"It is yet too early to interpret the full meaning of this last awful Providence of God. But look at it from two points of view. Abraham Lincoln was in danger of becoming the nation's idol. He was so gentle, so honest, so magnanimous, so unselfish, so forgiving; his measures had been crowned with such astonishing and unlooked for success, that there may have been danger that the nation, forgetting God, would fix its eyes upon him alone as the national Saviour and Redeemer. God hath taken away our head, as he took away Moses from his chosen people, that we might not worship him. From the summit of our national Nebo he permitted him to gaze upon the land of promise, and then hid his mortal body from our eyes, lest we should pay homage for a deliverance wrought by God alone. From another vantage, Abraham Lincoln died at the Zenith of his fame. He had done his work, and, as Romulus was rapt in a chariot of flame from the gaze of his astonished countrymen, so has he been rapt from the eyes of the nation, that he might live an almost spotless character, embalmed forever in the nation's heart, as the patron saint of its consummated liberty."

Smith, Henry. Pastor of the North Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, N.Y. The Religious Sentiments Proper for our National Crisis. A Sermon Delivered on Sabbath Evening, April 23, 1865. Buffalo. Printing House of Matthews & Warren. 1865. 32pp. 

Complete and textually clean; removed from a larger sammelband and thus weakened.