Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase: $b Delivered by William M. Evarts before the alumni of Dartmouth College, at HanoverEvarts, William Maxwell
History
Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase: $b Delivered by William M. Evarts before the alumni of Dartmouth College, at Hanover
Evarts, William Maxwell
Chase, Salmon P. (Salmon Portland), 1808-1873
While yet of tender years, following up the earlier pious instruction of
his mother, and his own profound sense of religious obligations under
the inculcation of the Bishop, he accepted the Episcopal Church as the
body of Christian believers in whose communion he found the best support
for the religious life he proposed to himself. When he left your college
he had not wholly relinquished a purpose, once held, of adopting the
clerical profession. His adhesion to the Christian faith was simple and
constant and sincere, and he accepted it as the master and rule of his
life, in devout confidence in the moral government of the world, as a
present and real supremacy over the race of man and all human affairs.
He was all his life a great student of the Scriptures, and no modern
speculations ever shook the solid reasons of his belief. When he entered
the city of Washington, fresh from college, "the earnest prayer of his
heart was, that God would give him work to do, and success in doing it."
When he was laying out the plans of professional life, on his first
establishment at Cincinnati, his invocation was, "May God enable me to
be content with the consciousness of faithfully discharging all my
duties, and deliver me from a too eager thirst for the applause and
favor of men." All through the successive and manifold activities of his
busy and strenuous life, when, to outward seeming, they were all worldly
and personal, the same predominant sense of duty and religious
responsibility animated and solemnized the whole.
At this point in his life we may draw the line between the period of
education for the work he had before him and that work itself. What Mr.
Chase was, at this time, in all the essential traits of his moral and
intellectual character--in his views of life, its value, its just
objects and aims, its social, moral, and religious responsibilities; in
his views of himself, his duties, obligations, prospects, and
possibilities; in his determinations and desires--such, it seems to me
from the most attentive study of all these points--such, in a very
marked degree, he continued to be at every stage of his ascent in life.
What, then, shall we assign as the decisive elements, the controlling
constituents, of character--and what the assurance of their persistence
and their force--which this youth could bring to the service of the
State, or contribute to the advancement of society and the well-being of
mankind?
These were simple, but, in combination, powerful, and adequate to fill
out worthily the life of large opportunities which, though not yet
foreseen to himself, was awaiting him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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