I think the part which pulpits play in the death of kings is the most ghastly of all the ceremonial: the lying eulogies, the blinking of disagreeable truths, the sickening flatteries, the simulated grief, the falsehood and sycophancies--all uttered in the name of Heaven in our State churches: these monstrous Threnodies which have been sung from time immemorial over kings and queens, good, bad, wicked, licentious. The State parson must bring out his commonplaces; his apparatus of rhetorical black-hanging...... And this, of course, applies not merely to kings of England, but to kings of Steel, kings of Coal, kings of Oil, kings of Wall Street. When a certain king of Western railroads died, a Methodist clergyman, afterwards Bishop, likened his heir to the boy Christ; a statement which requires for its appreciation a mention of the fact that this heir died of syphilis. In the year 1904 there passed from his earthly reward in Pennsylvania a United States senator who had been throughout his lifetime a notorious and unblushing corruptionist. Matthew Stanley Quay was his name, and the New York "Nation", having no clerical connections, was free to state the facts about him: He bought the organization, bribed or intimidated the press, got his grip on the public service, including even the courts; imposed his will on Congress and Cabinet, and upon the last three Presidents--making the latter provide for the offal of his political machine, which even Pennsylvania could no longer stomach--and all without identifying his name with a single measure of public good, without making a speech or uttering a party watchword, without even pretending to be honest, but solely because, like Judas, he carried the bag and could buy whom he would. Such was the lay opinion; and now for the clerical. It was expressed by a Presbyterian divine, the Reverend Dr. J. S. Ramsey, who stood over the coffin of "Matt", and without cracking a smile declared that he had been "a statesman who was always on the right side of every moral question!"