George H.W. Bush’s biographer proclaimed him “America’s last great soldier-statesman” at the 41st president’s funeral on Wednesday.

Bush, who died Friday at age 94, was the last commander in chief to have served in the military, and will be the last World War II veteran to occupy the Oval Office.

Jon Meacham reminded the mourners gathered at the National Cathedral of that striking historic note with his opening line: “The story was almost over even before it had fully began.”

The author, who penned the 2015 book “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush,” recalled how the 20-year-old president-to-be bailed out of his plane over the Pacific, gashing his head on the tail of the aircraft.

Bush lost two comrades that day but was rescued.

“The story, his story and ours, would go on by God’s grace,” Meacham said.

“And in a sense, the rest of his life was a perennial effort to prove himself worthy of his salvation on that distant morning. To him, his life was no longer his own.”

Meacham portrayed Bush as a tireless worker, a doting husband and an American with faults, in a speech the author had read to the former president before he died.

The biographer called Abraham Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature” and George H.W. Bush’s call to service — the “thousand points of light” — “companion verses in America’s national hymn.”

“Lincoln and Bush both called on us to choose the right over the convenient, to hope rather than to fear and to heed not our worst impulses, but our best instincts,” Meacham said.