near and dear to you will turn sometimes coldly from you; the wives of your bosom and the children of your love will be taken from you; your high hopes may be blasted; but, gentlemen, when friends turn their backs upon you, when you lay your dear ones away, when disappointments come to you on the right hand and on the left, there is one source for a true and brave heart, and that is an abiding faith in God, and a trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Having concluded his address he sat down, physically exhausted.  When we helped him into his carriage we never expected to see him again.  The telegram from Washington announcing his prostration and certain death was no surprise.  But there and then ended as remarkable a life as was ever lived in America.

It is no great thing if a man who has been carefully nurtured by intelligent parents, and then passed through school, college, and those additional years of professional study, go directly to the front.  But start a man amid every possible disadvantage, and pile in his way all possible obstacles, and then if he take his position among those whose path was smooth, he must have the elements of power.  Henry Wilson was great in the mastering and overcoming all disadvantageous circumstances.  He began at the bottom, and without any help fought his own way to the top.  If there ever was a man who had a right at the start to give up his earthly existence as a failure, that man was Henry Wilson.  Born of a dissolute father, so that the son took another name in order to escape the disgrace; never having a dollar of his own before he was twenty-one years of age; toiling industriously in a shoemaker’s shop, that he might get the means of schooling and culture; then loaning his money to a man who swamped it all and returned none of it; but still toiling on and up until he came to the State Legislature, and on and up until he reached the American Senate, and on and up till he became Vice-president.  In all this there ought to be great encouragement to those who wake up late in life to find themselves unequipped.  Henry Wilson did not begin his education until most of our young men think they have finished theirs.  If you are twenty-five or thirty, or forty or fifty, it is not too late to begin.  Isaac Walton at ninety years of age wrote his valuable book; Benjamin Franklin, almost an octogenarian, went into philosophic discoveries; Fontenelle’s mind blossomed even in the Winter of old age; Arnauld made valuable translations at eighty years of age; Christopher Wren added to the astronomical and religious knowledge of the world at eighty-six years of age.