that we should form no opinion of what may happen after death, because such conclusions cannot be based on the experience of living men; but their lives belie their creed; because in all conjectures they, like ourselves, habitually act on probabilities that are far from convincing; and because their very negation implies that they must sometimes indulge in reflections that transcend the multiplication table or the exact demonstrations of science; and that at times they must harbor "the thoughts that wander through eternity." The greater part of our knowledge is not based on exact demonstration, but on intuitions and inferences. If these should be withdrawn, the atmosphere of our lives would be so sterilized that its vivifying properties would be gone; and the proposition thus set forth, requiring us to think only in demonstrations, would put an end to scientific investigation itself, since it forbids us to consider theories as yet unverified by evidence equivalent to mathematical certainty; thus denying the very process by which science has made its conquests at every stage of its progress. I do not believe that the influence of a good man can ever perish. Largely derived from other sources, it will in its turn be transmitted, and will linger on when he is gone. We cannot think of our departed friends as mere physical wrecks on the desolate shores of Time. If we should adopt that grossly materialistic conception of death, and should continue to cherish their memory, and to erect statues and monuments in their honor, we should only act in obedience to that fetishism that is practiced by the lowest savage tribes, whose faculties scarcely rise above the level of those of the brute creation, and should perceive behind all the beneficient designs of Providence nothing but the gloomy and revolting picture of Saturn forever engaged in devouring his own children. JOHN MARSHALL Address on John Marshall Day-The One Hundredth Anniversary of his Appointment as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court JOHN MARSHALL I am not here to pronounce a eulogy on John Marshall; but the language that would express the most sober and discriminating estimate of his character might easily be mistaken for eulogy. There is not a man living that could add anything to his fame, or that could pluck a single leaf from the chaplet of laurel with which he was crowned by public acclamation long ago. Though younger in years, he was contemporaneous with that remarkable galaxy of men that sat around the cradle of American liberty; men such as Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Madison, Jefferson, and a score of others that might be mentioned, all men of extraordinary ability, all animated by the same devotion to the cause of their country, which was at the same time the cause of humanity. Never since the age of Pericles had a country so small in population produced so many men in the same generation of such splendid endowments. Born with a keen thirst for knowledge, and impelled by an ardent emulation to profit by their illustrious example, John Marshall had the advantage of knowing personally in their declining years all of these great fathers of the Republic, of observing their lives, and storing in his memory words of wisdom which in after days served him for guidance and for inspiration; so that his whole life became a sort of continuation of their traditions and of their manly virtues. The name of Marshall is as inseparably connected with the Constitution of the United States as that of Hamilton or Madison or of anyone else that helped to frame it. If others conceived the form of government which it was to ordain, it was Marshall that, more than |
