Our Way through Darkness Leads

O God! Our way through darkness leads,

But Thine is living light;

Teach us to feel that day succeeds

To each slow-wearing night.

Make us to know, though pain and woe

Beset our mortal lives,

That Ill at last in death lies low

And only good survives.

Too long the oppressors’ iron heel

The saintly brow has pressed;

Too oft the tyrant’s murderous steel

Has pierced the guiltless breast.

Yet in our souls the seed shall lie,

Till Thou shalt bid it thrive,

Of steadfast faith that wrong shall die

And only right survive.

We walk in shadow; thickest walls

Do man from man divide.

Our brothers spurn our tenderest calls,

Our holiest aims deride.

Yet though fell craft with fiendish thought

Its subtle web contrives,

Still falsehood’s textures shrink to naught

And only truth survives.

Wrath clouds our sky, war lifts on high

His flag of crimson stain;

Each monstrous birth o’erspreads the earth

In battle’s gory train,

Yet still we trust in God the just,

Still keep our faith alive.

That ‘neath Thine eye all hate shall die,

And only love survive.

-       Horace Greeley,[1] in 1863

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[1] Horace Greeley was born in 1811 in Amherst, New Hampshire, the son of poor farmers Zaccheus and Mary Greeley. He declined a scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy and left school at the age of 14. He apprenticed as a printer in Poultney, Vermont, at The Northern Star, moving to New York City in 1831. In 1834 he founded the weekly the New Yorker, which consisted mostly of clippings from other magazines.

In 1836 Greeley married Mary Cheney, an intermittent suffragette. He spent as little time as possible with his wife and would sleep in a boarding house when in New York City rather than be with her. Only two of their seven children survived into adulthood.

Besides editing, Greeley was a politician—he helped form the Liberal Republican Party—and reformer. But it is for journalism that he is best remembered. His New York Tribune was America’s most influential newspaper from the 1840s to the 1870s and established Greeley’s reputation as the greatest editor of his day, according to some.

Greeley used his paper to promote the Whig and Republican parties, as well as antislavery and a host of reforms. Crusading against the corruption of Ulysses S. Grant’s Republican administration, he was the presidential candidate in 1872 of the new Liberal Republican Party. Despite having the additional support of the Democratic Party, he lost in a landslide.

Not long after the election, Greeley’s wife died. He descended into madness and died before the electoral votes could be cast. Greeley died at 6:50 p.m. on Friday, November 29, 1872, in Pleasantville, New York at Dr. George C. S. Choate’s private hospital. He received no electoral votes, with the ones he was to have received being scattered among others. Greeley is buried in New York’s Green-Wood Cemetery.  (Source: Wikipedia)