“Let not your heart be troubled.  Believe in God, and believe also in Me.”

“All power is given to Me in heaven and in earth.”  “Lo I am with you even to the end of the world.”  Oh let us, to whom God has given that most undeserved grace, by the confession of a true faith to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity—­Let us, I say, beseech God that He would give to them, as well as to us, that comfortable and wholesome faith; and evermore defend them and us—­if it seem good in His gracious sight—­from all adversity.

And surely we need that faith—­those of us at least who know what we have lost—­in the face of such a catastrophe as was announced in this Abbey on this day week; which thrilled this congregation with the awful news—­That one of the most gifted men in Europe; the most eloquent of all our preachers—­the most energetic of all our prelates; the delight of so many of the most refined and cultivated; the comforter of so many pious souls, not only by his sermons, not only by his secret counsels, but by those exquisite Confirmation addresses, to have lost which is a spiritual loss incalculable—­those Confirmation addresses which touched and ennobled the hearts alike of children and of parents, and made so many spirits, young and old, indebted to him from thenceforth for ever—­That this man, with his enormous capacity and will for doing his duty like a valiant man, and doing each duty better than any of us his clergy had ever seen it done before—­with his genius too, now so rare, and yet so needed, for governing his fellow-men—­That he, in the fulness of his power, his health, his practical example, his practical success, should vanish in a moment:  and that immense natural vitality, that organism of forces so various and so delicate, just as it was developing to perfection under long and careful self-education, should be lost for ever to this earth:  leaving England, and her colonies, and indeed all Christendom, so much the poorer, so much the more weak; and inflicting—­forget not that—­a bitter pang on hundreds of loving hearts:  and all by reason of the stumbling of a horse.

And why?  Our reason, our conscience, our moral sense; that, by virtue of which we are not brutes, but men, forces us to ask that question:  even if no answer be found to it in earth or heaven.  What was the important why which lay hid behind that little how?—­The means were so paltry:  the effect was so vast—­There must have been a final cause, a purpose, for that death:  or the fact would be altogether hideous—­a scribble without a meaning—­a skeleton without a soul.  Why did he die?

“I became dumb and opened not my mouth; for it was Thy doing.”

So says the Burial psalm.  So let us say likewise.