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The Death of the President
President McKinley died at Buffalo,
N. Y., early on the morning of Saturday, September 14.
The whole nation mourns his loss.
In the North, in the South, in the East, in the West, the sorrow
is the same. His death is a great loss to the world.
The manner of his death—by the hand
of an assassin—is peculiarly a shock. This country has been made
a home for the oppressed, not with the expectation that they who
were sheltered by it would turn and sting it.
The effect of his death is to unite
the different sections of this country in closer bonds. Whatever
differences of interests there may have been, whatever antagonisms
as to public policy, they are all sunk in the feeling that our President
has been assassinated. We are all one in the sense of a wrong done
to us.
Such are the human aspects of the
assassination. Our people would do well to look also at the message
which God intends thereby to convey to us. The event is clearly
a chastisement from God upon this nation. It is becoming in us to
pause and ask the why and wherefore of it.
We do not attempt here to specify
the particular sins of our nation; we simply call attention to a
parallel, found in 2 Samuel 24. David’s kingdom had enjoyed prosperity
parallel to that of the United States. David was indulging self-congratulation
and a spirit of pride akin to that of our American people. In
this spirit he ordered a census. Others could see that it was
done in a wrong spirit, and remonstrated. But David could not see
the wrong that was in it though even Joab (of notoriously slow conscience)
was among the protestants: not until God sent the pestilence upon
the nation did David become conscious of his sinful pride. That
chastisement made David cry, “I have sinned greatly.”
Our temptation to pride has been like
David’s; would that the chastisement which we now bear might have
the like good effect upon us as a nation!
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