions and actions should be measured by the circumstances and conditions of his own time, and not by the circumstances and conditions of another and, it may be, a wholly different time. Any other mode of judgment is at once grossly unhistorical, grossly unphilosophical, and I will also add, grossly unchristian.

My other observation is, that whatever may be thought by others, now or hereafter, of Mr. Buchanan’s Presidential administration on the eve of the rebellion, he himself never changed his mind in regard to the righteousness or wisdom of the course which he saw proper to pursue. That his own policy was thwarted and overwhelmed by another policy, altogether different, never led him to believe that, in the circumstances of the country, as they then were, his own policy was not right. “Had I to pass through the same state of things again,” he would say, calmly but firmly, “I do not see, before God, how I could act otherwise than as I did act.”

This, of course, does not prove that his course was the wisest and best for the exigencies of that fearfully volcanic time, as they came to view afterwards in the lava flames of our civil war; but no one who was intimately familiar, as I have been, with the last years of Mr. Buchanan’s life, could doubt, at all events, the sincerity of his own convictions, thus expressed in regard to the closing portions of his political career.^[188] Whether absolutely wise or not in all his counsels, he was, in this time that tried men’s souls, honest, at least, conscientious and patriotically true to what he conceived to be the highest interests of his country.

But these political surroundings of the present solemnity, however they must unavoidably crowd upon our thoughts while we are engaged in it, form not, by any means, what we should all feel to be, for us now, its main interest. The relations of time, however otherwise vast and momentous, are here to-day, swallowed up and made small by the relations of eternity. Mr. Buchanan has passed away, not simply as a politician and a statesman, but as a Christian; and this it is we now feel, standing by his coffin and his grave, to be a distinction of infinitely higher account than all the honors and dignities of his life, under any other form.

These, at best, are but of ephemeral significance and worth. One generation of politicians passeth away and another generation cometh. Where are the voices that, thirty or forty years ago, filled our Congressional halls and electrified the land with their eloquent words? Kings and Presidents, the princes of the earth—terrestrial gods, as they are sometimes called—die like other men. “All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass; the grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away, but the word of the Lord endureth forever.” And where do we find this enduring word of the Lord in full presence and power, save in the Logos Incarnate, our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Alpha and Omega of the whole creation, the same yesterday, to-day and forever?

HappilyHappily, the venerable sage of Wheatland, as he has sometimes been called, sought and found here what he himself was ready to acknowledge as something better than all the greatness of the world; an humble but strong trust in the atoning righteousness of Christ, which brightened the whole evening of his life, which proved to be the strength of his spirit, when heart and flesh began to fail, and which now makes his death but the quiet sleep that precedes the morning of the resurrection. He died in the Lord; this is our great comfort in following him to the grave. We sorrow not as those who have no hope. “For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.”

In some sense, Mr. Buchanan was a religious man, we may say, all his life. Brought into the Presbyterian church by baptism in his infancy, he enjoyed at the same time the unspeakable advantage of an early Christian training, which made itself felt more or less sensibly on all his character and conduct in later years. In serious conversation with me on this subject less than a year ago, he referred, with moistened eyes and faltering voice, to the lessons that had been instilled into him as a boy, especially by his pious mother. She had taught him to pray; and her presence, as an invisible ministering spirit, seemed to hold him to the duty, as it were in spite of himself, through the whole of his subsequent public life. Whatever of worldliness there might be in his thoughts and ways otherwise, his conscience would not allow him to give up the outward exercise, at least, of some private as well as public, forms of devotion. He made it a point to read the bible, honored the Sabbath, and observed more or less faithfully stated times for secret prayer.

His general character, at the same time, was always good. Those who stood nearest to him in his public life, and who knew him best, have ever united in bearing the most favorable testimony to what he was in this view. He has been known and spoken of on all sides as a true gentleman of the old school, distinguished for his personal integrity, a man of honorable spirit, upright in his deportment, and beyond the common measure virtuous in his manners. He was unquestionably one of the purest in mind, and most exemplary in life, belonging to the generation of public men, which has now come to a close in his death. It is, indeed, something wonderful, that in his peculiar circumstances he should have been able to pass through such a long life of exposure to all forms of corruption and sin, so generally unscathed as he seems to have been by the fiery ordeal. In this respect, he is worthy of lasting admiration, and may well be held up as an example for the study and imitation of younger candidates for political distinction coming after his day. When will all our public men lay to heart, as they ought, that true oracle of the olden time: “The memory of the just is blessed; but the name of the wicked shall rot?”

All this, however, Mr. Buchanan himself very well knew, fell short of what was required to make him a Christian in the full sense of the term; and as he advanced in life accordingly, he seems to have turned his mind more and more seriously to the necessity of becoming a follower of the Saviour in a more inward and strict way. This practical discipleship he believed himself to have reached in some measure years before he withdrew from political life. Yet, he made then no open profession of his faith, in the way of what is commonly called joining the church, under the idea that there was some reason for postponing it in the peculiar circumstances in which he stood as a public man. That idea, of course, was a serious mistake, as he himself acknowledged it to be afterwards, when earnestly spoken with on the subject. He ought to have joined the church sooner, he said, and especially before he left Washington. As it was, he took this important step in due course of time, subsequently, after full serious consideration, by connecting himself in form with the Presbyterian church of Lancaster, which had been his regular place of worship previously, where he continued to worship afterwards, and in communion with which he has now departed this life, “looking for the general resurrection in the last day, and the life of the world to come.”

It was my privilege to converse with him frequently on religious subjects, during these his last years, and I can say his mind seemed to be always clear and remarkably firm, as well as consistent, in the apprehension of Christianity, under its simplest and most commonly acknowledged evangelical form. He had studied carefully, I may be allowed to state, the Heidelberg Catechism (that most œcumenical, and in some respects most genial of all the Reformed Protestant Confessions), and he was accustomed to speak highly of it at all times, as being a summary of religious truth, to which he could cordially subscribe as the full expression of his theological faith.^[189]

More particularly, however, it was during the last summer, that I had the opportunity of coming to the most intimate knowledge of his Christian views and hopes, on the occasion of his returning home from Cape May, under an attack of a strange sickness which threatened at the time to carry him to the grave. The sickness was attended with but little bodily pain, and it left his mind perfectly clear and free, while yet it was of such a character as to produce in his own mind the strong impression that it would end in his death. In these solemn circumstances, I had interviews with him day after day for some time, in which I talked with him, and prayed with him, as a dying man; and in which he talked also most freely himself with regard to his own condition, giving utterance to his views and feelings in a way which furnished the most satisfactory and pleasing evidence that religion had become with him, indeed, a deeply-settled principle in the soul, and such a conviction of faith as could not be shaken by the powers either of earth or hell. Let it be sufficient here to say, that he was able to resign himself with full filial confidence and trust into the hands of God as a faithful Creator and Saviour, and that he found Him an all sufficient help in his time of need. At the same time, his faith was far more than a vague trust merely in God’s general goodness and mercy. It was most explicitly the humble, penitent reliance of one who knew himself to be a sinner, on the mercy of God secured to men through His Son Jesus Christ. At this time, especially, more than before, he was brought to see and feel the importance of simply looking to Jesus (in the spirit of St. John’s gospel and of the Apostle’s Creed), as being Himself the sum and substance of the whole Christian salvation. His mind fastened with peculiar interest on the text: “Lord to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we believe and are sure that Thou art that Christ the Son of the living God.”^[190]

Altogether it was a death-bed experience, full of tranquil light and peace, the calm evening sunset of a long life, which seemed to be itself but the brightening promise of a new and far better life beyond the grave.

His late sickness, which has now terminated in his death, was more prostrating for him throughout, both in body and in mind, than that of which I have just spoken. Through it all, however, his views and feelings in regard to religion he declared to be, in the prospect of quitting the world, just what he had over and over again witnessed them to be before. He bowed with entire submission to his Heavenly Father’s will. His last intelligible word, indeed, whispered in the ear of anxious affection bending over him, as he was turned somewhat painfully upon his bed, and felt, no doubt, that the end had come—after which he fell away into the gentle sleep that some hours later closed the scene—was the short Christian prayer: “O Lord, God Almighty, as Thou wilt!” Thus he passed away. His trust was in Christ crucified and risen from the dead, and in Christ alone. He died in the full faith of the gospel, and in the joyful hope of having part at last in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.

He sleeps in Jesus. Be this his epitaph; the last and crowning honor of his long, illustrious life; the richest ornament of his public, no less than of his private memory and name. Be this also the consolation of his sorrowful friends as they look upon that venerable majestic form here lying in state before us, and are called now to follow it in slow melancholy procession to the grave. We sorrow not as others, which have no hope; for if Jesus died and rose again, them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him. The aged statesman has been gathered to his fathers full of years, like a shock of corn fully ripe and laden with fruit; he has served his country well, and enjoyed its honors largely, in his generation; he has left behind him a fair example of justice, benevolence, integrity and truth, a bright record indeed, of honorable and virtuous character in all respects. In all this we find matter for thankful satisfaction, and occasion for bowing in meek submission to the Divine will, which has now at last removed him from our sight. But, through all this, at the same time, we triumph and rejoice most of all, as Christians, in what we know to have been his Christian death, and in the assurance that we have, therefore, of his being still with us, and near to us, in Christ.

To Whom, now let us offer our united and unfeigned thanks for that victory over death and the grave, which he has obtained for us and for all who sleep in Him; while we pray also for power to follow the faith of those who have gone before us, “that we may enter at death into their joy, and so abide with them in rest and peace, till both they and we shall reach our common consummation of redemption and bliss in the glorious resurrection of the last day.” Amen.