At St. Paul’s Church, Bloor Street, Archdeacon Cody devoted his sermon to the loss of the Empress. He made particular reference to the death of Mr. H. R. O’Hara, who was one of the sidesmen at St. Paul’s, speaking of his connection with the church and of his life in the community. Special music was rendered, including the Dead March from “Saul.”
AT ST. JAMES’ CATHEDRAL
Rev. Canon Plumptre preached at St. James’ Cathedral from the text, “Ye shall receive power when the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and ye shall be my witnesses.” With reference to the disaster in the St. Lawrence, he said the collect for Whitsunday struck exactly the note desired. He said that in our perplexities and bewilderment at the ways of God we should rest assured that He would “give right judgment in all things,” and prayed that the bereaved might be given grace to “rejoice in His holy comfort.” Canon Plumptre spoke of the comfort in the memory of lives consecrated to the service of God and fellow-men and of the acts of heroism that had illumined the darkness of the night. “Whether death comes to us,” the preacher concluded, “as a lightning stroke in the darkness or amid the calm of a peaceful destiny, may it be said, ‘We died like men and fell like one of the princes.’”
RABBI JACOBS’ TRIBUTE
“It is with difficulty,” said Rabbi Jacobs, of the Holy Blossom Synagogue, “that I can trust myself to speak on that sad calamity which has touched the heart of Canada and other parts of the civilized world so deeply in the past two days. Ah, it is such blows as these which teach us how fleeting is all human existence, how uncertain the span of life, how our earthly days are measured, our only hope in God. May this sad event remind us of the uncertainty of life and stir us all to a greater sense of our duty to the Great Creator and to each other. Events such as this have a great spiritual purpose to accomplish. They show how weak, how unstable, all our calculations are—how man proposes, but God disposes. May the Lord take into His safe-keeping the souls of the departed.”
Throughout the churches of England and America similar references were made to the catastrophe that carried so many souls swiftly to their doom and sympathy expressed for those who had suffered the loss of dear ones. To the bereaved Salvation Army especially was a wealth of Christian love and fellowship extended.
WHOLE CITY HONORED THE ARMY DEAD
With the heavily draped standards of their late corps massed before, and amid the solemn notes of the funeral dirge, the dead of the Salvation Army were on the following Saturday borne in melancholy state through the streets of Toronto to their final resting place in Mount Pleasant Cemetery. The procession followed an impressive and soul-stirring service in the Arena, attended by a sorrowing multitude which crowded the vast building to its utmost. The service was under the direction of Colonel Gaskin and Commissioner McKie, successor to Commissioner Rees. Lying in heavily-draped caskets, covered with the world-renowned colors of the Army, emblazoned with the motto, “Blood and Fire,” and surrounded with handsome wreaths, tokens of love and esteem sent by sorrowing comrades and friends, the bodies lay in state in the Arena. The mute evidence of the terrible disaster which had overtaken the Army on the “Black Friday” of the week before, when the Empress of Ireland was swept beneath the waters of the St. Lawrence River, drew a vast concourse of people.
Long before the service commenced the streets were lined with the grief-stricken citizens who desired to pay their last respects to those silent Soldiers of the Cross. With sorrowing faces and tear-glistening eyes they reverently passed through the heavy banks of floral tributes encasing the catafalque, on which rested the caskets in three long rows, and gazed for the last time upon the still forms of the sixteen victims who had done so much for the uplift of humanity in the city and whose labors were so suddenly ended.