"The bitterest hour for them that mourn their dead is not when the breath rattles in the throat nor when the clod rattles on the coffin. It comes when, after all the stir and turmoil of death and funeral are over, the family go back to the ravaged home, and grope their ways, blinded with tears, through the rooms that the dead man has left forever empty. Not even the sudden jar of the final separation strikes so deep a wound as the growing sense of loss, as the accumulating despair of unsatisfied longing. So, in all the many regions where Dr. Duncan, the great apostle of Virginia, was known and loved, the deepest grief was not felt when all those thousands followed the hearse and sobbed around the open grave under the stars at Hollywood. A deeper sorrow comes to us now, after taking up again the task of life, when we feel, amid our pleasures and our business, that the great advocate of God, who lived Christ among us as sublimely as he preached him, has been withdrawn forever from among the potencies of our time; when we remember that, in evil days, when many bad men are seeking to break down the honesty and to dull the moral sense of the Virginia people, we are left without the mighty aid of that one man who knew best of all how to stir the hearts and to guide the acts of our people to good. Yet with the calmness of the deeper sorrow comes, too, the calmness to think out the secret of the dead man's power over the great masses of the Southern people, for that power was one that reached far outside of his church and of all churches deep down into the moral life of Virginia. Thus even for us laymen, for us that have no right to preach and no theology to teach, the character of this wonderful man has an abiding interest. It is worth while for us all to know what were the means by which he worked. As his life did such immense good to so many thousands of our people, the contemplation, and, if possible, the understanding, of that life, can hardly fail to do good to the great communities that are now mourning for him.