Excerpt from The Meaning of Our National Bereavement: A Sermon on the Death of President McKinley Delivered in the Church of the Epiphany, Washington, D. C., On Sunday, September 15, 1901 Yes, even a Pilate and a Judas and a Caiaphas could not have compassed the death of Christ, un less they were permitted by the Divine Providence to do the awful deed of murder upon the holy and spotless Son of God. The fact is of deep interest and value in our re flections upon the awful crime which has stricken down our noble President, and plunged our whole nation into mourning. It may teach as that this assassin, with all his scheming, and with all his wicked and reckless determination to do that good man to death, could not have compassed his end, unless liberty of action had been permitted him from above. The high and sublime purposes of the Divine Government of the world for the develop ment of character and for the advance of the race in the path of intellectual and spiritual and moral pro gress can only be attained by giving to man the god like prerogative of freedom - freedom to do evil as well as to do good but then there is a limit to the exercise of this liberty. Man cannot so use it as to defeat the ultimate plans of the Divine Wisdom. There reside in the Providence of God resources of power and wisdom and love which will ever defeat the designs of evil men in the long run, so that even in the flush of a terrible success, the purposes of wickedness and crime against mankind and against the Kingdom of God are brought to nought. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.