"I can scarcely realize that John is no more, but when I do, it is with entire resignation to the will of God. To you the blow is doubtless more severe; but the duty of resignation cannot be less. Both of us have still those around us whose happiness it is in our power to promote, and instead of wasting our days and distressing our friends by useless repining, let us rather resolve cheerfully to perform all our family and social duties. I am sure that John, if he be permitted still to love, will love you infinitely better if he sees you with smiling face and ready hand ministering to the comfort and pleasures of your father, mother, brothers, and friends, than if he beheld you sunk in desponding melancholy, useless to the dead and distressing to the living. I cannot but think that lasting mourning under afflictions is in the nature of repining against the God that sends them, and of rebellion against his will. It is, I think, a sin of an aggravated nature inconsistent with Christian sentiment, and almost as wicked as any other indulgence of our depraved nature. I do not censure outbursts of grief when calamities overtake us, and I should think the man or woman was to be shunned who could look on the death of a dear relative or friend without emotion. The sin lies in cherishing this grief, and sacrificing to it the duties we owe to ourselves and those around us. Is not he who kills himself with grief a suicide? Does not he who makes all around him unhappy by gloomy features and constant complainings become as much the guilty author of human misery as if he studied how to torture his fellow-men?

"All my household are engaged to-day in preparing a Christmas tree and other devices to interest the Sunday-school children on Christmas eve. I like this. How much better it is thus to make the little folks happy than to hide themselves in their chambers, clothed in weeds, bewailing the late act of God in taking to himself a son and a brother! Go thou and do likewise."

Writing subsequently to a friend on the death of his son, Mr. Kendall says:

"I stand, as it were, an old tree in a broad field, with no young growth around me to occupy my place when I too shall be prostrated by the storms of heaven. Yet I am content. It is the will of God. I accept the teachings of the New Testament as far as I can understand them, and do not reject them wherein I do not. It teaches me to live a life of honesty, kindness, and charity towards my fellow-men, and of entire resignation to the will of my Maker. This I understand and endeavor to practise. But when I attempt to penetrate the mysteries of infinity and eternity, I find there is a limit to human thought which no mortal

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mind can penetrate. I cannot think of the infinite otherwise than as an extension of the finite, or of eternity otherwise than as time without end, yet as passing time. Thus is my mind walled in by the finite creations around me, beyond which all is dark and fathomless, into which imagination itself cannot penetrate without carrying with it the finite objects among which it dwells. I am content to live and die within this prisonhouse, without attempting to scale its narrow walls in the vain effort to grasp the infinite and understand the eternal, but not without hope that, in a future state of existence, my capacities will be so enlarged as to enable me, not to comprehend God as he is, but to approach him more nearly, enjoy his presence, and comprehend his ways with man."

CHAPTER XX.

THE following is extracted from a lecture given by Mr. Kendall before the Young Men's Christian Association at Trenton, in February, 1862.

GENERAL JACKSON AND THE PRESENT TIMES.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,I am apprehensive that your attendance here this evening will subject you to serious disappointment. You see before you one whom his Maker never designed for an orator or a lecturer. A constitution always feeble, and a voice always weak, have been further enfeebled by the decay of nature and the infirmities of age, so that he can scarcely make himself heard throughout the hall which is before him. The desire to oblige the society for whose benefit this series of lectures was instituted, and to say something for his country, though it were with his dying breath, he hopes will be accepted by you as an excuse for any disappointment he may inflict upon you this evening.

We have indeed fallen on evil times. Under the protecting ægis of our Federal Constitution, our country had increased in population from three millions to thirty, in States from thirteen to thirty-four, and had expanded its territory to the capes of Florida, and from the Mississippi River to the Rio Grande and the Pacific Ocean. By our cotton we clothed half of the civilized world; by our bread-stuffs and provisions we fed the laboring millions in European manufactories; and California poured into the cup of our prosperity her long-hidden treasures. Lines of railroad and telegraph checkered the Atlantic States, seemingly destined to bind them in a closer union, and were preparing to leap across the deserts to the shores of the Pacific. The hand and the mind of man, freed from the apprehensions of danger and of care for the means of subsistence and comfort, were busy in the fields of mechanics and invention, illustrating the age and astounding the world with new achievements and discoveries. Each year brought us from the Old World emigrants enough to form a new State, who came to share in our wealth, our liberty, and our glory. Such a scene of active industry and increasing wealth, under the peaceful sway of liberty regulated by law, had never been witnessed on this earth.