“Blessed be the God and Father of Our Lord, who of his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope of the resurrection of Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for us who are now, by the power of God through faith unto salvation, ready to be revealed in the last time. “The services for the dead are fitly and almost of necessity services of religion and of immortal hope. In the presence of the shroud and the coffin and the narrow home, questions concerning intellectual quality, concerning public station, concerning great achievements, sink into comparative insignificance; and questions concerning character and man’s relation to the Lord and giver of life, even the life eternal, emerge to our view and impress themselves upon us. “Character abides. We bring nothing into this world; we can carry nothing out. We ourselves depart with all the accumulations of tendency and habit and quality which the years have given to us. We ask, therefore, even at the grave of the illustrious, not altogether what great achievement they had performed and how they had commended themselves to the memory and affection or respect of the world, but chiefly of what sort they were; what the interior nature of the man was; what were his affinities? Were they with the good, the true, the noble? What his relation to the infinite Lord of the universe and to the compassionate Savior of mankind; what his fitness for that great hereafter to which he had passed? “And such great questions come to us with moment, even in the hour when we gather around the bier of those whom we profoundly respect and eulogize and whom we tenderly love. In the years to come the days and the months that lie immediately before us will give full utterance as to the high statesmanship and great achievements of the illustrious man whom we mourn to-day. We shall not touch them to-day. The nation already has broken out in its grief and poured its tears, and is still pouring them, over the loss of a loved man. It is well. But we ask this morning of what sort this man is, so that we may perhaps, knowing the moral and spiritual life that is past, be able to shape the far-withdrawing future. “I think we must all concede that nature and training are—reverently be it said—the inspiration of the Almighty, conspired to conform a man, a man admirable in his moral temper and aims. We none of us can doubt. I think that even by nature he was eminently gifted. The kindly, calm, and equitable temperament, the kindly and generous heart, the love of justice and right, and the tendency toward faith and loyalty to unseen powers and authorities—these things must have been with him from his childhood, from his infancy; but upon them supervened the training for which he was always tenderly thankful and of which even this great nation from sea to sea continually has taken note.