Excerpt from A Sermon, Occasioned by the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln: President of the United States, Preached at Coventry, Vt;, April 23, 1865<br><br>To fill our cup of bitterness to the brim, the President has died suddenly, violently, by the hand Of an assassin. Had he died an ordinary death - had we learned, day by day, of the slow but certain progress of disease - had we been allowed to nerve Ourselves up to receive the dreaded intelligence, it would have come to us with less crushing force. But those few fatal words, The President Assassinated, - fell upon us like a thunderbolt from a cloudless sky, so stunning us with the violence Of the blow, that we heard as though we heard not. It had not occurred to us that he could die such a death. That he was mortal, we knew that he would die, we feared and our prayers had gone up continually that his life might be spared to finish the work which he had so well begun. Had he been murdered at Richmond, it would not much have sur prised us but when he returned unharmed from that city, we dismissed the transient fears that had been aroused. But in the very capital of the nation, in the very midst of his friends, in the presence of his family, the murderer did the work of death. That nothing might be lacking in the poignancy of our grief, it came to us while we were in the topmost height of exultation. Hardly had the joyous peals with which the bells announced the fall Of Richmond and the surrender of Lee died upon our ears, when they were saluted with the melancholy knell that bewailed the nation's bereavement. Such a transition from the delirium of joy to the delirium of wo, has had no parallel since that event in J udea, when the disciples, who, on Sunday, had accompanied Christ into J eru salem, amid the thronging multitudes that cried Hosanna to the Son of David, saw him, on Friday, put to death by wicked hands, and all their hopes buried with him in the sepulchre.<br><br>Let it be our endeavor, today, (1) to pay some tribute, however inadequate, to the memory of our murdered Presi dent, (2) to seek such consolation as we may for our affliction, and (3) to consider our present duties.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.