Eulogy on John Marshall (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1900. Excerpt: ... EULOGY ON JOHN MARSHALL. Fellow Citizens: The Providence of God is shown most beneficently to the world, in raising up from time to time, and in crowning with length of days, men of pre-eminent goodness and wisdom. Many of the undoubted blessings of life, which minister, and were designed to minister, to the elevation of man, tend, nevertheless, by developing the inferior qualities of his mixed nature, to impair the authority and to deaden the aspirations of his immortal spirit. The unnumbered contributions to the sum of physical enjoyment, which a bountiful Creator has spread around us, afford such a prodigal repast to the senses, that if man were not sometimes allured from the banquet by the example of wisdom, or driven from it by the voice of conscience or of inspiration, he would "decline so low from virtue" as to become incapable of discerning its beauty, or of rising to its delights. If there was not something within or without, to remind him that these pleasures of sense were designed to alleviate the labours of virtue in her arduous career, and not to seduce her from it, it might raise the irreverent question, whether the frame of man was adequately devised to contend with the temptations which surround him. But the wisdom of the Creator is justified in all his works. It is a provision in the moral government of the world, to hold out constantly to mankind, both the example of virtue for imitation, and its precepts for obedience; and the moral constitution of man is never so depraved, as to be totally insensible to either. Sometimes the inducement to virtue is derived from the catastrophe which closes the career of vice; sometimes from that internal monitor, which, however oppressed by a load of crimes, has always sufficient remains of life to bre...