An Unparalleled Sunday

In the memory of many living there has never been a Sunday like the last. Merciful indeed was the ordering of events whereby the day of the Lord, with its memories and associations, intervened between the death of President McKinley and the final commitment of his body to the earth. For during the hallowed hours of last Sunday the overburdened heart of this nation poured forth its sorrow at multitudes of public and private altars. It was a time when the prayer, “Send us help from the sanctuary,” was heard and answered. Men came out of the Lord’s house quieter, more trustful and more resigned. The note of revenge, struck too often in the pulpit on the preceding Sunday, had died away. It was as if the wounded President’s own attitude toward his assassin had been, in a measure, communicated to the people. Never was the essential Christian character of our country better evidenced than in the throng of worshippers last Sunday and in the words of consolation, interpretation and incitement to better living that fell from the lips of ministers of God. The essential unity of Christendom, too, was made manifest. No Methodist church thought of claiming Mr. McKinley as belonging specially to its fellowship, while the tributes from every branch of the Protestant communion and from the Roman Catholic churches, almost without exception, showed that in the presence of the elemental realities of life and death men of varying religious classifications are one.