Eulogy on Chief-Justice Chase | Page 3

shall be
proclaimed, this, too, shall be told in remembrance of her: that a
Christian's faith, and a mother's love, as high and pure as ever ennobled
the most famous matrons of history, stamped the character and
furnished the education which equipped him for the labors and the
triumphs of his life. One cannot read her letters to her son in college
without the deepest emotion. How many such women were there, in the
plain ranks of New England life, in her generation! How many are there
now! Paying marvelous little heed to the discussion of women's rights,
they show a wonderful addiction to the performance of women's duties.
His uncle, Bishop Chase of Ohio, assumed, for a time, the care and
expense of his education, and this drew him to the West, where, under
this tutelage, he pursued academic studies for two years. At the end of
this time he returned to his mother's charge, entered the junior class of
Dartmouth College, and graduated in the year 1826, at the age of
eighteen. The only significance, in its impression on his future life, of
this brief guardianship of the Western Bishop, was as the determining
influence which fixed the chief city of the West in his choice as the
forum and arena of his professional and public life. After spending four
years in Washington, gaining his subsistence by teaching, a law-student
with Mr. Wirt--then at the zenith of his faculties and his fame--studying
men and manners at the capital, watching the new questions then
shaping themselves for political action, observing the celebrated
statesmen of the day, conversant with the great Chief-Justice Marshall
and his learned associates on the bench of the Supreme Court, and with
Webster, and Binney, and other famous lawyers at its bar, he was
admitted to practice, and, at the age of twenty-two, established himself
at Cincinnati, transferring thus, once and forever, his home from the
New England of his family, his birth, his education, and his love, to the
ruder but equally strenuous and more expansive society of the West.

While yet of tender years, following up the earlier pious instruction of
his mother, and his own profound sense of religious obligations under
the inculcation of the Bishop, he accepted the Episcopal Church as the
body of Christian believers in whose communion he found the best
support for the religious life he proposed to himself. When he left your
college he had not wholly relinquished a purpose, once held, of
adopting the clerical profession. His adhesion to the Christian faith was
simple and constant and sincere, and he accepted it as the master and
rule of his life, in devout confidence in the moral government of the
world, as a present and real supremacy over the race of man and all
human affairs. He was all his life a great student of the Scriptures, and
no modern speculations ever shook the solid reasons of his belief.
When he entered the city of Washington, fresh from college, "the
earnest prayer of his heart was, that God would give him work to do,
and success in doing it." When he was laying out the plans of
professional life, on his first establishment at Cincinnati, his invocation
was, "May God enable me to be content with the consciousness of
faithfully discharging all my duties, and deliver me from a too eager
thirst for the applause and favor of men." All through the successive
and manifold activities of his busy and strenuous life, when, to outward
seeming, they were all worldly and personal, the same predominant
sense of duty and religious responsibility animated and solemnized the
whole.
At this point in his life we may draw the line between the period of
education for the work he had before him and that work itself. What Mr.
Chase was, at this time, in all the essential traits of his moral and
intellectual character--in his views of life, its value, its just objects and
aims, its social, moral, and religious responsibilities; in his views of
himself, his duties, obligations, prospects, and possibilities; in his
determinations and desires--such, it seems to me from the most
attentive study of all these points--such, in a very marked degree, he
continued to be at every stage of his ascent in life.
What, then, shall we assign as the decisive elements, the controlling
constituents, of character--and what the assurance of their persistence
and their force--which this youth could bring to the service of the State,

or contribute to the advancement of society and the well-being of
mankind?
These were simple, but, in combination, powerful, and adequate to fill
out worthily the life of large opportunities which, though not yet
foreseen to himself, was awaiting him.
The faculty of reason was very broad and strong in him, yet without