In Lincoln's character is a beautiful illustration of moral balance. He stands before the eye unchangeably, like the Capitol dome at Washington, a signal exhibition of firmness, harmony, and repose. As he fills his place as president, he seems to face the whole horizon at once. A study of his life leaves the impression that he is resting upon a solid, ample base; that his weight is well distributed; that his energies are united evenly; that all his parts agree together; that throughout his structure he is at ease; while yet there swell and rise within his breast proud, far-seeing hopes that only a Nation's grandest magnitude could give complete embodiment. This massive poise, and breadth, and balanced evenness are the seemly vesture of his character. They well become his inner attitude. They are the open intimation of the shapeliness and majesty of the unseen soul within. And quite as worthy of study and admiration as our national dome, is this well-poised nobility of Lincoln's personality.

With this intent one may well review this last inaugural, for it enshrines superior beauty. Not unfittingly did it find first utterance beneath the presence of that imposing masterpiece at our national Capitol. As in that circling colonnade, so in the measured cadences of this address, there is exalted harmony. Its phrases, rhythmic and pleasurable, rank almost as music. Read however many times, its sentences never tire. Minds the most refined are glad to point to this address as to a noble monument, assured that its perusal will awaken in any American high national pride, and in the minds of all men a pure delight.

This commanding, gracious dignity is not alone a matter of even rhythms and pleasing cadences. It is to its author's moral poise and full harmony that this speech owes its symmetry. Indeed this is all its substance. Of rhetorical decoration it is absolutely bare. Its only title to its universal admiration is the patent fact that its author has traced and set therein, as with an engraver's nicest art, the princely fashion of his high-born soul. Its finished ethical symmetry is all the art that gives this speech its everlasting charm.

What now is the inmost nature of the attractiveness that holds possession of this last inaugural? In this inquiry is extended a winsome invitation to any beauty-loving mind. As such a mind fixes its inspection intently upon the vital structure of this address, he sees within its shapely borders four princely virtues, standing together in a courtly league. Each virtue stands mature in unrestrained virility, no one of them overbearing the other three, nor being overborne. With easy, manly grace each virtue does its part, while all harmoniously combine, to support with Godlike sagacity and strength the problems of a Nation's destiny in days and tasks that mock the sagest counsel and baffle the proudest might of man.

Like stately columns beneath a stately dome, these virtues deserve regard. Each one is integral in Lincoln's personal majesty, and in the finely finished power of this address. The exhibition of personal self-respect, the very eye of moral verity, as displayed in Lincoln's own reliability, and idealized within his steadfast plan for national consistency, is fashioned forth within the well-set features of this address with all the well-poised grandeur of the Olympian Zeus. The tones of kindliest friendliness towards detractors and defenders alike, repelling all malignity, unfailingly benign, cannot in any cadence be misunderstood. They fall like healing music, reminding listeners of home, and hearthstone, and a father's heart. The lowly attitude of penitent submissiveness towards God, with its wonderful mingling of solemn awe, adoring worship, and conscious fellowship, undeniably without hypocrisy, as without restraint, institutes in this address nothing less than the model and inspiration of a reverent, religious liturgy, fit to lead and voice a Nation's humble penitence and praise. The kindled and enkindling zeal for the transcendent worth of men above all other wealth, the burning hearth from whose free flame springs up every passion glowing through this speech, is like the fervent ardor of a prophet's heart, watching with a patient, eager wistfulness towards the dawning of a day that shall never pass away.

These are signal qualities in this address, each one erect and free, its signal beauty and virility undiminished and complete. But to be noticed here is, not their individual comeliness, but the beauty of their companionship. They consort together perfectly. And in that unison is a peculiar, an individual attractiveness. Here is a symmetry that pleads for appreciation. It is the beauty of this unison throughout this speech that constitutes its eloquence. See how Lincoln's very confession of error puts him in line with God. Feel how his righteousness affiliates with tenderness. Mark how his heed for earthly things provides a body for his idealism. Within the unyielding rigor of his resolute will see how bending and genial is his attitude. Here is marvelous symphony—sin and error and war, light and truth and peace, so comprised and combined, so resolved and reconciled in this speaker and in this address, as to show a Nation how in the discord of arms heaven's own harmonies may be heard. To this fine blending of tones that are distinct, to this pure consonance of notes that are diverse, it were well for all our ears to become accustomed. This would mean a true and real refinement. To this refinement Lincoln did achieve. With this deep consonance his ear became familiar. Hence the deep-toned fulness and carrying power in the moral resonance of this address. It faces a manifold emergency with sentiments likewise manifold, but so composed together as to lead all discordant voices into lasting peace.

This moral equilibrium carried within it generous breadth. This is a striking aspect of this inaugural. It comprehends and resolves together, with an ease that seems an instinct, the total orbit of our national life. Within its little compass is the easy movement of the full momentum of our past. It holds in easy grasp the full circumference of concurrent events. It evinces, though with amazing brevity, that the ponderous issues of the coming day are a familiar topic in his brooding thought. And all of this consists together within his thought with even, equal recognition. Events are made to balance. Causes and effects are so held face to face as to declare by demonstration their true comparison. Great issues and mighty forces are given their needed amplitude in his observation and review. The weight of centuries is in his ponderings. This was the style and attitude of his mental deliberations. He was predisposed to cast and arrange his thoughts in national dimensions. Union, liberty, manhood, Providence, were the themes to which his soul was drawn, as though by gravity.

Thus Lincoln's influence attained solidity. The place of this inaugural, and of its author's honor, in our American life, and in the larger world of worthy civics is well-secured. The qualities embodied in this address, each one so elemental, and all so eternally allied, are more enduring, as they stand poised within those balanced paragraphs, than any qualities resident in marble or bronze. The proposition that the hostile interests of a mighty Nation be reconciled into eternal friendliness and constancy under the awful discipline of God through sacrificial baptisms of blood, contains within its balanced and majestic terms an interior cohesion and stability that nothing can ever disintegrate or move. It is without a bias anywhere. Through all its massiveness the weight is even absolutely. And its moral proportions are in perfect truth. It is a monument of finished majesty, solidity, and grace. It is a masterpiece of moral symmetry.

This massive grandeur in Lincoln's moral character finds an exalted illustration in the closing half of his message to Congress in December of 1862. It forms in itself a document that may well be held before the eye as a companion piece to his last inaugural. He is making an elaborate argument for "compensated emancipation." He is laboring to make clear that the issues pending in the center of the war are no concern of mere geography, but rather a problem hanging upon the free decisions of living citizens; and that in the interest of universal liberty a full agreement by Congress and the chief executive to tax the Nation peaceably, to remunerate all loss entailed by freeing every slave, would surely win the requisite electoral support, stay the war at once, establish lasting peace, and give demonstration of a civic character and courage fit to brighten and enhearten all the world. He closes his appeal with these following words:—

"Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or in dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless."

There is in that message a document that has the scope and the grandeur of the Alps. It offers an imposing illustration how politics, so prone to become and to remain ignoble, may come to have surpassing beauty; how statesmanship, vested in a worthy character, may wear transcendent dignity. This appeal, as shaped by Lincoln, is a monument fashioned by a master hand. Note its basis in equity, all the Nation in common accepting their money cost of a common complicity in wrong. Note its inscription to human goodwill, curtailing the period, and staying the bloodshed of the war. Note its enduring substance and composition, built up of human hearts, cemented in the action of freedom in the human soul, a towering protest against all gains and consequences where human liberty is denied. Note the humble reverence in the soaring appeal to the benediction of God, with which the whole address concludes. Note the conscience-stirring reference to inevitable and over-ruling law, in the ominous intimation that the light of history would luminously adjudge each several man. And note, with all the imperial urgency of the appeal, its vesture of infinite respect for the right of every congressman to make a free decision of and by and for himself alone.

Here is something at once most imposing and most engaging. Here is handicraft of the highest grade. The man that conceived and drafted that political appeal was, in the realm of politics, no mean architect. He is, in these arguments, measuring the forces elemental in a great Republic, as Michael Angelo measured gravitation. He is dealing with decades, and with centuries, with freedom and with slaves, with a transient Congress and the course of history, as builders deal with granite blocks. Embracing things dispersed and widely variant, as also things mutually inclined towards fellowship, he defines and demonstrates, as a master artisan, how they may all be grasped and overcome and harmonized in a commanding unison. With a skilled designer's easy grace he drafts a sketch of our transformed career, as plain and open to the observing eye as are the massive, graceful movements of deploying clouds across the sky. Here is majesty, lofty, balanced, and secure. And all its excellence is ethical. And it pleads to be made supreme in earthly politics. In such a message is ideal courtliness. Its bearer must be a comely prince. The man and author upon whose polished tongue those sentiments found birth must be of royal lineage.

Thus Lincoln has given to civics ideal comeliness and dignity. In his hand, and under his design, politics wears heavenly majesty. In his conception of a State, though devised and traced in times when cruelty and sordidness and unfairness and negligence of God were sadly prevalent through the Nation's life, there rose to view, in his pure patriotism, a civic standard in which, through holy fear of God, all men were rated at their immortal worth, and treated with the love and fairness that were the mutual due of freemen who were peers. Here is a portrait of a patriot upon which no artist can easily improve—a portrait which attests in Lincoln's soul a pure and a free idea of what true art must ever be.

And it is not without profound significance for art that Lincoln's statesmanship has become one of the finest objects in our modern world for artists to idealize. The very features of his face, that were wont to be esteemed most plain, have come to show a symmetry that is beautiful. And his whole outward frame, that men so many times have called ungainly, has come to bear and body forth a dignity such as summons finest bronze and marble to their most exalted ministry. Whence came to that plain face and plainer frame such symmetry and dignity? Let artists contemplate and reply. For in Lincoln's manhood stature, where utmost rudeness has become transmuted to refinement, all men are taught that true beauty and true art are ethical. In moral harmony is found ideal symmetry.

His Composure—The Problem of Pessimism

In the foregoing pages reference has been made repeatedly to Lincoln's poise. In the chapter just concluded this poise has been studied for its beauty. This attitude will repay still further scrutiny. For looked at again, and from another point of view, it reveals itself as a reservoir of energy. Seen thus, Lincoln's notable poise becomes a mighty store of potential, and indeed of active force. It may be described as a mingling of energy and repose, of resourcefulness and rest, showing and playing through all his influence among other men, and largely explaining its potency.

Of just this personal habitude, through all the years of Lincoln's participation in our national affairs, there was strenuous need and requisition. His public course ran through an era in our national career of unprecedented internal turbulence. The house was divided against itself. The cause of the dissension was a diametrical opposition and an irreconcilable contention of views touching a matter so radical as the basis of our Declaration of Independence, and the purport of our fundamental national document, the Constitution. To the men on either side of this contention it seemed as though their antagonists were bent upon uprooting and removing the very hills. This obstinate and inveterate disagreement revolved about the single, simple, fateful question of the right and wrong of holding men in bonds. For a full generation before Lincoln entered the lists the conflict had been bitterly intense, refusing to be composed or assuaged. Near the beginning of the last decade of Lincoln's life he put on his armor and chose his side. In 1858, while competing with Douglas for a seat in the U. S. Senate, Lincoln made a declaration that, for its bearing upon his own career and its influence in national affairs, has become historic; while for its testimony to the topic of this chapter it has the very first significance. The core of that declaration was a quotation from words of Christ, when refuting the charge that he was in league with Beelzebub:—"A house divided against itself cannot stand." This quotation was cited by Lincoln to edge his affirmation that the national agitation concerning slavery, then in full course, and continually augmenting, would not cease until a crisis should be reached and passed. This was his firm assurance. A national crisis was at hand. But to this assurance, that the government could not endure permanently half slave and half free, he attested another confidence equally assured:—"I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South."

That was said with resolute and imposing deliberation in July of 1858. In that utterance Lincoln's attitude deserves analysis, and for many reasons; but in particular for its revelation of his composure. He knew full well what tremendous issues for himself and for the Nation were involved in what he said. He knew that his appeal for the senatorship at Washington was thereby gravely imperiled. He knew that it foreboded national convulsions and throes. He knew that for himself and for the government a mighty crisis was ahead. And he knew that in that crisis the alternatives were for all humanity supreme. The issues were nothing less than human freedom and equality, or human tyranny and bonds. In the stress and strain of an age-long strife like this, many a man has swerved to moral pessimism.

From the date of that speech Lincoln stood in the face of that vicissitude. Indeed for his few remaining years he was, in all that deepening commotion, an energetic and influential central force. And he never yielded to despair. In this same month he issued to Senator Douglas his doughty challenge to a series of debates. During those debates Lincoln forged his way into a preeminence that amounted almost to solitude, as champion of a people and a cause that, for weary generations, had been under all but hopeless oppression and reproach. Through all those debates Lincoln's single heart was nothing less than a national theater of a solicitude nothing less than national. Upon his lone shoulders lay the gravest burdens of his day. The ideals of a Nation lay upon his anvil; the national temper was being forged beneath his hand. Highest chivalry waged against him, bearing tempered steel, and jealous of an old and proud prestige.

In the immediate outcome of those debates Lincoln met defeat. But farther on he only found himself involved more deeply still in the anguish of the crisis he had foretold. The national disagreement was verging towards the Nation's dissolution, heightening at length into secession and actual, long-drawn civil war. So tremendous was the crisis Lincoln foresaw. And this was precipitated directly by his election to the presidency. So vitally were his own fortune and fate bound up in the crisis he foretold. So pitiless and fundamental was the challenge to his hope. His total administration was spent in the tumult of arms. By no possibility in any Nation's conscious life could civil confusion be worse confounded than during the period of his presidential terms. Beginning with seven states in open secession, and brought to an end by assassination, the measure of his supreme official life was full to either brim with perils and sorrows and fears, such as any single human heart could hardly contain. But the undiminished, overwhelming volume of those fears and sorrows and cares was encompassed every day within his anxious, ample, patriot heart. When facing in August of 1864 the national election, upon which this last inaugural oath was based, he said:—"I cannot fly from my thoughts—my solicitude for this great country follows me wherever I go. I do not think it is personal vanity or ambition, though I am not free from these infirmities; but I cannot but feel that the weal or woe of this great Nation will be decided in November." So momentous and grave seemed to him the meaning and weight of the contention that drove the Nation into war. In this estimate, as said before, he stood almost in solitude. "Our best and greatest men," he said in New Haven in 1860, "have greatly underestimated the size of this question. They have constantly brought forward small cures for great sores—plasters too small to cover the wound." To Lincoln's credit it must forever be said that he had a true prevision of the agony through which the Nation must strive, as she reached and passed the crisis which he saw in 1858 to be her predestined and impending fate.

And so it came to pass that in 1861, when Fort Sumter was assailed, and the sharp imperious alternative of immediate dissolution or blood faced the Nation's eye, he was not surprised or unprepared; as likewise, when in 1865 at his second inaugural scene, after four full years of awful war, he is still found waiting in sacrificial patience to hail the culmination of his assured interpretation and hope. Here in 1865 as there in 1858, there in 1858 as here in 1865, he is cherishing the patriot-prophet's confidence that the crisis would be passed, that the Nation would not be dissolved, that the house would stand.

And to Lincoln's singular honor it must always be allowed that through all the terrible hours while that crisis was being passed, it was pre-eminently due to Lincoln's mighty moral optimism that our Union was preserved. Amid all the turbulence of armies and arms, his assurance of our national perpetuity was so deeply, firmly based, as to be itself invested and informed with perpetuity. So commanding was his posture of heroic, triumphant confidence, that it mightily availed to guide and steady the Nation through the crisis into an era of internal and international peace.

But not merely did Lincoln's composure prevail to secure that this Nation should not dissolve. It also wrought prevailingly to perpetuate our liberty. Throughout the crisis the issue held in stake was whether the Nation should be wholly slave or wholly free. Those were the alternatives between which Lincoln's care and fear, and the Nation's fortune and fate were hung. Throughout the crisis Lincoln's hope was that the Nation should be forever wholly free. His fear was that the Nation might be wholly slave. But above that fear, that hope steadfastly prevailed. One who studies Lincoln through those days comes to feel unerringly that deep beneath an anxiety that seemed at times almost to overwhelm his life, there lay a supreme assurance that, when the crisis should have passed, it should stand clear beyond debate, and sure beyond all doubt, that here in this favored land the chance of all the sons of men should be forever equal, fair, and free. Astutely heedful of the power of selfish, sordid greed; deeply conscious of the blind defiance of scorn and pride; painfully aware of the awful capacity of a human heart for cruelty and hate; and sharp to see how reason yields to prejudice, when chivalry becomes a counterfeit; he still found grounds to hold his anchored hope for universal liberty and brotherhood.

This deep-based confidence deserves to be well understood. It is a primary phenomenon in Lincoln's life. How in the deepest welter of violence and strife could Lincoln's mood retain such level evenness? How in all that continental turbulence could he keep so unperturbed? How, through all that confusion was he never confused? In truth his days were mostly dark and sad. Sorrows did overwhelm him. How did his anchorage hold unchanged? When the very hills gave way, his foundations seemed to stay. The assurance to which his soul was attached seemed all but omnipotent. What was the secret, what the ground of such phenomenal steadiness?

To answer these inquiries is but to rehearse again what has already been repeatedly made plain. This massive sturdiness of Lincoln's statesmanship, this unalterable political reliability lay inwrought in the hardy fiber of his moral character.

One factor here may be termed intellectual. Lincoln's study made him steady. His untiring thoughtfulness secured to Lincoln's soul a fine deposit of pure assurance. It was with him a jealous and guarded custom to make examinations exhaustive. He was always seeking certainty. Few men ever dealt more sparingly in conjecture. Always eager towards the future, and often making statements touching things to come, he was nevertheless a model of mental caution. It was this passion to make his footing fully secure that kindled in him such zest for history. It was this same passion that glowed in his eye, as he inspected in common men their common humanity. And likewise it was this that led him into the fear of God, and made him a student of the Bible, and a man of prayer. The full capacity of his mind was taxed unceasingly, in order to secure to his ripening judgments their majestic equipoise.

But with saying this not enough is said to describe the grounds of his composure. It was not merely that his mind, through thoughtful inquiry and comparison, grew far-sighted, and balanced, and clear. What gained for Lincoln his solid anchorage was his deep, strong hold upon all that was inmost and permanent in the heart and nature of men. Every inch a man himself, the one ambition of his mental research was to make every responsible thought and deed conduce to guide every brother man to the destiny which his nature decreed. This was the research that made his eye so clear. This was the study that made his hope so sure. Outcome of unsparing intellectual toil, this was the assurance that won for Lincoln his unique and most honorable diploma and degree. This was Lincoln's standing and this its warrant among all thoughtful men, alike the learned and the unlettered. This was the secret of that marvelous calmness, that was so potent to compose the fears of other men. He studied man, until he attained a magisterial power to understand and explain result and cause, issue and origin, amid historic, surrounding, and impending events. In the field where Lincoln stood and toiled he was an adept. He was a worthy master of the humanities. He took a liberal course in the liberal arts. And out of this broad course he constructed politics. He came to see unerringly, and to believe unwaveringly, and to contend unwearyingly that man, that all men should hold, in a universal equilibrium, their regard for God, their self-respect, their brother love, and a true, comparative esteem for things that perish and souls that survive. This reasoned, hopeful faith, adopted with all his heart as the comely pattern and well-set keystone of all his politics and statesmanship, is what secured to Lincoln through all those tumultuous days his far-commanding political equanimity. That all men were designed and entitled by their Creator to be free, and that in this liberty, as in the elemental right to life and self-earned happiness, all are likewise created equal, Lincoln did devoutly, profoundly, and invincibly believe. Confirmed by all his ranging observation and incessant, pondering thought, this faith was also rooted beyond repeal in his own deep reverence for God, in his own instinctive respect for himself, in irrepressible friendliness, and in his unabashed idealism.

Such a man could never be a pessimist. Such a faith in such a soul could not be plucked away. Nor could its protestations be variable. That each, as alike the handiwork of God, should alike be always fair, and that all should always and alike be free, was the base of his political philosophy, and the bond of his consistency. This was the teaching of the past. This was the harbinger of the day to come. And in this long-pondered wisdom and belief lay the explanation of his underlying peacefulness through the war, and of his singular ability to prevail above the fears of other men, when in other hearts every hope gave way. He deeply saw that underneath all battlefields, and within all antagonisms, these simple principles, so surely sovereign and so certainly immortal, encompassed a breadth and strength sufficient to circumvent and overcome all hate and doubt and fear, doing to no freeman any vital harm, shielding from essential evil every toil-bowed slave. This is the source and secret of Lincoln's unexampled composure amid scenes of unexampled anxiety and unrest.

And this composure, being so inwrought with hope, was unfailingly active and alert. It was never mere endurance, stolid and inert. It enshrined a powerful momentum. It was alive with purpose, conscious, vigorous, resolute. One of its fairest features was a seeing eye—an eye transfixed upon a goal. Things as yet invisible, and still unrealized, his earnest, unwearying eye prevailed to see. Hence his optimism was astir with enterprise. Anticipation, quite as truly as peacefulness, marked the constant attitude of his life. His composure could be closely defined as confidence respecting things to come. Always environed by difficulties, and all but blinded by their strife, his faith struck through their turmoil, and his hope rose free and strong into a jubilant salutation of man's undoubted destiny, and into a victorious companionship with God's clear, certain will.

And so there throbbed in this habitual posture of Lincoln's heart a mighty potency. His composure was prevailing. His deep and calm security dissipated other men's dismay. Repeatedly beneath the presence of his stately quietness the Nation felt its turbulence subside. This efficiency can be felt at work in this last inaugural address; and its action well deserves to be identified. In his exposition of its theme, and in his registration of his presidential pledge, he seems by one hand to have fast hold of things immutable, while with the other hand he is helping to steady things that tremble and change. Here is kingly mastery. Things mightily disturbed are being mightily put to rest, as though from an immutable throne. The open figure of that throne may well be scanned by all the Nation and by all the world. It is built and stands foursquare. Its measure conforms in every part with the measure of a man. It is shaped and set to stand and abide where men consort, to unify their minds, and tranquillize their strifes. With sobered and sobering insight into the human soul, with resolute and expectant will before our human goal, this address inscribes and upholds, as at once an outcome and an ideal of human events, a universal amity compacted of loyal, friendly men who walk in reverence before God, and cherish treasures that can never fail. Purity, humility, charity, loyalty—these are the constituents in the structure, and the explanation of the power of Lincoln's composure. Fully illumined, firmly convinced, evenly at rest upon principles that stand foursquare upon the balanced manhood of Godlike men, his civic hopefulness stood in the midst of his practical statesmanship, like an invincible, immovable throne.

His Authority—The Problem of Government

The study in the preceding chapter of Lincoln's even-paced serenity, culminating in the symbol of a throne, conducts directly to an examination of his influence and mastery over other men. During those troubled days in Washington, despite all the malice, defiance, and active abuse which he daily bore, his power to persuade, conciliate, and govern other men was, in all the land, without a parallel. In fact, as well as in name, he was throughout those presidential days the Nation's chief magistrate. And since his death that dominion has increased, until it stands today above comparison. Here is an opportunity, not easily matched, to explore a theme whose importance in the field of ethics no other topic can surpass—the seat and nature of moral authority. And here in this second inaugural is a transparent illustration of the firm security in which that authority rests, and of the method by which it prevails.

As in his own inner reverence for law, so in his sway of other men, his posture towards the national Constitution demands attention first.

"The supreme law of the land"—thus the Constitution of the United States, in its sixth article, defines itself. In its fifth article, the same fundamental document provides that "Amendments," properly made, "shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of this Constitution." This primary authority for the rule of the land is further affirmed to have been ordained and established by "the people of the United States." Here are three noteworthy features of this "law of the land:"—it is supreme; it is amendable; it arises from the people.

This written standard of our national life, its amendability, and its primal origin in the people's will, were matters much in Lincoln's eye. Each separate one of these three features of our national civic life had reverent respect in Lincoln's mind, in all his conception and exercise of authority over other men. It was this "supreme law" that he swore in both inaugurations to "preserve, protect, and defend." An amendment to the Constitution, that was pending at the time of his first inaugural oath, he took unusual pains in that address to mention and approve. And it was to "the people," on both occasions of his inauguration as president, and at all other times of public and responsible address, that he paid supreme respect, in his most finished and earnest eloquence and appeal. Here was a threefold ultimate standard to which Lincoln always made final appeal—the original Constitution; its amenability to due revision; and the people's free and deliberate decree. This triangular base-line was for Lincoln's politics and jurisprudence and statesmanship the supreme and finished standard of last appeal. He deferred to it submissively, habitually, and with reverence.

All this can be truly said. And yet all this does not say all the truth. Respectful as Lincoln was for all that he found thus fundamentally prescribed, and heedful as he was to indulge in no executive liberty inconsonant with those express decrees, he found his fortune as chief executive forcing him to move where all explicit regulations failed to specify the path. The Constitution does not include all details. It does not vouchsafe specific counsel for specific needs. Its guidance is as to principles. "No foresight can anticipate, nor any document of reasonable length contain, express provisions for all possible questions." This he declared in his first inaugural. Then he mentions three such unprescribed details:—the method of returning fugitive slaves; the power of Congress to prohibit; and the duty of Congress to protect slavery in the Territories. Touching those three civic interests, civic duties and civic standards were undirected and undefined. But even while he spoke, those three unsettled problems in the Nation's life were kindling the national pulse to an uncontrollable heat. Nothing less than civil war was certainly impending, over controversies touching which the sovereign standards of the civic life did not expressly speak.

Upon these momentous, undecided questions Lincoln, in his high authority as president, had to bring his judgment, his action, and his influence into settled shape. Deep in the heart of these unsettled regions he set his camp, and toiled away his life. This heroic and patriotic act may be called a detail of constitutional interpretation. But it was for Lincoln a labor of Hercules. It opened a gigantic controversy. The land was convulsed with contending explications. Views, held essential to the vital honor of separate sections of the land, were in essential hostility. As the dissension deepened, two questions rose, outstanding above the rest:—the Constitutional integrity of the several States (might States secede?); and the Constitutional rights of slavery (should slavery spread?). Both these problems were mortally acute in 1861. Both were still in hand in 1865. Under the Constitution could the Union be legitimately dissolved? Under the Constitution should slavery be permanently approved? To both these questions Southern leaders answered, Yes. To both these questions Lincoln answered, No.

Of these two questions and asseverations, it is plain to see that the second is the more profound. So this second inaugural affirms: "Somehow" slavery was the cause of the secession and the war. This "all knew." Upon this pivot, all the chances and contentions of the great debate were compelled to turn. Here lay all the meaning of the war. All those awful battles were trembling, struggling arguments; thrilling, impassioned affirmations striving to finally and forever decide whether human slavery was justified to spread.

Here was a supreme divergence of conviction, and a supreme debate. In all the realm of social morals, no divergence and no debate could be more radical. Into this supreme contention Lincoln was compelled to enter. To some conclusion that should be supreme he was, by his official station and responsibility, compelled to lead. To find his way through such a controversy, and to guide the land through all that strife to some sovereign reconciliation, involved this common citizen in the presidential chair in an assumption and exercise of authority nothing less than sovereign.

Face to face with this impending and decisive agony, Lincoln took his stand in his first inaugural, not flinching even from war, if war must come. A mighty wrestler in the awful throes of mortal civic strife, he held his determined stand in the act of his second inaugural oath, after war had raged for four full years. The great debate is unsettled still. Still Lincoln has to bear the awful burden of responsible advice. He is still the Nation's chief magistrate. An authority pregnant to predetermine continental issues for unnumbered years to come, however dread its weight, and however frail and faint his mortal strength, he may not demit. Within the darkness and amid the din, he must think and speak, he must judge and act, he must rise and lead, while a Nation and a future both too vast for human eye to scan and estimate, stand waiting on his word and deed.

It was a time for omens. But never did Lincoln's ways show fuller sanity. In such a day, and for such a responsibility this, his second inaugural address, is Lincoln's perfect vindication. Here the true civilian's true democracy stands vested with an authority both sovereign and beautiful. Here political expertness becomes consummate. Here the very throne of civil authority is unveiled. Here leadership and fellowship combine. Here a master, though none more modest in all the land, demonstrates his mastery in the mighty field of national politics. Here it may be fully seen how in a true democracy a true dominion operates.

Here emerges, in the ripened, rugged, mellowed, moral character of Lincoln, and in the finished, immortal formulation of his uttermost contention and appeal, a marvelous illumination of an inquiry, that is always alike the last and the first, the first and the last in ethical research—the inquiry about ethical authority. Where did Lincoln finally rest his final appeal? He is assuming to venture a preponderant claim. He is speaking as a Nation's president. And in a conflict of radical views that for four dread years has been a conflict of relentless arms, he argues still, and without a quaver, for the thorough prosecution of the war. Divergence of judgment on moral grounds could never be brought to a sharper edge. Contention over issues in the moral realm could never be harder pressed. On what authority could Lincoln push a moral argument unto blood? Is there moral warrant for such a deed? If ever there be, then where is its base, and whence its awful sanctity?

To shape reply to this is but to shape more sharply still the naked substance of the debate—the crying issue of the war. The core of that insistent strife concerned the essential nature of man. Was slavery legitimate? Might a white man enslave a black? Could a strong man enslave the weak? Dare some men forswear toil? May any men who toil be pillaged of the food their hands have earned? Are some men entitled to a luxury and ease they never earned, while to other men the luxury and ease they have fairly won may be denied? Are some men so inferior that they can have no right to life, and liberty, and happiness, however much they strive and long for such a simple, common boon? Are other men so super-excellent that life, and liberty, and happiness are theirs by right, though never earned or even struggled for at all?

This was the central issue of that war; and this the central theme of this inaugural. Are common people to be forever kept beneath, and traded on, and eyed with scorn; while favored men are to be forever set on high, and filled with wealth, and fed with flattery? This was the quivering question that was brought on Lincoln's lips to its sharpest edge. Well he knew its momentousness and its antiquity.

In its very formulation, as Lincoln gave it shape, there loomed the formulation of its reply, perhaps still to be bitterly defied, perhaps to be still long deferred; but inevitable at last, and sure finally to find agreement everywhere. This final answer Lincoln's vision saw. In that clear vision he discerned the certain meaning of the battles of the war. In the great debate they were the solemn, measured arguments. Amid those awful arguments this inaugural took its place, the oracle of a moral prophet, explaining how the war arose, by whose high hand the war was being led, and in what high issue the war must attain its end. As the arguments of this address advance, one grows to feel that Lincoln's thought is forging a reply, in which emerges a moral law whose authority no man may ever dare rebuke.

But as that authority comes to view in Lincoln's speech, its form is shorn of every shred of arrogance. Never was mortal man more modest than in the tone and substance of this address. This modesty is indeed throughout devoid of wavering. His tones ring with confidence and decisiveness. But in that confidence, though girt for war, there are folded signs of deference and gentleness and solemn awe, as though confessing error and confronting rebuke. Even of slavery, that most palpable and abhorrent evil, as he forever avers; and of slaveholders, who wring their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, and then dare to pray for heaven's favor on their arms, he says in this address:—"let us not judge that we be not judged;" as though the germ of that dark error might then be swelling in his and all men's hearts. And as to the war itself, for which he bade the Nation stand with sword full-drawn, the central passage in this speech more than intimates, what in an earlier part he fully concedes, that he and all the people had availed but poorly to understand the Almighty's plans. In all of this Lincoln seems to say that he found himself, in common with all the land, but imperfectly in harmony with God, as to his judgment concerning the sin inwrought in holding slaves, and as to the primacy of the Union among the interests pending in the war. He seems in this address, so far from affirming his right to judge and govern arbitrarily, instead confessing that love of ease, greed for gain, the mood of scorn, and proneness to be cruel—those inhuman roots that rear up slavery—were apt to find hidden nutriment in his and all men's hearts, yielding everywhere the baleful harvest of inhumanity; confessing further that this deep-rooted tendency in human hearts to undo God's primal decree of freedom and equality was far more needful to eradicate than any proneness to secede within any confederacy of States; and confessing in consequence and finally that it was for all Americans to accept the war as God's rebuke of their common propensity to be unkind, and as God's correction of their false rating of their national concerns. This then seems to be Lincoln's posture in this address—no lofty arrogance of authority to decree and execute the right; but a humble confession of error and guilt; an acquiescent submission to God's correction and reproof. This modest hue must tincture this address through all its web.

And yet the dominant note of this inaugural is clear decisiveness, an unwavering firmness in his own opinion, a classic illustration of persuasion and appeal, as though from the vantage ground of convictions perfectly assured. Where now, in full view of all that has been said, is the basis of Lincoln's argument and authority to be placed? In an argument where conviction seems to be transmuted into penitence, and where confession seems transfigured into confidence, how can the logic be resolved; and where at last can the authority repose?

The full reply to this inquiry can be found only when we find where Lincoln's conviction and confession coalesce. Touching this, one thing is clear. Both bear upon the same concern. Deep within them both slavery is the common theme. Assured that slavery is wrong, he confesses that its roots run everywhere. Honest to the core, he bows beneath the scourge of war, convinced that it is heaven's penalty upon all the land. Throughout he is pleading and suffering consistently that all men may be free. This is the sum of the address. In this it all coheres. Thus he divines and understands the ways of God. And so he stands, as poised in this address, in ideal fellowship, at once with men who have held slaves, with slaves in their distress, with the Creator in his primal decree, and with the Providential meaning of the war.

To all this problem, vexing so many generations, the clear and witting touch of Lincoln's sacrificial penitence is the master key. In this all contradictions, all hostilities, all sufferings, all transgressions, and all pure longings are harmonized. In assurance and repentance he has found how truth and grace, blending together in humble heed for God and for undying souls, hold complete dominion in the moral realm. These pure principles, congenial alike to God and men, he welcomes to himself, and commends to all his fellowmen in sacrificial partnership.

Here is Lincoln's prevailing faith. This is the secret of his strength. Herein vests his commanding and enduring power. This is Lincoln's self—his very manhood. This is the man in this address whom the world beheld, and still beholds—the man he was, the man he aimed and strove to be, the man he recommended all the Nation to combine to reproduce, the man in whom the fear of God, the love of men, the zeal for life, and true reliability, mingle evenly, at whatever cost. This is the man, and this the mighty influence over other men, enthroned imperishably in this address.

Here is the throne, the scepter, and the key to Lincoln's vast authority. It is patterned and informed from the cardinal constituents of a balanced moral character. It is inwrought within a life that heeds harmoniously, and with heroic earnestness, his own integrity, his God, his fellowman, and things immortal. Holding souls above goods, holding his fellow as himself, holding himself in true respect, and holding God above all, he stands and pleads, with a cogency that is unanswerable, for verities as self-evident to any man as any man's self-consciousness. All his claims in the heart of this address are self-apparent. They are original convictions. They prove and approve themselves. They make no call for substantiation. They confront every man within himself, the light in his eye, the life in his heart, the spring in his hope. They confront every man again within his neighbor. They confront both men again, when together they look up to God. And far within all forms that change, they confront all men forevermore in things that immortally abide.

This is the truth to which Lincoln pledged his troth, and in which he besought all other men to plight their faith, in this address. The vivid, ever-living dignity in man, discoverable by every man within himself, to be greeted by every one in his brother-man, at once the image and the handiwork of God—this defined all his faith, fired all his zeal, woke all his eloquence, shaped all his argument, winged all his hope. That such a being should be a slave, that such a being should have a slave, was in his central conviction, of all wrong deeds, the least defensible. It was the primal moral falsity, cruelty, insult, and debasement. That such a sin should be atoned, at whatever cost, was the primal task of purity, reverence, tenderness, and truth. Holding such convictions, handling such concerns, for him to make the statement was to give it demonstration. Against such convictions, and in scorn of such concerns, no man could seriously contend without assailing and, in the end, undoing himself. This was the citadel and the weaponry of Lincoln's authority.

And Lincoln found within these views the pledge of permanence. He saw them bulwarked and corroborated by all the lessons and revelations of history. All devices of human society, contending against these rudimentary verities, had been proved pernicious and self-defeating a thousand times. Only such behavior of man with man as harmonized with the creative design, and sprang from endowments that were common to all, could ever hope to last. Here is the sovereign lesson from all the centuries past, and a sovereign challenge for all the centuries to come. As Lincoln viewed it, he was handling a matter beyond debate, when he talked of two centuries and a half of unrequited toil. If that was not wrong, then nothing was wrong. There is the whole of Lincoln's argument, and the whole of his authority. It stood true two hundred and fifty years ago. It will hold fast two hundred and fifty years hence. To deny this is to dethrone all law, turn every freeman's highest boast to shame, and finally banish moral order from human government and from human thought. That this could never be suffered or confessed was the substance of Lincoln's argument, and the sum of his authority. This and this alone was the sovereign lesson that the sacrificial sorrows of the war were searing so legibly, that all the world could read, upon the sinful Nation's breast. And in saying this, Lincoln's voice was pleading as the voice of God.

His Versatility—The Problem of Mercy

The study of Lincoln's authority, as it wields dominion in the last inaugural, has brought to prominence his humble readiness to share repentantly with all the Nation, in the bitter sorrows of the war, the divine rebuke for sin. That sin was the wrong of holding slaves. But in all the land, if any man was innocent of that iniquity, it was Lincoln. And yet the honest Lincoln was never more sincere, more nobly true and honest with himself, than in this deep-wrought co-partnership with guilt. Surely here is call for thought.

Lincoln's character was fertile. The principles that governed his development were living and prolific. In his ethics, as in his bodily tissues, he was alive. As the days and years went on, he grew. Like vines and trees, he added to his stature constantly. New twigs and tendrils were continually putting out, searching towards the sunshine and the springs, and embracing all the field. And in all this increase he was supremely pliable. While always firm and strong, he had a wonderful capacity to bend.

The primary, towering impulse working in Lincoln's life was ethical. Amid the continual medley and confusion of things, he was continually reaching and searching to find and plainly designate the right and the wrong. This stands evident everywhere. Nowhere does this stand plainer than in the period, when, at his second inaugural, he faced a second presidential term. Still straining in the toil and turmoil, in the intense and blinding passion of the war, he halts upon the threshold of a second quadrennium of supreme responsibility, to see if he can surely trace God's indication of what is right. The eternally right was what he sought. He was after no mere expediency, no ephemeral shift for ephemeral needs. The judgments of the Almighty Ruler of Nations, true and righteous altogether and evermore, were what he prayed to find and know. Then, if ever, Lincoln's earnestness was moral.

And for this search at just this time his eye was peculiarly sobered and grave. Portentous problems were emerging, as the finish of the war drew near. And these problems were new. What should the Nation, when it laid aside its arms, decide to do with the seceded States, and with those millions of untutored slaves? For that no precedent was at hand, no direction in the laws. The conclusion must be original. And it must be supreme. And its issues must hold wide sway for generations of imperial, expanding growth. There loomed an impending peril, and a test of statesmanship, demanding the wisdom, and integrity, and deep foresight of a moral prince—a peril and a moral test but poorly met by the men whom his untimely death thrust into Lincoln's place. For bringing to perfection his ripening judgment upon that task, and so for displaying another historic demonstration of Lincoln's moral adaptability, the few short requisite years were mysteriously to be denied.

But upon other problems and in other days, there was ample revelation of Lincoln's agile moral strength. His entire career in national prominence provides outstanding demonstration of the continual full mobility and plastic freedom of his moral powers. The civil war, which he was conducting with such determination to its predestined end, as he stood the central figure in this second inaugural scene, was but the central vortex of a moral agitation in which all our national principles and precedents were challenged and defied; and in which statesmen of supremely facile, virile, moral sense were in exigent demand. Problems were propounded constantly upon which our Constitution shed no certain light, and the Constitution itself was in a way to be overturned.

Throughout this period of national discord and moral instability, Lincoln was a leading, creative mind. The circuit of that career was brief indeed, scarcely more than one decade. But in those dark, swift years shine and cluster many illustrations of the rich and ready fertility of his ethical postulates in the political realm. Man of the people though he was, and acutely sensitive of his responsibility to the people for every responsible act, he was in every judgment and resolve every inch a king, openminded, original, free. Again, and again, and again, he was the man for the hour.

One demonstration of this is shown in his surprising readiness. With whatever situation, he behaved as though familiar. Undisciplined in diplomacy, he proved himself almost instantly a finished diplomat. Totally untutored in all the acts and practices of war, but compelled by his office to take sovereign command of the Nation's arms, and that so suddenly that even the arms themselves could not be found, he became one of the foremost critics and counselors of perilous and intricate military campaigns. Unaccustomed to authority, but advanced at a leap to the Nation's head, beleaguered by deadly animosities among cliques and sections and States, encompassed by shameless cabinet intrigues, he developed, as in one day, into manager, adviser, administrator of political affairs, the most astute in all the land.

A most impressive example of this adjustability is seen in his manifold capacity for moral patience. It reveals how he could keep his full integrity, while binding up his life and fortune inseparably with men whose moral standards swayed far from his. Lincoln's first inaugural gave luminous definition of his designs and hopes. The principles there propounded were the ripe and firm convictions of a thoughtful, honest life. They had been pronounced repeatedly before. To their defense and consummation his heart and honor were pledged irrevocably. Those propositions were the irreducible rudiments of his faith, the permanent constituents of his hope. Surrender those convictions and desires he never did, he never could. Within the ample compass and easy play of those glowing sentiments there was no room for secession, nor for war, nor for any bitterness, but only for loyalty, fellowship, peace. But as he turned from that inauguration and its declaration of his policy toward the execution of his trust, he had to face and handle secession, war, and malicious defamation. He had to see the Nation's holiest dignity desecrated, all his brotherly offices disdained, the souls of men still held as rightful objects of common trade, and the plainest decrees of God defied. This as shown in the spirit and uprising of the impatient, imperious South.

And within the North, in the very armies assembled for the Union's defence, he had to find the very leaders and plotters of his campaigns absorbed and overcome by petty jealousies, too despicable and unpatriotic to be believed, and yet so real and vicious as to defeat their battles before they were fought. And back among the Union multitudes around his base, were men of might and standing, and men in multitudes, who maligned his motives, and entangled his plans, until antagonism the most malignant and resolved to all his views and undertakings seemed to environ him on every side.

To such conditions it was Lincoln's bitter obligation to conform. Many men were ready with many fond prescriptions for the case; but they all were marked by weak futility. They either brought the Nation no complete relief, or else surrendered the Nation's very life. Within the strain and pull from every side Lincoln felt the obligation of his oath.

The mood and method he employed (and let not the phrase be misunderstood) was moral relaxation. This did not mean that he altered aught of his pronounced belief, or varied by a single hair from his announced design. He remembered his inaugural oath. He retained his faith and hope, and held to his prime resolve unchanged. But he gave the opposition time. He suffered malignants to malign, seceders to rebel, detractors to impugn; and bore their taunts and blows and wounds patiently, still abiding by his word. His very war was simply for defense. The honor of the Union he would not yield up. His brotherly friendliness he would not forego. His rating of freemen he would not discount. The mandates of God he would not disobey. But while on every hand these might be assailed and abjured, he repressed all violence and vehemence of heart, and endured, and indulged, and was still.

Herein, however, his convictions and hopes wore a modified guise. Their rigor softened; their lustre mellowed; their angles broadened; their rudeness ripened; and his aspect passed through change; the while his honor brightened and became more clear. This adjustment of such a nature to such a fate is a massive illustration of moral versatility. It is like keeping the steed to the course, while yet laying the rein upon his neck.

Through experience such as this it must have been that Lincoln traversed his profoundest sorrow. Just here his critics and traducers had their firmest hold. To the world at large his tactics did seem slack, his method dilatory, his mood indifferent. Men wearied past endurance at his delay, and charged repeatedly that he had betrayed his trust. Such accusations must have been to his pure loyalty like gall. And yet he must perforce be mute. It was not he, it was the awful situation in which his noble life was manacled, that was so incorrigible. With God and man he pleaded day and night that bloodshed might be stayed, and peace possess the land. But an enemy was in the land, determined not to leave his guns until the Union was dissolved, and slavery vindicated as right. Rather than forsake the Union, and own that men were as the brutes, he would die a thousand times. And with a patience that no malice and no misfortune could wear away, he held his post and kept his word, through torments too severe for unheroic men to bear, producing thus upon his silent, sorrowful face a humble replica of the divine long-suffering of the meek and lowly Christ. And so he taught the world how in patience the righteousness that abhors all wrong may turn its face toward sin with humble meekness, through years that seem like centuries, and cause thereby that pure and Godlike truth and love shall only be more glorious.

But even with this the description of this case stands incomplete. To understand it rightly further statements are required. After all his patience, the South was obdurate. Even while in this last inaugural Lincoln was pleading for universal charity, and seeking to banish malice everywhere, the leaders of the armies in the South were rallying their unrecruited ranks in a very desperation of hatred for his principles, and of scorn for his forbearance. While he was interpreting the desolations and sorrows of the war as God's all-powerful punishment of slavery, our common national sin, they resented with impassioned vehemence such an explanation, disclaimed all guilt, and denied that slavery was wrong.

Here emerged in Lincoln's thought Lincoln's supreme perplexity. He was dealing with right and wrong, both only the more intensely real, because so really concrete. Liberty and loyalty, loyalty to liberty, the dignity of man, and the good pleasure of God—these were the eternal principles, and the personal interests at stake. Antagonisms were deadly virulent; and they were unrelenting. Compulsion was not availing. Patience likewise failed. Here was a desperate call for moral mastership. The man to meet the crisis, to join the cleft, to reduce to moral harmony this discord of right and wrong, the man who could resolve and morally unify this moral disagreement must have a soul and an understanding whose insight and moral comprehension were complete.

Here Lincoln's moral grandeur gains its full dimension. And in this consummation it comes clear to see how in very deed right and wrong, evil and good, can be encompassed in a moral unison such that evil remains the all-abhorrent thing, and good is proved to be alone desired. This marvelous explication is found within the words and tone of this last inaugural. It stands contained in perfect poise within the mutual balancings of his princely pledge to abjure all malice, show universal charity, and still pursue the awful guidance of Almighty God in the prosecution of the war. Herein moral rigor, forbearance, and gentleness do majestically coalesce.

The breath and voice of this same moral mystery are felt and heard again within this same inaugural in that bold prophetic exposition of the Providential purport of the war. In the burning furnace of those last four years, Lincoln's eyes had been purged to see how the ways of God transcend the ways and thoughts of men. Both North and South, in battle and in prayer, had failed to comprehend the thoughts of God. All the movements of all their armies were being mightily over-ruled. The purposes of the Almighty were his own. Both North and South had gone astray. Neither side was wholly right. The land was under discipline. The Nation had committed sin. That sin was destined for requital. That requital was to be complete. The ways of God were true and righteous altogether. All this the Nation must acquiescently confess. For all the wrong of slavery requital must be made, submissively, ungrudgingly, repentantly. Beneath that judgment every heart must bow. The sin must be abjured. Its wrong must be abhorred. Goodwill to all alike must be restored. And through it all the Almighty must be adored.

Like a solemn litany within a great cathedral, these solemn sentiments of Lincoln resounded through the land, as, in want of any other priest, Lincoln himself led the Nation to the altar of the Lord. He truly led. And to an altar. In this inaugural, Lincoln, for all Americans, bows and veils his own brave heart in sacrificial sorrow and confession, to bear and suffer all that, as the Nation's due, and for the Nation's rescue, it is the will of holy heaven to inflict.

In this profound, spontaneous assumption of full co-partnership with all the Nation in a Nation's undivided ill-desert; in this uncomplaining acquiescence, while God inflicted upon the land, as an awful scourge, all the shame and cost and sorrow that the woful wrong of slavery had entailed; in this deep discernment that deep in every heart ran and flourished all the baleful roots of greed and pride, of injustice and cruelty, out from which all man's enbondagement of brother man springs up; in this estimation of human slavery as a primary sin, while receiving without repining its ultimate doom—Lincoln unveils in his single heart, an abhorrence and an endurance of our national sin, that makes him enduringly and indivisibly the friend and brother of us all, accomplishing, in a single moral experience, the pattern of the confession, and of the resolution of our common wrong. Unto this, Lincoln's moral versatility attained. Beyond this, moral versatility could never go.

The same moral dextrousness, this facile power and fluent readiness to fully comprehend and fitly meet the moral mastery of a problem, in itself all but absolutely obstinate and impossible, this wondrous deftness in compounding together guilt and grace in mutual compassion and repentance, is shown in Lincoln's patiently repeated, but always futile efforts to persuade the North and the South to come together, and so bring slavery and all dissension to an end, by giving and receiving fiscal reimbursement for the emancipation of the slaves. To this magnanimous and unexampled proposition, offered in the midst of war, and urged in words and tones of classic winsomeness, the North and South could never be brought unitedly to consent. Therein this moral hero stood like a king against the wrong, argued like a prophet for the right, and led towards mutual penitence and sacrifice like a priest. It is in human history one of the supremest illustrations of moral versatility. Never were Lincoln's character and aim more stable than in that plea. But never was mortal man more mobile. Beyond all his contemporaries he observed and regarded the signs of the times. He saw that the ancient order was certainly to change. He felt that an almighty, a just, and a benignant Providence had assumed control. He discerned that the new order was freighted with vast store of good. To make its entrance gentle, so that nothing should be rent or wrecked, was the sum of all his thought and toil. He took for pattern the coming of the dew. For his method he adopted his own well-mastered and transcendent art of brotherly persuasion. As to manner, he was vestured in humility, desiring to eject and ban the pharisee from his own and all other hearts. For prevailing motive he designated the passing hour as a time of unexampled opportunity. "So much good," he said, "has not been done by one effort in all past time, as in the Providence of God it is now your high privilege to do." And for admonition he pointed to the vastness of the future, and a possible lament over a pitiful neglect. But it was all for naught. For such a moral transmutation and free triumph the embattled Nation was unprepared.

But over against that unrelenting rigor, his moral readiness to meet his brother, friend or foe, in free and mutual sacrifice, glows beautifully. Deep in the heart of his design was struggling heroically, and in balanced moral unison, the Godlike spirit of eternal justice, mercy, and conciliation. In his strong breast all pride was crucified, malice was melted down to tenderness, hypocrisy and sordidness were purged away. His moral outlook was now unobstructed, open every way. Then his soul stood fleet and free for any path within the moral universe. With every man in this broad land he stood ready to journey or sojourn, meek to suffer, resolute to prevail. Sharing with the wrongdoer and the wronged alike their shame and suffering and sin, while urging with immortal eagerness towards fairness and happiness and peace, he resolved and overcame the problem of the slaveholder and the slave, and made this land forever the universal refuge of the free. In such a transmutation, first within himself, and then throughout the land, moral as it is in every fiber, and from circumference to core, is perfect moral concord. Thus, in moral discord, moral freedom finds the way to peace, while full responsibility remains unchangeably supreme. Here is the final, perfect triumph of moral ingenuity. Thus by means of mercy, freely offered and freely received, through mutual fellowship in moral suffering, wrong may be comprehended, and fully overcome, in the unchanged dominion of the right. So moral freedom and moral consistency combine. Men's lives become vicarious. Thus moral versatility culminates, and overcomes, and wins the sovereign moral crown.

In the chapter just preceding, Lincoln's patience came into allusion and review. That quality deserves a somewhat closer, separate examination. When Lincoln took his last inaugural oath, he based its meaning upon a statement in his inaugural address, that all the havoc of the war was, under God, a penalty and atonement for a wrong that had been inflicted and endured for centuries. In this interpretation he subtly interwove a pleading intimation that all the land, in reverent acquiescence with the righteous rule of God, should meekly bow together to bear the awful sacrifice. And, deep within this open exposition of his prophetic thought, there gleamed the hidden pledge, inherent in his undiluted honesty, that he himself would not decline, but would rather stand the first, to bear all the sorrow consequent upon such wrong.

Here is an attitude, and here a proposition which men and Nations are forever prone to scorn; but which all Nations and all men will be compelled or constrained at last to heed. Therein are published and enacted verities, than which none known to men are more profound, or vast, or vested with a higher dignity. They demand attention here.

The statement made by Lincoln pivots on "offenses." Strong men, in pride and arrogance of strength, had wronged the weak. Weak men, in the lowliness and impotence of their poverty, had borne the wrong. In such conditions of painful moral strain the centuries had multiplied. Those long-drawn years of violence had heightened insolence into a defiance all but absolute. Those selfsame years of suffering had deepened ignominy into all but absolute despair. Through banishment of equity and charity, of purity and humility, while all the heavenly oracles seemed mute, fear and hope alike seemed paralyzed. The oppressor seemed to have forgotten his eternal obligation to be kind and fair. The oppressed seemed to have surrendered finally his God-like dignity. The times seemed irreversible.

Here is a problem that, while ever mocking human wisdom, refuses to be mocked. It enfolds a wrong, undoubted moral wrong; else naught is right. It overwhelms. Within its awful deeps multitudes have been submerged. And it is unrelieved. It outwears the protests and appeals of total generations of unhelped, indignant hearts.

This problem Lincoln undertook to understand. In his conclusion was proclaimed the vindication of the meek. Beneath that age-long wrong, beneath the silence and delay of God, and beneath the final recompense, he prevailed upon his heart, and pleaded with other hearts to stand in suffering, hopeful acquiescence. Among these sorrows, so wickedly inflicted, without relief, and without rebuke, let patience be perfected. Here let meekness grow mature. Let confidence in our equal and unconquered manhood, and let faith in God not fail to overcome all Godlessness and inhumanity. Let time be trusted absolutely to prove all wrong iniquitous. Let the worth inherent in undying souls be shown to be indeed immortal.

Here is Lincoln's resolution of this profound enigma, a resolution unfolding all its mystery, and involving all his character. Here Lincoln won his crown. This is all his meaning in abjuring malice, and invoking charity. Too kindly to indulge resentment, whatever the provocation, and too sensible of his own integrity to ever court despair, he appealed to God's eternal justice and compassion, and clung to a hope that no anguish or delay could overcome. This is Lincoln's patience. This is the inmost secret of his moral strength. This is his piercing and triumphant demonstration that in this troubled world, where sin so much abounds, it is the meek who shall finally prevail.

This moral patience deserves to be explored. It comprehends ingredients, quite as worthy to be kept distinct, as to be seen in unison. For one thing it identified him with slaves. Therein he bore a grave reproach. Its weight only he himself could rightly compute. Beneath the rude and among the hurt he took deliberate stand. Among the lowly, before the scorner, he held his place. He braved the master's taunts. He penetrated to its heart the cause that kept the black man mute. He measured out, but without indifference, as without complaint, the divine delay. He courted in his thought on slavery a perfect consciousness of its sin. He examined with nicest carefulness the sufferers' impulse towards revenge. He knew the awful misery in human shame. He shared with honest men their proudest aspirations. And all of this, he shared with blacks, not by compulsion, but as a volunteer.

Herein, and in the second place, he held fast the fundamental claims that every slave retained an ineffaceable affinity with God; that this divine inheritance, however deep the negro's poverty, could never be annulled or forfeited; that friendliness with fellowmen, however hard or sad their lot, was no reproach; that in human sorrows it well becometh human hearts, as it becometh God, to remember to be pitiful; that all invasion or neglect of those inherent human rights and dignities was bound to be avenged; that in God's good time all patient souls would be crowned with song; and that thus his open championship of the cause of slaves was in perfect keeping with his own unaltered and unalterable self-respect.

A third ingredient in Lincoln's patience was its conspicuous and inseparable impeachment of oppression. Lincoln's patience under moral wrong made him no neutral morally. Without fear and without reserve, he held before oppressors, however hard or strong, the enormity of their wrong. Before the cruel their cruelty was displayed. Before the arrogant their arrogance was reflected back. Before the base and foul their sordidness was brought to light. Before disloyal men the perfidy of covenant disloyalty was nakedly unveiled. All the wrongs inwrought and undergone in slavery were recited with insistent accuracy and unreserve. Of all those centuries of unpaid toil each month and year were reckoned up. Of all those sins against pure womanhood and helpless infancy each tell-tale face was told numerically. The moral wrong in slavery was set before its advocates and beneficiaries unsparingly. Patience, whether God's or man's, and whether for one day or for a thousand years, can never be interpreted or understood to diminish sin's iniquity. Its prolonged persistence only aggravates its guilt.

In the fourth place, there was in Lincoln's patience a waiting deference before God's silence and delay. His total confidence was in God. That God was negligent, or indifferent, he would not concede. His whole abhorrence of oppression was based on God's decree. Here rested also all his hope of recompense. Vengeance belongs to God. He will rebuke the mighty, and redeem the meek. In both, his righteousness will be complete. And when his judgments fall, all men must own adoringly his perfect equity.

Finally, in Lincoln's patience there is explicit recognition and confession of his own complicity with all the land, in the wrong to slaves, and of his own and all the land's delinquency before the Lord, in failure to discern and approbate the divine designs. It had been left with God's far greater patience and far higher moral jealousy to overcome and overwhelm and overrule the devious plans and ways of erring men. In lowly acquiescence it was for him and the land to acquaint themselves with God's designs, confess their wanderings, accept his will alike in redemption and rebuke, and unite henceforth to represent and praise on earth his perfect equity and grace.

Here are the elements in Lincoln's patience, and here their sum. Forming with the lowly and oppressed a free and intimate partnership; avowing jealously for all mankind a coequal dignity among themselves and an imperishable affinity with God; declaring unflinchingly to all who tyrannize the full enormity of their primal sin; restraining malice and all avenging deeds; confessing his own misjudgments and misdeeds among his fellowmen and before the Lord; he endures submissively the divine delays, and shares repentantly with all who sin the judgments of a perfect righteousness. Genuinely pitiful for suffering men, sharply jealous for human worth, direct as light to designate the shame in pride, docile as a child before the righteous and eternal rule of God, he illustrates and demonstrates how a perfect patience makes requisition in a noble man of all his noblest manliness.

But worthy as are all its qualities, its exercise entails stern discipline in suffering. It costs a man his life. That this was Lincoln's understanding, as he traversed the responsibility of that last inauguration day, is witnessed unmistakably by his letter to Thurlow Weed respecting his inaugural address. These are his words, well worthy to be reproduced a second time:—

"I believe it (the address) is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told, and, as whatever of humiliation there is in it falls most directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it."

"Most directly on myself." There Lincoln bares his heart to God and man, in order that upon himself might fall the first, the deepest, and the most direct humiliation. At one with slaves, despised by pride, astray from God prepared for sacrifice—but attesting still that slaves were men, that robbery was wrong, that God was just—so he stands.

But, be it said again and yet again, in such a posture looms nobility. In meekness such as this is nothing craven. It beseems true royalty. Bowing before his God to receive rebuke, bowing to make confession before his fellowmen, he stands as on a hilltop, announcing and declaring to all the world how arrogance proves men base, how lowliness may be beautiful, how reverend are God's mysteries, how just and pitiful his ways. Here is a kingliness that no crown can rightly symbolize. Here is a victory that is not won with swords. In the very attitude is final triumph. It bravely claims, and truly overcomes the world. In such a patience there is present instantly, and in full possession, the vigor of undying hope, and the title of a firstborn son to the heritage of the earth.

This capacity in Lincoln's patience for the close allegiance of self-devotion and self-respect, of sympathy and jealousy, is shown dramatically in his tournament with Douglas in 1858. Throughout those speeches, replies, and rejoinders Lincoln held fast his full fraternity with the slaves, while repressing with his fullest vigor every onslaught against his personal integrity.

The date of those debates marked over four full years, since Douglas had championed through Congress into finished legislation a bill that abrogated all federal limitation of slavery, and opened an unrestricted possibility of its further spread forever, wherever any local interest might so desire. That bill obtained the presidential signature in May of 1854. During the succeeding years Douglas had been shaping public sentiment by his almost royal influence in public speech towards a stereotyped acceptance of the principles and implications of that law. Under his aggressive leadership his party had been well solidified upon three political postulates, which he declared essential not alone to party fealty, but to any permanent national peace. These three postulates were the following:—

Slavery is in no sense wrong.

Slavery is to be treated as a local interest only.

These principles have been sanctioned perfectly by history.

From these fundamental postulates flowed numerous corollaries:—

Black men are an inferior race. This inferiority has been stamped upon this race indelibly by God. The Declaration of Independence did not and does not include the blacks in its affirmations about equality.

This country contains vast sections precisely fitted to be occupied by slavery.

Local interests being essentially diverse, as for example between Alabama and Maine, decisions as to local affairs will also be diverse. This entails divergent treatment of black men, just as of herds and crops.

To the rights of stronger races to enslave the blacks, the fathers who framed our government, our national history since, and the age-long fate of Africa unitedly bear witness.

Counter to these three major postulates of Douglas, Lincoln set the following three:—

The enslavement of men is wrong.

The treatment of slavery is a federal concern.

Our history has contained, and still contains a compromise. Our fathers deemed slavery a wrong. But finding it present when they framed our government, and finding its removal impossible at the time, they arranged for its territorial limitation, for its gradual diminishment, and for its ultimate termination.

From these three fundamental postulates in Lincoln's arguments flowed also various corollaries:—

The sinfulness of slavery roots in the elemental manhood of the slave. This manhood warrants his elemental claim to the employment and enjoyment of his life in liberty.

In our form of government, things local and things federal being held within their respective realms respectively supreme, things locally divergent lead to federal compromise.

Certain sections of the country in particular, and the Nation in general being committed, either from policy or from choice, to foster slavery; men who hate the thing as wrong must in patient meekness endure its presence, until in God's own time its presence and its sin and guilt shall be removed.

As will be seen at once, for the purposes of a popular debate, the postulates of Douglas were easier to defend. Of the two sets of premises, his seemed the more simple, more explicit, more direct, more telling with a crowd; while those of Lincoln, by reason of that moral and historical compromise, seemed more confused, more evasive, and not so apt to take the multitude. In the nature of the debate Lincoln had to shape his propositions and replies to face two ways:—towards the practical emergencies of our history and form of government, on the one hand; and on the other hand, towards an ideal nowhere yet attained, and seemingly unattainable. Whereas Douglas, quite unconcerned about any ideal motives in the past, as of any vision of an ideal day to come, but dealing solely with the political situation that day occurrent, could make every affirmation and every thrust against his adversary seem straight, and clear, and impossible to refute. This very practical and substantial disadvantage Lincoln had to bear. Questions that Douglas would answer decisively, and instantly, and with absolute distinctness, Lincoln would be compelled to labor with, in careful deference both to our Constitutional protection of slavery, and to its moral wrong.

This situation in those debates deserves a close attention. The difference in the two positions was most profound. That this deep difference was laid fully bare was the supreme resultant of the debate. It was indeed a difference in principles. But stated yet more narrowly, it was a difference in nothing less than estimates of men, and attitudes towards wrong. It was not a difference in abstract theorems. It was vastly more. It was a difference in the personal qualities of the two protagonists. To test this affirmation let any one imagine Douglas producing from his heart the sentiments, and arranging in his thought the arguments of Lincoln's last inaugural. Douglas sadly erred in his opinion of his time. In Lincoln, in those debates, our government, our history, our ideal as a great Republic stood incorporate. Like our noble history, he patiently endured and bore what he instinctively and inveterately abhorred. This pathetic situation, this invincible anomaly in our national career, is pathetically re-enacted in the fate of Lincoln in these debates.

This at bottom, and this at last is what those flashing falchions and ringing shields declare. This explains the genesis and the actual course of those painful personalities. And it is to study this that these debates have been introduced. In the personal thrusts of those debates two qualities in Lincoln become pre-eminent. He would not forsake his humble championship of slaves. He would accept no thrust against his personal integrity. Let those debates be read, and re-perused until those cardinal elements in Lincoln's attitude come clear. And let it be observed that in no single personality was Lincoln's thrust initial. Douglas opened the debate. In his opening speech he made direct assertions and indirect intimations too gross to be termed subtle, and too staring to be called disguised; imputing and suggesting that Lincoln was in character a coward and a cheat, in his politics a revolutionary, and in his social proclivities contemptible. These same charges were made with unrelenting persistency and reiteration by Douglas throughout the series of the debates.

To every imputation Lincoln made definite and reiterated reply, denouncing them roundly as unwarranted and inexcusable impeachment of his honor, his veracity, and his candor. And then, with measured and exact equivalence, he dealt out to Douglas's face a list of counter personalities of sharply parallel and actual transactions in Douglas's life, meriting precisely his own reproach. And he pressed the battle home so hard that Douglas, in an impassioned height of protest, demanded if Lincoln meant to carry his tactics up to "personal difficulty."

All this is painful confessedly to review. One wishes earnestly, just as with the later civil war, it might never have occurred. But it should be remembered that every retort of Lincoln was, as in the war itself, in personal defense. Lincoln was not the assailant. But once his honor was assailed, it was not the nature of that honor to stand so mute that his own character seemed rightly smirched, while justice rested with his adversary. And so, in self-defense, as in his speech at Quincy, he carefully details, he vigorously returned each thrust. And this, be it constantly recalled, not in any selfishness, not for wounded pride, not for unction to a hurt, not in any vengeful heat; but just as in the following war, in absolute unselfishness, void of malice, in the ministry of charity, that the honor of all men might be saved, and that the Union with its boon of universal freedom and equality might not perish from the earth.

Such was Lincoln's patience, in those earlier debates, and in this last inaugural, the same. While bearing voluntarily in his single life all the opprobrium borne by slaves; through all that fellowship and sympathy, and on its sole behalf, he guarded his own honor with an infinite jealousy. But it was honor saved for suffering. His life was sacrificial. He learned to know full well, but willingly, what meekness costs. Not alone from a political antagonist and an embattled South, but from a multitude of active dissentients besides throughout the North, from Congress, and from the close circle of his cabinet he had to bear with blind misunderstandings, and malignant misrepresentations of the deeds and qualities and motives of his perplexed and overburdened life.

But whatever his shortcomings or mistakes, whatever his follies or sins, two affirmations about his life will hold forever true. He bore his load. And he kept his path. Through all that stern campaign for liberty and union he turned neither to the right nor to the left. Sorrows and contentions surrounded him continually. But he descried a better time. To speed that day he welcomed sacrifice. He lived and died for nothing else. To show the priceless worth of freemen in a mighty multitude, in a civic league of lasting unison and peace was his supreme commission and consuming wish. To bring that vision near he aspired and submitted to be its pattern and its devotee.

His Rise From Poverty—The Problem of Industrialism

In his first public speech, seeking election to the State Legislature of Illinois in 1832, Lincoln said: "I was born, and have ever remained, in the most humble walks of life." He adds: "If the good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined." In the same speech he said: "I have no other (ambition) so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem."

Here are three phrases that epitomize Lincoln's ideals and Lincoln's career:—"the most humble walks of life;" "too familiar with disappointments;" and "rendering myself worthy of their esteem." There at the age of twenty-three we are apprised of Lincoln's poverty, of his ambition, and of his adversity. In the same address he says: "I have no wealthy or popular relatives or friends to recommend me." At that time he had been but two years in the State.

In pondering this brief and frank appeal one wonders at the blending of the youthful and the mature, the daring and the wary, the ardent and the chastened, the eager and the sedate, the wistful and the resigned. What had been the inner and the outer history and fortune of him, who at the age of twenty-three could talk of being "familiar with disappointments"—so familiar with experiences of reverse that he could bear the public refusal of his one greatest ambition, that public's "true esteem," without being "much chagrined." Plainly in Lincoln's early life there was a great heart, cherishing a high hope, but environed with poverty, familiar with reversals, unchampioned, unknown. Already he was being refined by manifold discipline. Already in that refining fire he had fixed his eye and set his face to win his neighbor's true esteem. Therein one comprehends his whole career. Out of oblivion and solitude and direst poverty he passed by sheer self-mastery to the highest national authority and renown. Of all the distance and of all the way between those "humblest walks" and that commanding eminence, and of all the pregnant meaning to him and to all Americans, and indeed to every son of Adam, of that achievement, Lincoln had a marvelous discerning sense. He knew full well its vast significance and he never let its vivid recollection lapse. It was always in his living consciousness.

One impressive proof and token that the meaning of his advancement had permanent place in his remembrance, and that he deemed his fortune an ideal and a type of our American government and life has been preserved in the tone and substance of his address in Independence Hall, when on his way to his first great inauguration. Standing there at the age of forty-one, the Nation's president-elect, and "filled with deep emotion," he said: "I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence." And to give that statement explanation he said, "I have often inquired of myself what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together." And for answer to that inquiry he points to "that sentiment in the Declaration which gave liberty not alone to the people of this country, but hope to all the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance." "Liberty," "hope," "promise," "weights lifted," "an equal chance," "to all," "for all," "of all," "all," "in due time"—these are the terms that answered the question over which he "often pondered" and "often inquired." This was the "great principle," the "idea" which held the Confederacy together. This was the "basis" on which, if he could save the country, he would be "one of the happiest men in the world, if he could help to save it." This was the principle concerning which he exclaimed: "If this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say that I would rather be assassinated upon this spot than surrender it"—words whose purport is seen to be nothing less than tragic, when we recall the peril of death, which he was consciously facing in that very hour from a deep laid conspiracy against his life.

Thus spoke Lincoln within ten days of his inauguration, in a speech which he says was "wholly unprepared." But the day before, in a speech at Trenton, he characterized that same "idea" as that "something more than common" which away back in childhood, the earliest days of his being able to read, he recollected thinking, "boy though I was," was the "treasure" for which "those men struggled." That "something" he then defines as "even more than national independence;" and as holding out "a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come."

This lifting of weights from the shoulders of men, this equal chance for all; this was the liberty for which the fathers fought, this was the hope which their Declaration enshrined, this it was whose preservation Lincoln longed to secure above any other happiness, this it was for which he was all but ready to die.

There Lincoln spoke his heart. There he voiced his highest hopes. There he traced his patriotism to its roots. And there too he touched the quick nerve of his own disappointments, of his own often futile endeavors and desires. And there as well his living sympathy with other men, encumbered with disadvantage and defeat, found mighty utterance. Lifting weights from the shoulders of all men—that in "due time" this should be achieved he judged and felt to be the single sovereign meaning of our national destiny.

Of just this national destiny Lincoln's personal life was a strangely full epitome. His shoulders knew full well the pressure of those "weights." His soul knew all the awful volume of sorrow as of joy, that poured about the denial or the enjoyment of an "equal chance." From the humblest walks to the foremost seat he had been permitted to thread his way. That liberty he chiefly sought in struggling youth. That liberty he chiefly prized as president. And this, not alone for himself, not alone for all Americans, but for "all the world." Thus spoke Lincoln, "all unprepared" in February of 1861.

But these spontaneous words were no passing breath of transient sentiments. In July of that same year he sent to Congress his first Message. That paper was Lincoln's studied and formal argument, a president's deliberate State Paper, addressing to Congress his responsible demonstration that the war was a necessity. In that argument and demonstration his fundamental postulate was a definition of our government. In that definition he affirms its "leading object" to be "to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance in the race of life." And so he calls the war a "people's contest." And he speaks of its deeper purport as something that "the plain people understand." And he speaks of the loyalty of all the common soldiers—not one of whom was known to have deserted his flag—as "the patriotic instinct of the plain people."

Those words of Lincoln in Trenton and Philadelphia, defining the "leading object" in the minds of the founders of our government in the hours of its birth-travail, define his own idea and ideal as he approached the hour of his presidential oath. That a national government, thus beneficently designed for the equal weal of all, should be preserved inviolate and preserved from dissolution was his supreme desire and his supreme resolve. Its majesty and its integrity must be held most sacred and most jealously preserved. This was the apple of his eye. By the light of this ideal and in the pursuit of this alluring, wistful hope he studied and judged all the movements of his time. And in this, his initial message, he registers his official verdict upon those surrounding evolutions and events. A vast and ever-expanding Confederacy of intelligent and resolute men, leagued together in a Union of Confederate States, and pledged to secure to all men within its bounds a clear path, an unfettered start, and a fair chance in every laudable pursuit, was judged by him a civic undertaking too preciously freighted with promise and hope for the welfare of the world to be ever disrupted and destroyed by the disloyalty and the withdrawal of any one or any cluster of its constituent parts. It was a Union as sacred and holy as all the worth and all the hopes of men. To separate from such a league was a capital disloyalty. To disintegrate such a unison was the ultimate inhumanity. To stand fast forever by such a federation was a crowning fidelity. To preserve, protect and defend such a Union, at whatever cost of life or wealth, and therein to adventure however sacred honor was a primary and a final obligation. By its perpetual preservation unimpaired was secured to all mankind the vision and the priceless promise of liberty and hope. By secession, defiance, and violent assault, that precious human treasure was being endangered and defiled. Hence his anxious all-consuming eagerness as he approached his ominous task. Hence his firm acceptance of awful, inevitable war.

Such were the marshalings of Lincoln's thoughts and sentiments as he approached and undertook his mighty work—fit prelude in Independence Hall, and befitting explanation and defense in the Halls of Congress of the mighty rallying of those regiments of men for the awful combats of a people's war.

This was Lincoln's argument. That the rights of life and liberty and happiness were designed and decreed by the Maker of all to be equal for all was for him, as an American, and for him as a fellow and a friend of all, under God, an axiom. And to that firm truth the war was but a corollary. Because the Union was a league of freemen, kindred to God, and peers among themselves, bound together in mutual goodwill and for mutual weal, it must at all hazards and through all perils and sorrows be made perpetual. Not that slavery should be immediately removed, though its existence in such a league was an elemental unworthiness and affront; but that the Union should be forever secured was his immediate aspiration and resolve. This once achieved and forever assured, and slavery with every other kindred inequality would in "due time" be done away.

This is the key and the core of his ringing and irresistible retort to Greeley. This was the inspiration of that immortal appeal at Gettysburg, the very pledge and secret of its excellence and immortality—the plea that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth.

And it was definitively this axiomatic verity that provided to his deeply thoughtful mind that deeply philosophic interpretation of the divine intention in the war, which he so carefully enshrined within his last inaugural. The sin of slavery had transgressed a primary law of God. Human shoulders had been heavily laden with artificial weights. Brother men had been denied by fellow-men an equal start. The paths of laudable pursuit were not kept equally clear to all. Multitudes of men, by the inhuman tyranny of the strong upon the weak, and that from birth to death, had been accorded no fair chance. Men had toiled for centuries, and that beneath the lash, without requital. Hence the awful doom and woe of war—God's visitation upon ourselves of our own offense, the wasting of our unholy wealth and the leveling of our inhuman pride. And all of this was being guided through to its predestined and most holy end with the divine design that through the awful baptism of blood our national life should begin anew in humble reverence for him whose just and fiery jealousy demands that all his little ones shall share with all the mightiest in equal rights. Thus Lincoln viewed the war as God's avenging vindication of the just and gracious principles that all men everywhere are entitled to share together equally in liberty and hope.

But Lincoln felt all of this to be, not alone the law of God, but quite as truly the common and compelling affirmation of the human heart. This way and style of phrasing it found eloquent annunciation in that earliest and unanswerable address respecting slavery at Peoria in October of 1854, where were deeply laid and may still be seen the foundations of all his power and fame. In that address he said, "My faith in the proposition, that each man should do precisely as he pleases with all which is exclusively his own, lies at the foundation of the sense of justice there is in me." And upon that foundation he laid this cornerstone of social and civic order: "No man is good enough to govern another man without that other man's consent." To so invade the liberty of another man is "despotism." Such invasion is "founded in the selfishness of man's nature." "Opposition to it is founded in his sense of justice." "These principles are in eternal antagonism." When they collide, "shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow." These sentiments of liberty are above repeal. Though you repeal all past history, "you cannot repeal human nature." Out of the "abundance of man's heart" "his mouth will continue to speak." And to demonstrate that this sentiment of liberty, this consciousness that human worth is sovereign, is a verity of human nature which even holders of slaves corroborate, he points to the over 400,000 free negroes then in the land. Their presence is proof that deep in all human hearts is a "sense of human justice and sympathy" continually attesting "that the poor negro has some natural right to himself, and that those who deny it and make merchandise of him deserve kickings, contempt and death." This irrepealable law of the human heart was a mighty rock of confidence in Lincoln's social and political faith. All men were made to be free, and entitled equally to a happy life; and of this divine endowment all men everywhere were well aware. Human nature is by its nature the birthplace and the home of liberty and hope.

Especially serviceable for the purposes of this study upon Industrialism is the section in Lincoln's Message to Congress of December, 1861, dealing with what he calls our "popular institutions." With his eagle eye he discerns in the Southern insurrection an "approach of returning despotism." The assault upon the Union was proving itself, under his gaze, an attack upon "the first principles of popular government—the rights of the people." And against that assault he raised "a warning voice."

In this warning he treats specifically the relation of labor and capital. In this discussion his motive is single and clear. He detects a danger that so-called labor may be assumed to be so inseparably bound up and indentured with capital as to be subject to capital in a sort of bondage; and that, once labor, whether slave or hired, is brought under that assumed subjection, that condition is "fixed for life."

Both of these assumptions he assails. Labor is not a "subject state;" nor is capital in any sense its master. There is "no such thing as a free man's being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer." So he affirms. And then he argues that "labor is prior to and independent of capital." "Capital is only the fruit of labor." "Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." Hired labor, and capital that hires and labors not—these do both exist; and both have rights. But "a large majority belong to neither class—neither work for others, nor have others working for them." This is measurably true even in the Southern States. While in the Northern States a large majority are "neither hirers nor hired." And even where free labor is employed for hire, that condition is not "fixed for life." "Many independent men everywhere in these Northern States, a few years back in their lives, were hired laborers." The "penniless," if "prudent," "labors for wages awhile;" "saves a surplus;" "then labors on his own account;" and "at length hires another new beginner to help him." "This is the just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all, gives hope to all." Here is a form of "political power;" here is a "popular principle" that underlies present national prosperity and strength, and infolds a pledge of its certain future abounding expansion. Thus Lincoln argued in his Annual Message of 1861.

In his Annual Message of 1862, he pursued in a similar strain, a vital and kindred aspect of the same industrial theme. He was arguing with Congress in favor of compensated emancipation. In the course of that argument, speaking of the relation of freed negroes to white labor and white laborers, he said: "If there ever could be a proper time for mere catch arguments, that time surely is not now. In time like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and in eternity." And then, after appealing with utmost patience and consideration and with ideal persuasiveness to every better sentiment and to every proper interest, he drew towards the close of his plea with these arresting, prophetic, almost forboding words, words richly worth citation for a second time:—"The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion." "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." "We cannot escape history." "The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation." "We know how to save the Union." "We—even we here—hold the power and bear the responsibility." "In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve." "We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of earth." "The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless."

Thus Lincoln voiced, and in terms that human-kind will not lightly suffer to be forgotten, his seasoned and convinced belief about the principles that should hold dominion in the industrial realm. They reveal that in his chastened and chastening faith Civics and Economics are merged forever in Ethics, and that therein they are forever at one. Individuals, however lowly or however strong; parties or combinations of men or wealth, however massive or however firm; governments or nations, however puissant, ambitious or proud, are alike endowed and alike enjoined with sovereign duties and with sovereign rights. The negro, however poor, may not be robbed or exploited or bound by any master, however grand. The soil of a neighboring government, however alluring its promise of expansion or wealth, may never be invaded or annexed by force of any Nation's arms, however exalted and humane that Nation's professions and aims. If any man, or any Nation of men be but meagerly endowed, that humble heritage is inviolably theirs forever to enjoy. The person of Dred Scott and the soil of Mexico are holy ground—heaven-appointed sanctuaries that no oppressor or invader may ever venture to profane. If to any nation, or to any man "God gave but little, that little let him enjoy." Slavery and tyranny are iniquitous economy. "Take from him that is needy" is the rule of the slaveholder and the tyrant. "Give to him that is needy" is the rule of Christian charity. As between the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the timid and the bold, "this good earth is plenty broad enough for both."

Here is indeed an eternal struggle. But underneath is "an eternal principle." And among the many Nations of the earth this American people are bringing to this principle in the face of all the world a world-commanding demonstration of its benign validity. By the sweat of his face shall man eat bread. And the fruit of his toil shall man enjoy.

So would Lincoln guard, in the industrial world, against all exaggeration and all infringement of human liberties and rights, and this quite as much for the sake of the strong as in defense of the weak. Tyranny, in despoiling the weak, despoils the tyrant too. Liberty does harm to none, but brings rich boon to all. Thus Lincoln cherished freedom.

But deep within this treasured liberty Lincoln saw the shining jewel of human hope. And hope with him was ever neighborly. And this generous sentiment, expanding forever in his heart, he cherished, not merely as common civilian, but as president. It was while at Cincinnati, on his way to his inauguration, that he said, "I hold that while man exists it is his duty not only to improve his own condition, but also to assist in ameliorating mankind." "It is not my nature, when I see people borne down by the weight of their shackles ... to make their life more bitter by heaping upon them greater burdens; but rather would I do all in my power to raise the yoke."

But true as was Lincoln's view of our national mission, and clear and just and generous as was his own desire, he saw in the Nation's path before his face a mighty obstacle. He knew the fascination of "property." And he knew that this fascination held its malevolent sway, even though that "property" was vested in human life. Here was the brunt of all his battle. The slaves of his day had a "cash value" at a "moderate estimate" of $2,000,000,000. He saw that this property value had "a vast influence on the minds of its owners." And he knew that this was so "very naturally" that the same amount of property "would have an equal influence ... if owned in the North;" that "human nature is the same;" that "public opinion is founded to great extent on a property basis;" that "what lessens the value of property is opposed;" that "what enhances its value is favored."

With this prevailing tendency, native and universal in all men alike, he had to deal. Indeed he had no other problem. All his presidential difficulties reduced to this:—the universal greed of men for gain; and deep within this inborn greed, man's inborn selfishness. And all his all-absorbing toil and thought as statesman and as president were to exalt in human estimation the values in men above all other gain. This desire lay deep in his heart at the beginning of his struggle in 1854. At the end of his conflict in those closing days of his life in 1865 this longing came forth as pure and shining gold thrice refined.

From the time of his second election his thoughts moved with an almost unwonted constancy upon these upper heights. With immeasurable satisfaction he brooded and pondered over the emerging issues of the stupendous strife. With an almost mother's love he considered and counted over and reckoned up those outcomes of the sacrifice that should worthily endure. With a vision purged of every form of vanity and every form of selfishness, not as a miser, but in very deed with a mother's pride and inner joy, he recited over the precious inventory of the chastened Nation's wealth.

Touching evidence of this is in his habitual tone of speech when addressing soldiers returning from the field to their homes. Over and over again he would remind the men of the vital principle at stake, alike in war and in peace. "That you may all have equal privileges in the race of life;" that there may be "an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise, and intelligence—this is 'our birthright,' our 'inestimable pearl.' Nowhere in the world is presented a government of so much liberty and equality." "To the humblest and the poorest among us are held out the highest privileges and positions." It is hard to say, when he was voicing his satisfaction and his gratitude to these returning regiments, to which his words were most directly addressed, to the soldier in the uniform, or to the citizen. All those veteran soldiers were to his discerning eyes the precious sterling units of the Nation's lasting wealth. In their service as defenders of the Union they had saved the most precious human heritage that human history ever knew or human hope conceived. And of that heritage and hope they were themselves the exponent. Their service under arms and their civilian life in coming days of peace were one. And with a deep and fond solicitude he would charge them to shield and guard, to champion and defend with ballot as with sword their dear-bought liberty and right. These peaceable precious fruits of the deadly terrible war he well foresaw and greeted eagerly. The verdict of the ballots in his re-election in 1864 proclaimed afar a word the world had never heard before. It "demonstrated that a people's government can sustain a national election in the midst of a great civil war." That verdict declared authoritatively that government by the people was "sound and strong." And it also showed by actual count that after four terrible years of war the government had more supporting men than when the war began. This abounding victory filled and satisfied his heart. And in the presence of that unexampled proof that equal liberty for all was safe within the guardianship of common men, he exclaimed with a prophet's vision of the living unison of civic and economic weal:—"Gold is good in its place, but living, brave, patriotic men are better than gold."

Such were Lincoln's principles as he defined a Nation's true prosperity and wealth. A Nation's strength, a Nation's honor, a Nation's truest treasure is in her men. Men of freedom and men of hope, men intolerant of tyranny, men resolved to be worthy of themselves and conscious of kinship with their Maker, men jealous equally of their own and their brother's liberty, men who welcome all the bonds involved in a friendly league of equal duties and equal rights, men in whom the amelioration of all is a ruling desire, these are the chief and best achievement in the proudest Nation's wealth. To undervalue men, preferring any other good, is to cherish in a Nation's heart the source of its undoing. More to be prized than finest gold is every citizen. However weak and humble any man may be, his honor is sacredly above offense. To leave the burden of the feeble unrelieved, or to clog the progress of the slow is in any Nation's history a primal sin, and is sure to be abundantly revenged. For such a sin no store of wealth has power to atone. A sin like that a sinner himself must bear. This is the central thought of the last inaugural. These were the human sentiments lying underneath all Lincoln's economic faith. To these firm verities he held devotedly, whether counseling the Nation as its president, projecting negro colonies as the negro's friend, or offering to an idling, impecunious brother a dollar gratis for every dollar earned.

Men are equal; men are free. Men are royal; men are kin. Men are hopeful; men aspire. Men are feeble; men have need. Men may prosper; men may rise. Melioration is for all. Men have duties; men have rights. Rights are mutual; duties bind. Every man resents offense. Only despots can offend. Human tyranny is doomed. Vengeance waits on every wrong. God is sovereign, kind and just. These are Lincoln's sentiments. These he nobly illustrates. These are laws which he defends. These are truths he vindicates.

These few fundamental principles, applied anywhere in the industrial field, would soon and certainly put in force wholesome, everlasting, all-embracing laws. If, like Lincoln himself, men start in penury with never a favor and never a friend, then, like him, they must hire themselves to other men for the going wage. But every such a contract must be forever subject to a fair and orderly recall. The humblest earner of a daily wage must be forever free, free to continue or to withdraw. To his freedom and improvement, to his enheartenment and hope all industrial regulations must conduce. This is basic. This alone is generous and fair. And only here can any government win permanence and peace.

Here are Lincoln's primal postulates in social economics. Moral imperatives are over every man. Moral freedom is in every breast. Within the nethermost foundations of any mortal's share in any social fellowship must rest his own self-wrought integrity and self-respect. To make that social fellowship in any form perpetually secure each man must seek with all his heart and with continual willing sacrifice the lasting welfare of every party and of every part. That this be safely guaranteed each man must learn to estimate his brother-man, not by epaulets and coins, but by immortal standards, such as only living persons can achieve. To make this social league invincible within, each member in the fellowship must show a true humility, abjuring all temptation or desire to be a despot or a grandee. And through it all this social compact must be cherished and revered as ordained by a God of pure and sovereign truth and love. Thus by friendly ministry, in unpretending honesty, in brother-kindliness, as sharing in a common immortality, under the favor and in the fear of God, may fellowmen in multitudes be fellow citizens in a civic order that may hope for perpetual prosperity. This is the resounding message that Lincoln's life transmuted into speech through his pathetic and inspiring rise from poverty.

His Philosophy—The Problem of Reality

The study of Lincoln's moral versatility, examined in a former chapter, ranging as it does through all the measure of the moral realm, verges all along its border on the domain of philosophy. Lincoln has scant familiarity, it is true, with the rubrics and the problems, the theories and the methods of the schools. His boyhood was in the wilderness; locusts and wild honey were his food. Such education as he achieved was in pathetic isolation. It was a naked earth, unfurnished with any aids or guides, from which his homely hard-earned wisdom was laboriously wrung. But his Maker dowered him with a mind attempered to defiance of every difficulty. And, however stern the face of his life's fortune might become, his sterner will and diligence found in her solitudes her choicest treasures. To minds that nimbly traverse many books, thinking to have gained the substance of great truths, when they have only gained vain forms, this may seem to be impossible. But Lincoln's mind had traversed severest discipline. He found rare substance of intellectual wealth. And he knew its solid worth. Of this, as has been shown, his first inaugural yields shining proof. Almost every sentence is as the oracle of a sage.

But his second inaugural, too, is a gem of wisdom, clear and pure, fit ornament for any man to wear in any place where wisest men convene. Let keenest eyes examine narrowly the aspiration with which this second inaugural concludes. There shines a wish as bright as any human hope that ever shone in human breast—a wish that all the earth might gain to just and lasting peace. That yearning plea was voiced upon the very breath that spoke of the battles and wounds, the dead and the bereft, of a mighty Nation in fratricidal war. The peace he sought for within all the land, and through all the earth, was to be the national consummation of a conflict in which multitudes of men and millions of treasure had been offered up under God in the name of charity and right. Such was the wording and the setting of this wish.

Comprehend its girth. It encircled all the earth. This cannot be said to be nothing but the ill-considered aspiration of an inexperienced underling. It is the prayer of one who for four terrific years had held the chief position in conducting the executive affairs of one of the major empires of the world. During all that time, among the bewildering and imperious problems of an era of unexampled civil convulsion, hardly any complications had been more obstinate or more disturbing than those bound up in the relation of the United States to the other major Nations of the world. Within those international complications were infolded problems and principles as profoundly fundamental as any within any Nation's single life, or within all the reach of international law. In such a situation and out of such a career Lincoln culminates the declaration of his policy for a second presidential term with an invocation of just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all Nations.

Again let it be said, and be it not forgotten, that it is from the lips of Lincoln that this appeal ascends. He is not a novice. He is a seasoned veteran. Coming from that heart, and spoken in that hour, those words cannot be lightly flung aside. They are the longing of a man who, through almost unparalleled discipline, has attained an almost peerless sobriety, sincerity, and clear-sightedness. Too honest to utter hollow words, too deliberate to accept an ill-judged phrase, too discerning to recommend a futile and unlikely proposition, and sobered far beyond any power or inclination to play the hypocrite, we must concede that Lincoln meant and measured what he said. In simple fairness, and in all sobriety, we must allow that Lincoln understood that the principles which guided him as national chief magistrate, and the goal towards which he was driving everything in his conduct of the war, contained all needed light and power for winning all the world to perpetual harmony. This is nothing less than to allow in Lincoln's deeds and words the sweep and insight of a philosopher. And it is but simple justice, though of vast significance, to append just here that it was in the office and person of John Hay, Lincoln's private secretary, when later he was our Secretary of State, that there dawned and brightened the new era in international diplomacy, now in our day so widely inaugurated, and so well advanced. It can be truly added that in this vast arena, where mighty Nations are the actors, and in very fact all the world is the stage, those cardinal moral traits of Lincoln, and his transparent and commanding personality, so steadfast and vivid and gentle and meek, have no need to borrow from other and ancient theories and illustrations of world-wide statesmanship either light or power. That each individual retain unsmirched and undiminished his pristine self-respect as the cornerstone of all reliability, his neighborly kindness as the prime condition of all true comity, his child-like deference towards God as the basis of all genuine dignity, and his rating of human souls above all perishable goods as the absolute and essential foundation of any perpetuity, forms a programme as elemental and imperial among mightiest Nations, as among humblest neighborhoods of men. Lincoln's obedient recognition of the Almighty's purposes in over-ruling national affairs, his king-like resolution to hold loyally by his innate sense of equity, his eagerness for the elevation of all the oppressed, his instinctive aspiration in his civic life for foundations that cannot fail, and his uncomplaining fellowship with the penal sorrows of his erring fellow citizens,—all apprehended and defended and adhered to with such a lucid mind and steadfast will and prophetic hope upon the open platform of our American Republic—propose both in active practice and in reasoned theory a pattern of statesmanship, capable of comprehending the political conditions, and directing the diplomacy of all the governments of the world. Here are the primal conditions and constituents of international amity. Agreements constructed and defended thereupon among the Nations could not fail to be fair. They would surely endure. And as the centuries passed, the faith of Lincoln in a Ruler of Nations, just, benign, eternal, supreme, would aboundingly increase.

But once again it must be said that these are not the themes, nor this the flight of an untrained imagination. The peace among all Nations towards which Lincoln's hope appealed, was being patterned upon a just and lasting achievement among ourselves. And among ourselves the government was being tried in the burning, fiery furnace of a civil war. It was being proved in flames what factors in a national civic order were permanent, and fair, and approved of God. It was out of deep affliction and unsparing discipline, rebuking all our sins, humbling all our vanity, purging all our hopes, and cementing among ourselves a just and lasting brotherhood, that Lincoln found the heart to hope for perpetual fraternity through all the world. Within his wish deep-wrought, hard-earned, clear-eyed wisdom was crystallized. It was an imperial proposition, momentous, comprehensive, profound. It embodied nothing less than a political philosophy.

But these assertions demand a closer scrutiny. Does Lincoln's thought, in scope and mode, deserve in any sense to be entitled a philosophy? In soberness, is any such pretension justified? Are Lincoln's principles so radical, so comprehensive, so well-ordered, as to deserve a title so supreme?

All turns on truly understanding Lincoln's apprehension of reality. Lincoln's world was a society of persons. God, himself, his fellowman engrossed his thought and interest. Among all persons, as seen and known by him, there was a full affinity. All men were equal, and all were kindred to the great God. This was the starting point, this the circuit, and this the goal of all his conscious thought and toil. This was his world. To penetrate its nature was to handle elements. To grasp those elements was to be inclusive. And to comprehend their native correlation was to master fundamental wisdom.

Here Lincoln shows his mental strength. Among all these elements he traced a fundamental similarity. A common pattern embraced them all. The highest and the lowest were essentially alike. All were dowered with kindred capacities for nobility. He never suffered himself or any of his fellowmen to forget his own elevation from lowliest ignorance and poverty to the presidency. However humble, all could rise. However ignorant, all could learn. However unbefriended, all deserved regard. Life and liberty and happiness were a common boon, an even, universal right. For fellowship with God, even when buffeted beneath divine rebukes, all might hope. The ultimate, open possibility of such divine companionship is shown in this last inaugural, where Lincoln's keen discernment avails to comprehend, that even sinning men may, through penitent acceptance of heaven's rebukes, win heaven's favor and walk with God. Thus Lincoln learned and knew that among all men, and between all men and God there was a fundamental ground of imperishable affiance. Here lies the foundation of his philosophy.

And this affiance was in its being moral. With him the real was ethical. Pure equity was the primal verity. By character were all things judged. Politics and ethics were identical. In the thought of Lincoln the qualities constituting our American Union, the qualities that defined and contained its very being, the qualities that made it a civic entity, securing to it its coherence and perpetuity, the qualities guaranteeing that it should not dissolve and disappear in the fate and wreck of all decaying things, the qualities that made it worth the faithful care of God and the loving loyalty of men, were identical with the qualities constituting himself a free, responsible soul. The same humble reverence, the same mutual goodwill, the same regard for durability, the same jealousy for integrity as informed his personal conscience and inspired his personal will, should form the law and determine the deeds of the Nation as well, if the Nation was ever to have in its civic being a dignity worthy to survive. Here is a standard conformable at once with the measure of things in heaven, the measure of a Nation, and the measure of every man.

Such is the scope of this inaugural. In penning that grave paragraph touching "unrequited toil," Lincoln had his eye alike upon the individual slave, upon the Nation as a whole, upon long centuries, and upon the ways of God. It may be said with equal truth that he was pondering the sin and hurt of a single act of fraud, the vital structure of organic civic life, the continual tenure of right and guilt through lives and times that seem diverse, and the unison of moral estimates that hold with God and men alike forever. This may not be denied. The sin inflicted in a single wrong, like that of slavery, may implicate a Nation in a guilt that, under the impartial and upright rule of God, the centuries cannot obliterate. Inhuman scorn, short-sighted greed, disloyalty and cruelty, however disguised, or however upheld, entail a doom too certain and too sovereign for the centuries to unduly defer, or for any nation to ever annul.

Here are principles undeniably. And as undeniably these principles are supreme. A just God is over all. To his high purposes all things, even the most perverse, must eventually conform. To his right rule even unrighteous men must bend. Into intelligent harmony with his will all upright men may come, finding in lowly acknowledgment of his great majesty their true dignity, in loyalty to his pure righteousness their own complete integrity, in imitation of his universal benignity their perfect mutual friendliness, and in a vision of his eternal purity their assurance of personal and civic perpetuity. Thus in the midst of all being, and in the conscious presence of Him in whom all being finds its source, our personal, human being finds its transcendent dignity and crown. Living thus, and living thus together, men find life indeed. Thus all, endowed alike with the common sanctity of life, enjoying equally the common right to liberty, share equally a common boon of happiness. Thus each man alone and thus the civic order as a whole may survive and flourish under God in just and lasting peace.

This, in Lincoln's thought, was final, comprehensive truth. Taken in all its foursquare amplitude and unison, there was nothing human it did not avail to fitly arrange and fully circumscribe. Whether for man alone or for men in leagues, whether for States supreme or for States confederate, it provided every needful guide and bond. As for the international arena, so for every lesser realm of social life, the principles enshrined in this inaugural are civic wisdom crystallized. They proffer to our human social life nothing less than a philosophy.

This is the wisdom literally inscribed upon the tablet of this last inaugural. To unveil its face before an ever heedful and ever more attentive world is being found a sovereign function of succeeding time. Men are ever learning, but have ever yet to learn what Lincoln was. Despite his fame, his proper glory has been veiled. His features have been shadowed, almost smirched. His reputation has been overlaid with rumours and reports of excessive pleasure in ribald, rollicking hours in wayside inns. But in his very laughter there were deep hints of measured soberness. Seasoned wisdom flavored all his wit. His very folly was profound. But when his mood of frolic passed, when, and almost without any inner change, his outer mien grew serious, and sadness brooded on his face, then his speech was fed from nether springs. Then his lips were freighted from afar, and his speech was rich with precious lore.

In his inmost instinct Lincoln was a philosopher. Out of life's complexities he was always searching for its clue. His speeches deal at bottom with nothing but details. But out of the mesh of those details he was always weaving principles. It is this that gives his words their weight. He is by his own right a true philosopher. It was true wisdom with which he dealt. With true wisdom he was in love. In his own character he has garnered all his gains. By self-refinement he has become a Nation's pattern. In himself are treasured all the honors, dignities, and rewards that appertain to a worthy devotee of wisdom. Assuredly, and beyond all fair dispute, the author of this last inaugural, when fairly measured and esteemed for what he was, and what he did, and what he overcame in civic realms by sheer original research, far more than any Dr. Faust, deserves his doctorate and degree. In sober verity the author of this inaugural is a true Doctor of Philosophy.

His Theodicy—The Problem of Evil

The last preceding chapter closed with an allusion to Dr. Faust. That reference may now be profitably resumed. Goethe's Faust is introduced as in deep uneasiness before the unsolved mysteries of life. He is described as having mastered all that all the Faculties can give, but all to no sure end, and as being then beguiled into other paths and scenes, there to prosecute afresh his quest for present satisfaction. In this new quest he accepts the guidance of a scorner into realms of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft; into scenes of ribaldry, debauchery, and basest sordidness; into lust, murder, and treacherous unfaithfulness; into a devilish trade for present carnal happiness, at cost of freedom, reason, and any heed for future destiny.

One notable feature in all this quest is its submergence in the sea of things that surge up around the passing life, only to pass away themselves and disappear. His riddles and his quests, his ideals and delights are largely physical. His guide does not conduct him into the steadfast presence and observation of things permanent and spiritual. He is prone to make him roam in realms of magic, where forms and deeds are too thin and vague to be even shadows, and too false to be even artificial, but where yet each scene excites the imagination to perishing desires for joys of sense. Carnal potions, charms, and lust; physical tumults and delights so largely occupy the central place in all the scenes, that the riddles Faust would fain resolve are, to a large degree, the mysteries of the universe of sense.

Now let any man compare the major problems in the mind of Goethe's Faust with the problems that Lincoln felt to be supreme. One discovers instantly a vast divergence. Themes and questions, that to the very end of Goethe's life perplexed and vexed his thought, were in Lincoln's writings not so much as named.

But far beyond all this. The vast, unwieldly world of solid sense, so baffling, but so sure, now so terrible, and now so kind, now serving, and now crushing boastful, trembling man, now begetting, and now absorbing endless, countless generations and multitudes, seems not to constitute a vexing or perplexing theme in Lincoln's most insistent thought. This can never be explained as due to a painless, care-free, earthly lot; nor to a pampering environment; nor to physical stolidity; nor to incapacity for aesthetic joys. The lines that seamed his face, the muscles that leashed his frame, the structure of his hands, the meaning message upon his lips, his shadowed, sobered, brooding eyes attest a different tale. Lincoln was sufficiently aware of the plain and common sorrows incident to our earthly environment. He knew what havoc cold and heat, hunger and pain, toil and want, plague and death could visit upon our human life. But none of these things seemed to trouble him. So engrossed was he with questions he called "durable," that all physical discomforts and distresses, with their connected pleasures and desires and hopes and fears, were but passing, minor incidents.

This undoubted fact in Lincoln's mental habitude is a signal and significant factor, to be held in careful estimation in a final judgment of Lincoln's character. Ethics, pure ethics, themes that dealt with realms where man is truly responsible and truly free, were his supreme concern from first to last. And so it comes to pass that the problem, which for him is truly fundamental and ultimate, passes wholly by at once all that burden of so-called evil, in the fear and hurt and mystery of things inflexible, and clings fast hold of things alone that are responsible and free.

Touching the theme of this chapter, and touching also this last inaugural, the following letter, written March 15, 1865, to Thurlow Weed, already cited and considered once, deserves a bit of heed again:—

Every one likes a compliment. Thank you for yours on my little notification speech and on the recent inaugural address. I expect the latter to wear as well as—perhaps better than—anything I have produced; but I believe it is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there is a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told, and, as whatever of humiliation there is in it falls most directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it.

Truly yours,

A. Lincoln.

This letter shows what Lincoln judged to be the secret of this inaugural's permanent hold on human approbation. It was its humble testimony to the fact that, amidst and above the errors and sins, the struggles and failures of men and Nations, there is a world-governing God. Here opens a theme that is truly sovereign and ultimate.

The last inaugural reveals that Lincoln was closely pondering two incongruous themes: the bitter career of slavery; and the just rule of God.

Touching the first—the fact of human slavery—whatever other men might think, in Lincoln's view it was always abhorrent, a primary immorality. He was naturally "anti-slavery." Even in this address, guarded against all malice, and suffused with charity, he could not forbear from saying:—"It may seem strange that any men should dare to seek a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from other men's faces." Man's right to live was in his thought primal. That right carried with it the right to enjoy the bread that his own hands had earned. Such a privilege was the central element in human happiness. Such felicity was elemental. Such freedom and such joy were the simplest common boon in our common, earthly lot.

The institution of slavery blasted that joy, denied that liberty, robbed that right to life. This annihilated hope. It ranked men with brutes. Such a ravaging of human desires and human rights Lincoln judged, from the side of the slave-holder, a paramount crime; and from the side of the slave, an insufferable curse. The terrible enormity of both crime and curse was measured in Lincoln's estimation by the enormity of the war. Viewed any way, that war was the indication and register of the wrong done, and the wrong borne, by men in the centuries of slavery. Arrogance and insolence, ruthlessness and cruelty, dishonesty and faithlessness, luxury and lust, trailed all along its path. That, in a Republic dedicated to liberty, men would go to war and fight to the death with their fellow-citizens in defense and perpetuation of tyranny and bonds, gave evidence to the strange and obdurate perverseness involved and nurtured in the mood and attitude of men that were bent on holding fellow men as slaves. The existence of such an institution in any land Lincoln deemed a national calamity; in a free Republic he felt it to be a heaven-braving anomaly and affront. It was a flagrant evil, bound to bring down woe.

But in the deep entanglements of history this baleful institution had to be condoned, even in this land made sacred to the free. Inbred within the Nation in the Nation's very birth, that it be sheltered within the Nation's life became a national responsibility. From this firm bond Lincoln himself could not escape. In the Constitution that Lincoln swore to uphold, when first he took the presidency, slavery was sheltered, if not entrenched. As chief magistrate of the whole Republic, however obnoxious slavery might be, he had the obnoxious thing to protect. This he freely admitted, and explicitly declared in his first inaugural.

Here was the beginning of his final, moral debate. How should he morally justify himself in defending what he morally abhorred? That this dual attitude should be assumed he seemed fully to concede. This shows most clearly, and in its sharpest moral contradiction, when, in his first inaugural, he volunteered to permit an amendment to the Constitution, enacting, as the supreme law of the land, that slavery should remain thereafter undisturbed forever. How he brought his mind to take that stand has never been made clear. He said in that connection that such an amendment was in effect already Constitutional law. But previous to that date he had always pledged and urged forbearance with slavery, on the understanding that such forbearance was only for a time; that, as foreseen and designed by the men who framed the Constitution, slave holding was always to be so handled, as to be always on the way to disappear. It is not easy to see how a man, to whom the practice of holding slaves was so morally repellent, could participate in making it perpetual. One could wish that just this problem had been frankly handled under Lincoln's pen. It must have been plainly before his thought. And the words of few men would be more worthy of careful record and review than deliberate words from Lincoln upon this world-perplexing query:—how adjust one's thoughts and acts to a moral evil, that inveterately endures, and is never atoned? But in fact that amendment was never carried through. One of the fruits of slavery was its rash unwisdom at just this juncture.

Still, though the amendment lapsed, slavery held on. And slaveholders tightened their resolution to retain their rights in slaves, or rend the Union. This precipitated war. This may seem to have doubled Lincoln's problem, slavery and national dissolution. Standing at the apex of national responsibility, he had to bear the hottest brunt of the physical anguish, the mental perplexity, and the moral sorrows of a war waged by a slave-holding South in militant secession. But in reality, in his thought, the two were one. All turned on slavery. This was the burning blemish in the Constitution. This was the intent of the war. This was the burden on his heart. Here was a load too grievous for any man to bear. It bore preponderantly on him. And yet, as regards any personal and conscious desire or deed, he was through and in it all conscious within himself of innocence. His trial and sorrow were without cause. How now, in his soberest thought, was all this moral confusion explained? Hating slavery with all his heart, innocent all his life of any inclination to rob another man of liberty, but pledged and sworn to shelter slavery under the arm of his supreme and free authority, how could he prove himself consistent morally?

Here emerge the profoundest thoughts of Lincoln on the ways of God. And herein appears his contribution to a theodicy—a vindication of God's moral honor, where his moral government seems slack. How can thoughtful men conceive and hold that God is just, when such injustice and disaster are allowed at all, much less for centuries; in any corner of the earth, much less where heaven's favor seems to dwell?

Upon this subduing theme this last inaugural gives us Lincoln's most explicit words. Of God's personal being, and of his personal care, this address shows Lincoln to be perfectly assured. This was his standing attitude and confidence. Throughout his years in the presidency this trust had seemed unwavering. Indeed, by repeated, almost unconscious attestations, it was his stablest trust. Some of his utterances are tender and touching testimonials to his belief that God rules in his own personal career. But mainly his confessions of belief in the Providence of God are connected with national concerns. He did joyfully, almost jubilantly believe that this Republic was under God's special watch and care. His own hope for our national future well-being and honor rested mainly, we must judge, upon the tokens he thought he could trace in our thrilling and inspiring history of the divine controlling care. At bottom it was this faith that underlay all his patriotism. That the fundamental affirmations of our Constitution were rescripts and digests from the will and word of God was the lively ground and unfailing confirmation of his pure devotion to his Nation's honor and weal. More than aught in all the world beside, it was this religious faith that steadied and girded his will through all those strenuous days.

It is just here that this study of a theodicy sets in. Above all his former thoughts about himself, about his land, about the clash of right and wrong; above all thoughts of other men, and other times; even above his own and his opponents' former prayers and faith, he lifts new thoughts in new reverence and new docility towards God.

Still naught but slavery in his theme—its undeniable iniquity; its strange, prolonged permission; his own, and all other men's responsibility; its unavoidable entail in penalty; and the divine, enduring terms of new liberty and peace. Here are themes and fixed realities that seem eternally to disagree. Can they ever all be morally harmonized? Could even God enlighten that dark past? Could his own historic acts be morally unified? Nothing he had ever done with slavery, not even its utter elimination in his act of freedom, had ever been done, he explicitly affirmed, on moral grounds. Yet slavery, and by his own hand, was indeed undone. But even so the spirit of the South was still invincible, and war was holding on. What indeed could be the thoughts and plans of God?

To begin with, he confesses both North and South and all the land gone wrong. This is the first component in his theodicy. Neither North nor South, not even in the act of prayer, had walked with God, nor found the truth, nor gained its wish. All thoughts of men, in the righteous rule of God, were being overturned. This confession verges near to worship, acclaiming, as it does, the Almighty's designs; and venturing as it does, to trace and reproduce the Almighty's thoughts.

Here is seen how genuine is the moral earnestness in Lincoln's earnest thoughtfulness. As though by a very instinct, his form of words betrays his reverence. He refrains from dogmatism. He refrains even from affirmation. He knows he is venturing upon a daring flight. He is assuming to conjoin together into a moral unison that bitter sample of the age-long cruelty of man against his brother, and the transcendent sovereignty, the eternal justice, and the age-long silence of God. His formula is a modest supposition. But within its modesty is an eye that searches far.

He takes resort in one of the most trenchant declarations of Christ, that momentous saying in his colloquy about the majesty and modesty of a little child:—"Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh."

In this colloquy Jesus seems to be moved by a tender impulse of affectionate jealousy for the model beauty and grace of children. But that tenderness is roused into one of the most terrific outbursts that ever passed his lips. Little children are Christlike, Godlike, models of the citizenship in the heavenly Kingdom. God is their jealous guardian and defender. But Godlike, and of heavenly dignity though they be, they are shy and frail. And men, as they grow gross and impudent, abuse and offend their defenselessness. So things have to be. But woe to such offenders. They were better tied to that mammoth stone that the mule turns in the mill, and submerged in the abyss of the deep of the great sea.

Here are four noteworthy elements:—a blended heavenly modesty and majesty and innocence; an insufferable insolence; a trebly-terrible penalty; and a strange and ominous necessity.

Over these four factors Lincoln's mind must have pondered long. Else how explain their place in this inaugural? They form the foundation of its central paragraph, and constitute its paramount argument; forming alike a sobering admonition, and a humble ground of hope to all the Nation, while at the same time holding aloft before the Nation's thought the outline and substance of a stately vindication of the ways of God. Evidently here is shapely fashioning in lucid speech of Lincoln's ripest, surest thought. As one faces all its range, it seems like the open sky, clear but fathomless. But its wisdom is doubly sealed, and it bears a double claim to our respect. It shows the way of Lincoln's mind, and the way of the mind of Christ. Not quickly will any other thinker, however disciplined, traverse all its course. But travel where he will in the mighty orbit of this inquiry, the modern thinker, whatever his attainment, may find in this inaugural shining indications that Lincoln's thought has gone before.

In this modest, far-searching supposition, transferred to American history from the lips of Christ, Lincoln firmly grasps two solid facts, elemental and universal in human life:—the beautiful modesty of the meek; and the ugly arrogance in the strong. Strength and weakness needs must be. These invite to rudeness and retreat. Then the powerful overbear. The gentle are overborne. Offenses multiply. The arrogant prevail. So must it be. But when the meek go down beneath the wicked rudeness of the strong, then the Most High God, within whose firm dominion both strong and weak share equally in all the privileges and rights of liberty and law, sets over the offended one his shield, and against the proud offender his sword, until pity and equity are enthroned upon the earth again. Thus must it be. The meek must suffer. Offenders must arise. But meekness is a heavenly, Godlike quality. And as with God, so with his gentle little ones, patient gentleness will be duly vindicated; rude arrogance will meet exact and fit rebuke; and it will stand clear that strength and weakness may dwell together in equity and liberty and peace.

This was the age-long moral process which Lincoln's eye discerned, and the final issue which his expectation hailed. Then and therein his eye discerned that all voices would be constrained to proclaim that in all the moral world pity and equity were prevalent; that the least had Godlike majesty; that humility gave to all the great their courtliness; and that there was within all men a fadeless worth, far outranking all other wealth.

But it is essential to note, not alone that Lincoln offers this in the modest form of supposition; but that, as it leaves his lips, it assumes the formula of a confession. Even the meek receive rebuke. The gentlest have wandered also away from God. The problem has surpassed us all. All have somewhat to learn from God. That arrogance may meet its due, meekness must be yet more meek. It must needs be that offenses come. Greater than all our wrong, and all our patience, is the patient truth of God. This must be fully learned. It is under wrong that wrong is made right. It is by meekness under arrogance that arrogance is put to shame. It is by gentleness under rudeness that rudeness is subdued. Offenses must needs be. Only in sacrificial submission to its woe is the problem of evil ever resolved. Only thus is the iniquity of the sin measured back upon the evil doer in a symmetrical and equivalent rebuke.

But this is never to exculpate the offender or condone the offense. Blood with the sword, drop for drop, must be meted out to the slaveholder, as he meted out to the slave blood with the lash. All the wealth that the bonds-man's lord has snatched from the toiling slave must be yielded up. Over human scorn and greed and injustice and cruelty hang unfailingly judgments that are true and righteous altogether. Neither may they who are offended rail, nor they who offend exult, over the divine delay. Nor when God's judgments fall may they who are rebuked complain, nor they who are redeemed turn exultation into arrogance. God's ways, and his alone are even, and altogether true.

In thoughts like these Lincoln's final explanation of the ways of God took form. In patient, repentant, adoring acquiescence his heart found rest. His sorrows were profound, the sorrows of a patriot, kinsman to all the sorrowful in the land. But he learned, however deep the stroke, to forbear complaint. He received the sorrows of the war into his own breast as heaven's righteous woe upon a haughty land, and as heaven's discipline, teaching offenders the woe of their offense. So his ways became coincident with the greater ways of God.

But in this moral explication of the war, and of all that the war involves, two vastly different types of character persist. Lincoln's solution of the enigma was in diametrical contrast with the views of the leading spirits of the South. Not like him did they rate slavery, nor conceive the war, nor understand the ways of God. How, now, could Lincoln's view assimilate this obduracy in the South? This question was clearly within the scope of Lincoln's thought, and its answer is embraced in what has already been explained. Given an even penalty for any sin, drop for drop with the avenging sword for blood with the lash, and it is morally indifferent whether men rail, or whether they acquiesce. The wrong is made right. The meek are redeemed. God's delay is vindicated. Rudeness is reversed. The law is fully revealed. Man's liberty is honored equally. Cruelty and unfairness are rebuked. The gains of greed are scattered. Humblest men are crowned with eternal dignity. To such, whether from the North or from the South, as with melting sorrow and repentance welcomed to their bosoms this bitter vindication of those primal rights, the sorrows of the war opened into perennial peace. To such as repelled that proffered vindication, there was in the sorrows of the war no alleviation. But for both, nevertheless, and for both identically, the sorrows of the war completed the moral vindication of a pure and Christlike equity and friendliness. Thus all the ways of God, with the repentant and the rebellious alike, are just and righteous altogether. This it is the highest wisdom of men to acquiescently confess. To this even those who rebelliously complain and rail must finally utterly submit.

And now one final matter remains—the idea and definition of happiness. When men discuss the problem of evil in the universe, and in its awful presence try to substantiate their confidence in the just and friendly care of a transcendent Deity, one subtle touchstone governs all they say:—What is their conception of human weal, and of human woe? What in actual fact is deepest misery; and what is true felicity? What do they assume man's highest good to be?

Just here is wide and multiform diversity. For illustration, let thought recur to the contrast with which the topic of this chapter was introduced. The idea of happiness that Goethe plants in Dr. Faust, and the idea of happiness that ruled in Lincoln, are as separate as the poles. And again, to keep within the setting of this inaugural, the happiness towards which Lincoln strove, and in which his thought found satisfaction, contrasted mightily with the happiness that informed the aspirations of the leaders of the South. In their ideal, disdain of all inferiors, delight in easy luxury, unequal acknowledgment of rights, and a cruel stifling of the very rudiments of love, were mixed and working mightily. Desiring and enjoying that Elysium, their estimate of evil, their definition of the highest good, and their programme for a final consummation under God could have no fellowship with any final plan of thought approved by Lincoln.

What was Lincoln's highest happiness? This merits pondering anywhere; but compellingly, where one tries to trace his views upon this problem of theodicy; and yet still more when one conceives in this inquiry how in Lincoln's life his ethics, his civics, and his religion became coincident.

As this mighty problem resolves itself in Lincoln's mind, it comprehends, along with his own welfare and worth and true contentment, the equal dignity and happiness of every other man, and a harmonious consonance with the being and decree of God. He sees that scorn of any other man involves in time the scorner's shame. He sees that robbery, however veiled, entails a debt whose perfect reimbursement the slowest centuries will in their time exact. He sees that any form of malice or unfriendliness, housed and fed in any heart, will forfeit all the joy of gratitude, and fill that heart at last with vindictive hate and bitterest loneliness. He sees that fleshly joys, however lush and full, are marked and destined for a swift and sure decay and weariness and vanity. And so, to realize the perfect welfare, he commends to himself, and urges persuasively on all other men, the sovereign good of an even justice, upheld within himself, and so measured out to other men by the perfect standard of God's self-respecting loyalty; of universal charity, eager everywhere to minister universal benefit and peace; of supreme enthusiasm for enduring life; and of a genuine humility, that shares all hope with all the lowly, and trusts and honors God. In this fourfold, composite unison of conscious, deathless life Lincoln sees the fairest goal, the choicest boon, the highest good of man. In the presence of such a standard, and before the outlook of such a hope Lincoln fashions his theodicy.

Here then is the sum of Lincoln's thought upon this bewildering theme:—

The evil that makes this earthly lot so dark and hard is man's wrong to man; the awful sorrows of the meek; the offenses wrought upon the helpless by the arrogant.

Before this mystery all other mysteries, however deep and terrible, such as hurricanes and famine, plagues and death, may not be named.

This most sovereign evil is most clearly understood by those who are oppressed. Their eyes pierce all its deeps. The rude are, by their rudeness, blind.

The names of all who suffer and are still are registered on high for full solace and redemption.

The register of the rudeness of the strong is also full, and destined for full requital.

This redemption and requital shall be wrought by God.

In this redemption the ruthless may relent and share with all the meek the full measure of all their sorrows, and so become partakers of all their joy.

If ruthlessness persist, full requitals shall still descend, and in the presence of God's even righteousness every mouth shall be stopped.

And so shall all evil be fully rectified.

His Piety—The Problem of Religion

Of all the words of Lincoln, evincing what he thought of God, none outweigh the witness of this last inaugural. His reply to Thurlow Weed regarding this address, referred to in another place, concerned precisely just this point—the movements and the postulates of his religious faith. As his ripened mind prepared and pondered and reviewed this speech, there accrued within his consciousness a solemn confidence that it was destined to become his most enduring monument; and that as coming generations became aware of its outstanding eminence, their eyes and hearts would fasten on those words about the age-long, just, and overturning purposes of God. There was a confession, so Lincoln felt assured, embracing and conjoining North and South and East and West in an equal lowliness and shame; and declaring and extolling God's divine supremacy over all the erring waywardness and awful sufferings of men.

In this outpouring of his burdened heart before his God, and in the presence of his fellowmen, there is evidence respecting Lincoln's piety that courts reflection.

In the first place it indicates where Lincoln's sense of moral rectitude found out its final bearings. Those purposes of God, as Lincoln watched their operation, were working out the moral issues in the awful wrong of age-long, unrequited toil in perfect equity. Strong men had been wronging weaklings and inferiors. Helpless men had been suffering untold sorrows. Indignant men had been crying out in hot and hasty protest for full and speedy vengeance. Thoughtful men had been tortured over weary, futile wonderings as to how the baffling problem could be solved. Convulsions and confusion, which no arm or thought of man could start or stay, were shaking and bewildering all the land.

But through and over all, as Lincoln came reverently to believe, a sovereign God held righteous government; and out of all the baffling turmoil he was, by simple righteousness, bringing perfect unison and peace. The dark mystery of unrequited wrong was being illuminated by the righteous majesty of complete requital. But in its full perfection, it was a righteousness such as no mind of man devised. It was the righteousness of God. Here Lincoln's moral sense was purified. He was being taught of God. And this he clearly, humbly recognized. And he took full pains in this address to give God all the praise. And so his reverence towards Deity, and his affirmation touching righteousness became identical. His sense of equity stood clothed in piety.

In the second place, deep within the heart of these divine instructions were such unveilings of God's high majesty, in his steadfast reign above the passing centuries, as awoke on Lincoln's lips such lowly adoration as attuned these words of Godly statesmanship unto a psalm of praise. Here Lincoln's lowliness attains consummate beauty. It is indeed an utterance of profound abasement. It sinks beneath a strong rebuke. It acknowledges sad wanderings. It accepts correction, and meekly takes God's guiding hand. It also sees God's excellence, his high thoughts and ways, his irresistible dominion, his moral spotlessness. And before that revelation he humbly walks among his fellow-citizens, the lowliest of them all, confessing that the reproach involved in what he said fell heaviest upon himself; and therein, as a priest, leading the Nation in an act of worshipping submissiveness before the Lord. Herein his comely, moral modesty becomes an act and attitude of simple reverence towards God. And thus his humility, just like his sense of righteousness, becomes apparelled all about with Godly piety.

In the third place, this new discernment of the ways of God unfolds profound discoveries of the divine evaluation of the diverse, contending interests in our commingled life. It makes clear which values fade, and which shine on eternally. The problem upon which Lincoln had transfixed his eye was that two and one-half centuries of hard and sad embondagement. By that gross sin men's deathless souls were bought and sold for transient gain. Past all denial, therein was moral wrong; else moral wrong had no existence. Its presence, every time he faced it, tortured Lincoln, and made him miserable. And it affronted heaven, overturning God's creative fiat of equality in all mankind. It set and ranked brief creature comforts and desires above the worth of heaven's image in a brother man. Every day it challenged heaven's curse. But heaven's judgment was delayed. Long centuries seemed to show that heaven was indifferent whether human souls or carnal pleasures held superior rank.

But now, within the awful tumult of the war there boomed an undertone, conveying unto all who had quick ears to hear, how God adjudged that wrong. Upon dark battle clouds shone heavenly light, making newly plain God's estimate of slaveholder and of slave; of joys and gains that perish with their use, or await recall; and of souls that never die. Those awful tidings told how ill-gotten, carnal wealth is mortgaged under woe, and to the uttermost farthing must be released; how offending men affront the Lord; and how all offenses must be avenged. They made full clear how he who grasps at earthly gain by wrecking human dignity commits a primal sin—a sin that time, though it run into centuries, cannot obscure, or mitigate, or exempt from strict review. They reveal infallibly that God's pure eye is on God's image in every son of man; that supreme, far-seeing ends are lodged in all the good but unenduring gifts wherewith God's wise and kindly bounties crown man's toil; that a perfect moral government holds dominion everywhere and forevermore; and that beneath this rule, in God's own time, it shall come supremely clear that feasts and luxury and fine attire, that wealth and lust and pampered flesh have lesser worth and pass away, while souls of men may thrive, and gain, and win new worth eternally.

As Lincoln's eye reviewed these centuries of reveling wealth, and impoverished hearts; and beheld, in the issues of the resultant war, that wealth laid waste, and those pure hearts fed and filled with hope and liberty; his wisdom to compare all earth-born, mortal things with things unperishing and heavenly passed through new birth, new growth to new completeness in depth and clarity and confidence. And all this gain to Lincoln, while wholly ethical, dealing as it did with the wrong and right in human slavery and liberty, owed all its increase to truer understanding of the Lord. Here again his ethics was purified by faith. His faith was deeply ethical. As with his lowliness, and his rectitude, so with his moral valuation of the human soul. It was vestured all about with Godly piety.

In the fourth place, within the awful wreckage of the war, with which this last inaugural is so absorbed, there were mighty attestations that God was pitiful. That war could be defined as God's vengeance on man's cruelty. Precisely this was what Lincoln grew to see. To all who toiled in slavery the war had brought deliverance. Thereby the stinging lash was snatched from human hands; the human heel was thrust from human necks; the shameless havoc of the homes of lowly men was stayed; countless sufferings were assuaged; and true blessedness was restored to souls hard-wonted to unrelenting grief.

And this achievement was alone the Lord's. Of all down-trodden men high heaven became the champion. In all its awful judgments he who ruled that conflict remembered mercy. High above all the bloody carnage of those swords there swayed the scepter of the All-pitiful. In the very doom upon the strong God wrought redemption for the poor. And so, as that dreadful wreckage brought to nothing all the pride in the extorted gain of centuries, it published most impressively that he who reigned above all centuries was All-compassionate.

To this great thought of God, Lincoln keyed this last inaugural. The majesty of God's sovereign law of purity and righteousness was robed in kindliness. Into this high truth ascended Lincoln's patriot hope. Let men henceforth forswear all cruelty, and follow God in showing all who suffer their costliest sympathy. This was a mighty longing in his great heart, as he prepared this speech. Before God's vindication of the meek, let the merciless grow merciful. Yea, let all the land, for all the land had taken part in human cruelty, confess its wrong, accept God's scourge without complaint, thus opening every heart to God's free, healing grace, and binding all the land in leagues of friendliness. Let men, like God, be pitiful. Like God, let men be merciful. In mutual sympathy let all make clear how men of every sort may yet resemble God, the All-compassionate. This was the trend and strength of Lincoln's gentleness, as it stood and wrought in full maturity beneath God's discipline, within this last inaugural. It was nothing but an echo and reflection of the gentleness of God. And so, in his benignity, as in his rectitude and lowliness and purity, he stood in this address attired in Godly piety.

So Lincoln's ethics can be described, in his ripened harvest-tide of life. So it stands in this inaugural. It is alike a living code for daily life, and a religious faith. It is born and taught of God. It is Godliness without disguise, upon the open field of civic statesmanship. It is a prophet's voice, in a civilian's speech. It is the seasoned wisdom of a man familiar equally with the field of politics, and the place of prayer. It shows how God may walk with men, how civic interests deal with things divine. It proves that a civilian in a foremost seat may without apology profess himself a man of God, and gain thereby in solid dignity. It shows how heaven and earth may harmonize.

But this manly recognition in Lincoln's mind of the inner unison of ethics and religion was in no respect ephemeral, no careless utterance of a single speech, no flitting sentiment of a day. It was the fruitage of an ample season's growth. It was royally deliberate, the issue of prolonged reflection, the goal of mental equipoise and rest to which his searching, balanced thought had long conduced. It was in keeping with an habitual inclination in his life.

This proclivity of his inwrought moral honesty to find its norm and origin, its warrant and secure foundation in his and his Nation's God must have taken shape controllingly within those silent days that intervened between his first election in 1860, and the date of his inaugural oath in 1861. Else, in those brief addresses on his way to Washington, that marvelous efflorescence upon his honest lips of an ideal heavenward expectancy is unaccountable. In those dispersed and fugitive responses, from Springfield to Independence Hall and Harrisburg, there breathed such patriotic sentiments of aspiration and anxiety as owed their ardor, their excellence, and their very loyalty to his eager trust and hope, that all his deeds as president should execute the will of God. Throughout his presidential term this wish to make his full official eminence a facile instrument of God, attains in his clear purpose and intelligence a solid massiveness, all too unfamiliar in the craft of politics.

The witness to this, in a letter to A. G. Hodges of April, 1864, is most explicit and unimpeachable. This letter is a transcript of a verbal conversation, is written by request, and is designed distinctly to make the testimony of his mortal lips everywhere accessible and permanent. Its major portion aims to give his former spoken words a simple repetition. Then he says:—"I add a word which was not in the verbal conversation." And upon this he appends a paragraph, as of something he could not restrain, the while he was conscious perfectly that what he was about to write was certain to be published and preserved among all men. In this letter, so doubly, so explicitly deliberate, he is defending his decree for unshackling the slave, by the plea, that only so could the Union be preserved. In the appended paragraph, he disclaims all compliment to his own sagacity, and accredits all direction and deliverance of the Nation's life, in that dark mortal crisis, to the hidden, reverend government of a kind and righteous God.

If any man desires to probe and understand the thoughtfulness of Lincoln's piety, let him place this doubly-pondered document and the last inaugural side by side, remembering discerningly the date of each, detecting how each conveys Lincoln's well-digested judgment of unparalleled events, and not forgetting that Lincoln foresaw how both those documents would be reviewed in generations to come. Here are signs assuredly that Lincoln's lowliness and reverence, his prayerfulness and trust, his steadfastness and gratitude towards God had been balanced and illumined beneath the livelong cogitations of an even, piercing eye. Pursuing and comparing every way the tangled, complex facts of history; the endless strifes of men; the broken lights in minds most sage; and the awful evidence, as the centuries evolve, that greed and scorn and hate and falsity lead to woe; his patient mind grows poised and clear in faith that a good and righteous God is sovereign eternally. The truth he grasped transcended centuries. His grasping faith transcends change.

But Lincoln's piety was not alone deep-rooted and deliberate, the ripened growth of mixed and manifold experience. It was heroic. It was the mainspring and the inspiration of a splendid bravery. This is finely shown in the early autumn of 1864. On September 4 of that year he wrote a letter to Mrs. Gurney, a Quakeress. This letter bears a most curious and intimate resemblance to the central substance of the last inaugural. It witnesses to his earnest research after the hidden ways of God.

Within this search he sees some settled certainties. He sees that he and all men are prone to fail, when they strive to perceive what God intends. Into such an error touching the period of the war all had fallen. God's rule had overborne men's hopes. God's wisdom and men's error therein would yet be acknowledged by all. Men, though prone to err, if they but earnestly work and humbly trust in deference to God, will therein still conduce to God's great ends. So with the war. It was a commotion transcending any power of men to make or stay. But in God's design it contained some noble boon. And then he closes, as he began, with a tender intimation of his reverent trust in prayer. The whole is comprehended within this single central sentence, a sentence which involves and comprehends as well the total measure of the last inaugural:—"The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance."

Here is a confession notable in itself. It would be notable in any man, and at any time. But when one marks its date, its notability is enhanced impressively. For Lincoln was traversing just there some of the darkest hours of his overshadowed life. It was the period following his second nomination for the presidency in May of 1864, and before the crisis of election in November of the same year. Central in that season of wearisome and ominous uncertainty fell the failure of the battle in the Wilderness under Grant; the miscarriage of his plans for Richmond; and the awful carnage by Petersburg. Here fell also the date of Early's raid, with its terrible disclosure of the helplessness in Washington. Thereupon ensued, in unexampled earnestness, a recrudescence of the great and widespread weariness with the war; and of an open clamor for some immediate conference and compromise for peace. Foremost leaders and defenders of the Union cause throughout the North sank down despairingly, convinced that at the coming national vote Lincoln was certain to meet defeat. At the same time the army sorely needed new recruits; but another draft seemed desperate. Then Lincoln's closest counselors approached his ears with heavy words of hopelessness about the outlook in the Northern States confessedly most pivotal.

In the midst of those experiences, on August 23, 1864, Lincoln penned and folded away with singular care from all other eyes, these following words:—

"This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be reelected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the president-elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration, as he will have secured his election on such ground that he cannot possibly save it afterward."

Those words were written eleven days before he penned the sentiments cited above from the letter to the Quakeress. Between those two dates the Democratic Convention of Chicago had convened and nominated General McClellan.

Amid such scenes, in the presence of such events, and among such prognostications, Lincoln chiseled out those phrases about the perfect, hidden, but all-prevailing purposes of God. Here is Godly piety in the sternest stress of politics. Here faith is militant, and unsubdued. Its face is like a burnished shield. Its patience no campaign outwears. In its constancy suggestions of surrender can find no place. It was forged upon a well-worn anvil, under mighty strokes, and at a fervent heat. Fires only proved its purity. It was fighting battles quite as sore as any fought with steel. It was the deathless, truceless courage of a moral hero. It was pure and perfect fortitude. Its struggle, its testing, and its victory had not been wrought on earthly battle-fields. Its strife had been with God. More than with the South, Lincoln's controversy had been with the Most High. He wrestled with the heavenly angel through the night, like the ancient patriarch. Like the ancient saint, he bore the marks of grievous conflict. And like him of old, he gained his boon. He achieved to see that God and perfect righteousness were in eternal covenant.

Such was Lincoln's piety. His view of God gave God an absolute pre-eminence. In Lincoln's day, as in the day when Satan tempted Christ, vast areas of human life seemed to give all faith in God's control the lie; and men in multitudes abjured such futile confidence. But Lincoln kept his faith in God, and truth, and love, and immortality. And in that faith he judged his trust, and hope, and prayer to be preserved on high inviolate. There above, he firmly held, were lodged eternally the perfect pattern and assurance of full rectitude and charity. And in that understanding he held on earth unyieldingly to the perfect image of that heavenly norm, in a pure and acquiescent loyalty and love. Thus discerningly, submissively, triumphantly did Lincoln's heart aspire to unify an honest earthly walk with a living faith in God.

One word remains. As Lincoln makes confession of his faith in this inaugural, extolling God supremely, and therein announcing to his fellowmen the groundwork of his morality, it comes to view that the qualities held fast in Lincoln's heart, and the attributes of God have marvelous affinity. The equity he adores in God he cherishes within himself, and recommends to all. God's estimate of the incomparable value of a human soul, when set beside the variable treasures men exchange, Lincoln's judgment reverently approves, and as reverently adopts, establishing thereby a standard quality in his conscious life. God's tender pity for the poor, hidden deep in his divine rebuke of slavery, and hidden deeper still within his mercy for all who help to bear its awful sacrifice, melts and molds the heart of Lincoln to the same compassion. And to the very outlines of God's majesty, as his sovereign purposes are all unrolled and all fulfilled throughout the earth, Lincoln's soul conforms ideally, in its humble vision and expression of devout, discerning praise.

Here is something passing wonderful. Between a fragile, mortal man and the eternal God, when each is limned in terms of ethics, appears a deep and high agreement. There is enthroned in each a common righteousness. In each, the laws of mercy are the same. In each are constituted principles inwrought with immortality. And within the eternal interplay of reverence and majesty between mankind and God, there is a fellowship in dignity that proves the holy Maker and his moral creature to be immediately akin. And so the mind and will of Lincoln, in this their moral plenitude, may interpret and recommend, may apprehend and execute the eternal purposes of God. This high commission Lincoln humbly, firmly undertook. And in his commanding life there is a mighty hint, not easy to silence or erase, that Godliness and ethics, which have been set so often far apart, were eternally designed for unison.

His Logic—The Problem of Persuasion

In the study of Lincoln's ethics it is not enough to describe it as an ideal scheme of thought, however notable its range and poise and insight may be seen to be. As Lincoln's character stands forth in national eminence among our national heroes, he figures as a man of deeds, a man of powerful influence over the actions of other men, a man of masterly exploits. However truly it may be affirmed that multitudes of adjutants reinforced his undertakings at every turn and on every side, it still holds also true, and that a truth almost without a parallel, that his sheer personal force was the single, undeniable, over-mastering energy that shaped this Nation's evolution through an outstanding epoch in its career. It was primarily out of those prolific and exhaustless energies, stored and mobilized within himself, that he rose, as though by nature, to be national chief executive. It was straight along the line of his far-seeing vision and advice that Congress and the Nation were guided to accept and undertake that terrible enterprise of war. In that great struggle he came to be in firm reality, far more than any other man, the competent, effective commander-in-chief. He was chief councilor in a cabinet whose supreme function dealt singly with matters wholly executive. It was by the almost marvelous unison of wisdom and decision resident in him that Congress and the Nation were day by day induced to hold with an almost preternatural inflexibility to the single, sovereign issue of the strife. When, after four years of unexampled bitterness, multitudes were wearying of all patience in further hostilities, it was his personal momentum and weight, more than any other influence, that held the prevailing majority of the national electorate to predetermine by their free ballots that, at whatever cost of further war, the principles of liberty, equality, and national integrity should be placed above all possible challenge or assault forever.

And in the period before the war and before his elevation to the presidency this same executive efficiency, this singular capacity to mold the views and stir the motives of other men, was likewise in continual demonstration. Discerning how supreme a factor in our American affairs was the power of public sentiment, and observing how that power was being utilized to undermine the national tranquillity, he challenged and overthrew single handed the leading master of the day in the field of political management and debate. Trusting in the same confidence, and pursuing the same device, he appealed to the civic consciences of men in the open field of free debate, by the single instrument of reasoned speech, until, by his persuading arguments, he consolidated into effective harmony and led to national victory a party of independent voters, with watchword, platform, and experience all untried. In all the process by which that new-formed party gained access to national pre-eminence it was Lincoln's governing influence that went ahead and gave the movement steadiness. And through it all he vitally inspired a Nation, now undivided and indivisible, with a prevailing, corporate desire, that all succeeding days and all beholding Nations are now deeming, for any stable civic life, the true enduring ideal.

And all of this was compassed and set afoot within scarcely more than one decade. In October of 1854 at Peoria, he consciously took up his strenuous enterprise. In April of 1865, he laid it down and ceased to strive. Single handed he undertook the task. Through all its progress the weight of that one hand was undeniably preponderant. And when that hand relaxed, the task that its release left trembling was one that stirred a mighty Nation's full solicitude.

Here is something marvelous. These affirmations, as thus far made, seem certainly overdrawn, and totally incredible. An agency and an efficiency of national dimensions, introducing and completing an epoch in our national history; but an agent and an outfit almost defying inventory, his personality seeming in every phase so simple and without prestige, and all his ways and means seeming so unpromising and plain; the while through all his course he was confronting a resistance and a hostility whose impulse was rooted in centuries of firm and proud dominion, and whose onset made a Nation tremble. How can such stupendous affirmations be clothed with credibility? Was it indeed the hand of Lincoln that turned the Nation from its mistaken path? Was it Lincoln's will that reinaugurated our predestined course? Was it Lincoln's overcoming confidence that established in the land again a good assurance that its integrity was indestructible?

If questions such as these were addressed to Lincoln himself for his reply, we may be sure his answer, like all his ways, would contain a beautiful mingling of modesty and confidence. Heeding well the mortal crisis, and hearing the Nation's call for help, he would not refuse, when bidden and appointed, to take his stand alone at the very apex of the strain, knowing well that the burdens to be borne would be greater than tasked the strength of even Washington; and affirming as he advanced warily to his post, that in his appointment many abler men had been passed by. But then he would re-affirm and urge again all the arguments of his great addresses and messages and debates, beginning with that initial trumpet peal in Peoria in 1854, and not concluding until, after all had been rehearsed and reavouched, he recited again with prophetic earnestness this last inaugural. And throughout all his devout re-affirmation of all the spoken and written appeals to which his patriotic mind gave studied form and utterance in that intense decade, a discerning ear could distinguish in every paragraph profound and penetrating attestations, such as these:—This is a mighty Nation. Its future is far more vast. Its present perplexities are intricate. It has been misled. It needs most sane direction. I am stationed at her head. Difficulties environ me. My burdens outweigh Washington's. But this land was conceived in liberty. It was dedicated to be free. Here all are peers. God's hand has been on our history. Our destiny enfolds the highest human weal. God is with us still. Human hearts are with us. Here is overcoming power. Despite my frailty and poor descent, I will never leave my place. I see how other men prevail with multitudes by personal appeal. This shall be my confidence. Though I have no name, though there is perhaps no reason why I should ever have a name, I can plead. I can plead with men. It is a Godlike art. Grave as is my problem, this is its grand solution. I will study to persuade. I will take refuge in the mighty power of argument. I will confer, and conciliate, and convince. I will employ my reason to the full. I will address, and assail, and enlist the reason of other men. I will put all my trust in speech, in ordered, reasoned speech. I will arrange all my convictions and hopes and plans in arguments. I will approach men's wills with momentous propositions. I will open a path to human hearts through open ears by my living voice. I will make righteousness vibrate vocally. To men's very faces will I rebuke their wrong. Argument, pure argument shall be my only weapon, my only agency, my only way. By naked argument, honest and unadorned, I will undertake to turn this Nation back to rectitude. I will rest all my confidence in truth, truth unalloyed, abjuring every counterfeit and all hypocrisy. It is truth's primal and mightiest function to persuade. Through persuasion alone can freemen be induced by freemen to yield a free obedience. The heavenly art of persuading speech shall be for me the first and the last resort. By this most comely instrument shall my most eager and ambitious wish gain access to all this peopled land, and win vindication through all coming time.

Something such as this, as one must judge from Lincoln's practice, was Lincoln's science and evaluation of the art of logical appeal. By every token Lincoln was a master of assemblies. Upon a public platform he was in his native element. There he won his place and name. Whatever any one may say about Lincoln's reputation or Lincoln's power, that power and that reputation were mined and minted in the very act and exercise of reasoning appeal. As iron sharpeneth iron, so he, in the immediate presence of audiences of freeborn men, assembled from his very neighborhood, shaped and edged and tempered his total influence. It was when upon the hustings, and while engaged in pleading speech, that he commanded the Nation's eye and gained the Nation's ear. And once advanced to national pre-eminence, it was still by logical persuasion that the Nation's deference was retained.

What now was the inner nature of Lincoln's arguments? What was the fiber, what the texture in the composition of his thought that made its arguments so convincing? What was the structure, and what the carrying power in his appeals that made their logic so prevailing, so compelling, so enduring?

To find an answer to this inquiry let men review yet once again this last inaugural. Here is a product of Lincoln's mind whose single motive is persuasion, whose momentum does not diminish, and which seems destined to be adjudged by history a master's masterpiece. What does this short speech contain that gave it in 1865, and gives it yet, an influence almost magical?

There can be but one possible reply. The factor in that address that makes its influence so imperial is the moral majesty of the argument in its major paragraph. That paragraph enshrines an argument. Though fashioned in the mode and aspect of a reverent supposition, the steady pace and import of its ordered thought is such as every ordered mind admits to be compelling. But in substance and in structure that argument is purely ethical. All turns upon that cited, undoubted fact of age-long, unrequited toil. Upon that stern actuality hinges all the arrangement of the thought. Its phrases move with rhythmic fluency; but they bind together inseparably a Nation's duty, sin, and doom; not omitting to enfold, with a marvel of moral insight, an almost hidden intimation of a healing cure.

Here are weighty thoughts, thoughts that press and urge, thoughts that carry and communicate the gravity of centuries. They contain an interpretation. They clarify and illuminate. And they all co-ordinate. They combine and operate together to enforce agreement. They demonstrate that tyranny breeds a baleful progeny of guilt and woe; that robbery binds the robber under debt to the full measure of his rapine; that such guilt can never be forgotten; that such a woe is pitiless; that the centuries, though slow and mute, are attentive and impartial witnesses; and that God's even judgments are over all, and are altogether just. This is all the content and all the purport of this paragraph, and of all this speech: an exposition of American slavery and of its resultant civil war, in moral terms, before the moral bar of every hearer's conscience, and beneath the thought of God's eternal righteousness; all turning upon the self-evident verity that unpaid toil is wrong. In this prolific affirmation is the fertile germ of all that Lincoln ever thought or undertook in that supreme decade. Here are enfolded all his axioms and postulates and propositions. By interlocking its multiform, infolded, self-evident certitudes he framed all his arguments. Its overflowing, resistless demonstrations in active human affairs formed all his corollaries. Toil unrequited is a moral wrong. It cries to heaven, and shall be avenged. In this avenging, if we but see our day, there is an open door to join with heaven, and transmute its vengeance into recompense and reconciliation.

This was Lincoln's logic. It was purely ethical. This was the master-key to his transcendent statesmanship. Here was the secret of his political efficiency. Thus, and in no other way, he swayed the Nation. Himself a Godlike man, and discerning in every other man the same Godlikeness; trusting his own soul's honesty, and appealing to honest manhood in all other men; he took his stand beside all the oppressed, and against all extortion; and voiced and urged and trusted the sovereign moral plea for perfect charity, and perfect equity for all.

But Lincoln's logic was interlaced with history. All through his debates and addresses are woven the facts and sequences of our national career. And to these connected events he clung in all his arguments, as a man clings to the honor of his home. There was in those events an argument. To tamper with that history, discrediting its sure occurrences, or distorting their right connection, was in his conception a downright immorality.

But mere historical exactitude was not the motive of Lincoln's appeal to past events. The momentum of our past was for Lincoln's use entirely moral. Here upon this continent, as he conceived our great experiment, was being tried, in the presence and on behalf of all mankind, a government in which the governed were the governors. Here men are inquiring and being taught what true manhood can create, uphold, and consummate upon a continental scale, in mutual equality. Here men are schooled for independence. Here men may dare to fashion their own law. Here men are nurtured towards full fraternity. Here men are forced to heed the civic necessity of being fair. Here a boundless impending future has to be kept steadily in view. Here the God of Nations is teaching a Nation that he should be revered. Here, in brief and in sum, men are being disciplined to know and cherish the rudiments of civic character.

Thus Lincoln interpreted the meaning of our national history. In his rating, its total purport was ethical. Any logical exposition of our national career, if its statements are historically exact, will carry moral consequences. If the logical sequence of any statement of our historical course is morally perverse, then that statement of our history is historically untrue. Thus Lincoln's jealous zest for truthful history, for truthful argument, and for true morality became coincident.

But Lincoln's logic was his own. His zeal for history was a freeman's zest. His arguments were not the cold reflection of a borrowed light. They were the fervid affirmations of his own convictions, compacted into reasoned unison, out of the indivisible constituents of his very manhood's honor. When in his appeal his soul most glowed, when the ordered sequence and pressure of his thought waxed irresistible, he was simply opening to his auditors the balanced burden of his honest heart. Then genuine manhood became articulate. Then pure honor found a voice. Then eloquence became naught but plain sincerity. Then arguments became transparent, and affirmations convinced like axioms. Then demonstrations moved. Assertions did persuade. Then the very being of the orator took possession of the auditor in an intelligent fraternity. True, indeed, a solid South, and multitudes besides, derided his postulates, contemned his arguments, and scorned derisively his tenderest appeals. But better than they themselves he understood their hearts; and holding fast forever his deeper faith and confidence, he maintained his reasoning and his plea, knowing surely that in some future day their chastened hearts would vindicate his words.

But in all of this exposition of Lincoln's logical force and skill there has been no mention of a syllogism. Did Lincoln then neglect that famous formula of argumentative address? To this natural inquiry it must be replied that Lincoln understood right well the fine utility of this strict norm of formal thought. Indeed, he had taken special pains to perfect his skill in just that form of argument. To the logical click in a well-formed syllogism his inner ear was well attuned. Repeatedly he summoned in its aid. An excellent illustration may be seen in his rejoinder to Douglas at Galesburg in September of 1858. But Lincoln's confidence was not in syllogistic forms, however trim. His trust was in his moral axioms. Unaided, naked truth; truth whose total urgency is self-contained, whose perfect verity is self-displayed, and whose proudest triumphs are self-achieved; pure truth, shaped forth in speech of absolute simplicity; truth that works directly in the human mind, like sunshine in the eye, was Lincoln's handiest and most common instrument in an argument. Thus he sought to so use reason as to awaken conscience and arouse the will. And thus his arguments prevailed.

This was Lincoln's logic. It was the orderly exposition of his honest manhood, pleading with the honest intelligence of every other man for his free assent. Himself a freeman whom God made free, and greeting in every other man an equal dignity; with loyalty to himself and with charity for all; with Godly deference and unfailing hope; he urged and argued from his own true manhood, and from no other grounds, with a logic that no true freeman can ever refute: that in this heaven favored land, and for the welfare of all the world, these ethical foundations of all true civic welfare be kept unmoved forever. In such a moral character, and in such a moral argument is this expanding Nation's only pride and sure defense. At any modern Round Table of civic knights Lincoln is true King Arthur, and his persuading speech the true Excalibur.

His Personality—The Problem of Psychology

When Plato took his pen to write his dialogues; when Michael Angelo took his chisel to fashion his Moses; when Raphael took his brush to paint his Madonna; they were designing to make their several ideals of personality pre-eminently beautiful and distinct. And each artist in his way won a signal, a supreme success. Moses, Socrates, the Madonna, are shining revelations of human personality. Success herein is the height of highest art.

But what is personality? It seems an eternal secret, despite all human search and art. Yet its secret is everywhere felt instinctively to be of all quests the most supreme. By every avenue men are trying to reach and reveal its hiding place. Our goal is nothing less than the human soul. And upon this inquest the eyes and instruments of our inspection are being sharpened with a determination and zeal hitherto unparalleled.

Suppose this quest be turned to Lincoln. Surely here is a human person. He stands enough apart in his preeminence to be pre-eminently distinguishable and distinct; while yet his face beams near enough to be as familiar and accessible as our most accessible and familiar friend. For surely, despite all his proneness towards a musing solitude, Lincoln, of all Americans, displays through all his published statements, and in all his public life, an instructive and unstudied openness and unreserve. Just here his marvelous power and influence lie. He practiced no concealment. He held communion with all his fellowmen. Herein consists his honesty.

Now may not an honest scholarship, honestly conceiving that of all investigations our pursuit for the ways and dwelling place of personality is easily supreme, as honestly believe that in the open, waiting heart of Lincoln that supreme inquiry may find its supreme reward? Surely here is promise of a labor that will pay. In Lincoln's personality is a vein, a mine whose worth and sure utility no mineral wealth can parallel.

What in very truth, what in solid fact, what in absolute reality is Lincoln's personality? For undeniably in facing and regarding him, we confront and apprehend a human life, compact and self-controlled, the native home and throne of all the conscious and self-directed energies that are ever resident within and representative of any man. If human personality ever took evident and conscious shape and form, then Lincoln is an open and easily approachable illustration of its embodiment. Upon no object may a student of psychology more easily or more wisely fix his eye than upon the soul of Lincoln, when it thrills in resolute, intense endeavor, as in this last inaugural.

For one thing, that Lincoln should be the specimen of psychology commanding any student's choice is suggested by Lincoln's notability. Here is an exhibit in no way ordinary. He has secured the attention of us all. And the attention of us all is athrill with mighty interest. However it has come about, in some way, as a human personality, he illustrates a type, he presents a sample so powerful and positive as to stand before all eyes almost alone, while also so attractive as to be by everyone beloved. This fact may fairly beget assurance from the start that in any heedful search for the very substance of human personality, an interior and intimate fellowship with Lincoln may show us closely and clearly where it dwells, and what it is. For from the start it stands plain that Lincoln's hold upon our hearts is in its controlling co-efficients purely personal. That hold clings fast and spreads afar, indifferent to space, or time, or even death. His influence over us, so gladly welcomed and so clearly felt, is no wise physical or temporal. It cannot be handled or weighed. It is personal. Herein is high encouragement. And that in this sense of our response to his enduring sway should be enfolded on our part, a kindred, pure, enduring delight attests convincingly that within Lincoln's personality and our own there is something mutual. Within the thing we search and us who seek there is profound affinity. In this our encouragement may heighten, and that with solid soberness, unto hope.

And then the scene of this his last inaugural is all aglow with promise. For here if anywhere Lincoln's personality may be seen engaged in the ripeness of his finished discipline, and the fullness of his manhood's strength. The scene itself swells full of meaning; and Lincoln's part and contribution fix and fill the center of its significance. Surely if anything within that scene is plain to see and localize, it is Lincoln's own identity. The living Lincoln is surely there, wholly unreserved and unconcealed. There Lincoln's personality is in fullest play, an evident and mighty revelation, plainly felt and seen.

But it is only in the action that the actor comes to view; only in his words does the thinker stand revealed. Here and thus, and nowhere else or otherwise, is Lincoln's personality unveiled. And yet herein, within the compass of this speech, Lincoln unlades a burden of such grave concern, and unrolls a problem of such profound complexity as could nowhere come to birth and utterance but in a mighty human heart. In the vastness of that problem and anxiety can be gauged the vastness of the measure of that heart. Here open into immediate view at once an object and a method of research, fitted at once to challenge and appall the bravest student's heart. But once its summons is distinguished, it is irresistible.

One thing that meets the student, as he seeks the speaker in this speech, is its witness to his titanic and pathetic toil. The words he utters are the message of a laborer far forespent, voiced with mingled weariness and hope, well towards the sunset of a weary day. The sun had been fiercely hot. The field had been full of thorns. And through the arid hours he had tasted little food, or rest, or joy. No husbandman ever chose his seed or tilled his ground at greater cost of patient care. None ever had to bend his frame to ruder weather, or battle against more malicious and persistent pests. And all the agony of that toil had been wrought through within the anguish of his mind. In exactest and exacting thought he had engrossed and consumed the full measure of his full strength. On all he had to bear and do he pondered mightily. No mortal ever pondered more intently on all that mortals ever have to meet. In this inaugural scene the soul of Lincoln is straining at its full strength. No portion of his personal life is idling. If a student's hand is truly deft, he can feel, as he fingers the throbbing life of this address, the pulse beats of a full heart.

And within the grasp and compass of that heart are revolving vast and strenuous themes. The soul of Lincoln is dealing with a Nation's destiny. His speech is borne upon his single voice; but with that single voice he pleads for millions; and its vibrations carry through a continent, as a national oracle. Expounder and defender of the Nation's vital honor, beleaguered all about with war, distressed by all oppression, eager with a sacrificial passion that all men everywhere may have liberty and an equal share in equity, searching for a just and stable basis for the world's tranquillity, as he stands and strives throughout that speech the structure of his soul grows luminous. As he studied Providence and scanned the grounds of government; as he peered far into the deeps of freedom, the majesty of duty, and the sanctions of inviolable law; as he pondered the nature of eternal right, and the deadly mischief of moral wrong; as he watched the ways of hate and pride and falsity and sensual delights, he was not alone compacting the substance and order of this immortal address; but in the shapely body of his argument he has embodied and uncovered his honest, guileless heart. In the very scars and seams upon his sorrow-shadowed face, as he overcomes his task and fills out his duty in this address, discerning eyes can see through the furnace of how deep refinement his humble and majestic soul has been forever beautified. Transforming themes possessed his mind. By the ministry and inner influence of these themes he grew to be transformed; and in the process and issue of that change the outline and texture of his inner being becomes traceable.

And of this inner revelation the most notable mark is its simplicity. As in this speech his inner life is introduced, its texture is not perplexing and intricate. It is perfectly apprehensible. The total speech can be quickly scanned. Its sentiments barely get your full attention before they are at an end. Its entire compass can be comprehended in a single glance. Its whole sum can be reviewed in a single breath. And still its themes and propositions are imperial. Within its fine simplicity its stateliness stands uneclipsed. Hence its marvelous power to command. Upon all who look and listen, its action and appeal are like the dawning of a day. Its major propositions are assented to unconsciously. It works like light. It is genial, winsome, clear. And it is irresistible. It moves. It rules. It is an argument, the ordered appeal of a candid, earnest mind to the reasoned thought of honest men. Gentle and modest throughout, it contains and conveys compelling energy. It has the sturdiness of a hardy oak. And yet its first appearing was like a new unfolding of our flag. It is a kingly word, alike in lasting beauty and enduring strength. In this there is surely some sure reflection of that hidden man within, Lincoln's real, undying self.

And this still further may be said. Amid these sovereign interests and affirmations their agent is thus employed of his own free choice. He is no automaton. The Lincoln whom we seek, the Lincoln whom this address is helping us to see can never be defined by physical terms. Through the realm of physics things move as they are moved. Lincoln in this address moves and guides and governs himself. And he is here self-judged. This inaugural teems with moral verdicts, verdicts that define eternal issues irrevocably. No higher function than this can be imagined in any sphere of being, or in any form. These verdicts Lincoln fastens upon himself. And before the same complete authority he summons the whole Nation to bow. Deep within those verdicts there throbs omnipotently a sense of moral duty, moral right, man's highest good and goal. This ideal of what should be stands evident in this inaugural in Lincoln's own humble conformity with God, in his own unimpeachable integrity, in his unreserved benevolence, and in his pure esteem for souls. In each one of these constituents of human duty Lincoln sees unchallengeable authority. For the honor of each one he deems himself responsible. Their mingled rays create the light in which he writes this speech, by which this speech is read, and under whose clear radiance he records his oath. Surely here are more than hints for any one, who seeks to see just where this speech originates, and most precisely how its author may be defined.

Within this last preceding paragraph one feels again the presence and the movement of all that all the chapters of this volume have contained. Herein we seem to face a sort of final synthesis of all our study. If this be true, or only true approximately, then its face and contents should be scrutinized until they are cleared of every shadow or alloy. For this research is surely approaching its goal, and some of its boundaries may surely be defined.

One line that shows indelibly is his intelligence; an intelligence comprehending total centuries, and assembling within its scope extreme diversities; an intelligence that has a piercing eye, acute to distinguish and divide; an intelligence that has power to estimate, compare, and summarize; an intelligence intolerant of error, and eager after truth; an intelligence that can frame an argument designed to clarify, convince, and win all other minds; an intelligence that assumes to deal with God, receiving and reflecting within its own interior and proper vision a revelation of the divine intent. Here is an energy, at once receptive and original, fitted marvelously for a reflection that can embrace and authorize eternal truth.

This intelligence is within control. It is not a vagrant or unguided force. It is under conduct, all its action to observe, inspect, and estimate being ordered reasonably. And all this influence operating to understand and counsel, all this wisdom, while gathering light and substance from everywhere, is informed within, and wonderfully self-contained. As Lincoln reasons in this inaugural, as he resolves and purifies his argument, its power to convince is most intimate and deep within himself. As he guides and shapes his thoughts for the thought of other men, the convictions within the speaker, and their power to persuade, so inwrought in the speech, become identical. In his own consent choice and judgment are combined. Here is freedom indeed, a freedom to discern as truly as to choose, to distinguish as truly as to decide, to estimate as truly as to select, the freedom of the intelligence, an intelligence that is truly free.

This freedom fashions character. It is a moral architect. It is original, able to create. The author of this speech is self-produced. The personality that comes to view among those words is self-determined and self-made. Its plan was sketched by his own hand. His position and his posture, his sentiments and his sympathies, his bent and inclination, his moral postulates and axioms, his moral stamp and trend and tone, his stability and moral sturdiness are all his own invention, originally, essentially, inseparably his own. Lincoln's character is Lincoln's handicraft. Its title vests in him. It never was, nor could it ever become the property of another man. This all men recognize. But this universal recognition is pregnant with significance to any seeker amid the phenomena of Lincoln's life for the substance of his personality. Somewhere within those statements just now made, somewhere within Lincoln's conscious authorship and invention of his moral worth is precious intimation of the whereabouts and constitution of his personality.

This blend in Lincoln of freedom and intelligence, of liberty and sanity is notable for its evenness. Lincoln's liberty is not chimerical or riotous. It is regulated, orderly, real. Within himself and over his full destiny, an unimpeachable sovereign though he is, he is not prone towards wilfulness, but towards composure and sobriety. He moves as one fast-held beneath the law that for all his movements he will be accountable. He always wears the mien of one who carries high responsibilities. Far from being arbitrary, he behaves as facing within himself a court of arbitration, truly self-invested, and just as truly sovereign. Of all his words and deeds and attitudes he is himself self-constituted, reverend judge. Whether seeking to resolve a doubt, or waiting to receive a verdict, his appeal is finally to himself. This is his mood and posture in this inaugural. He is giving an opinion. This scene is a literal crisis in a review in which a Nation's history and delinquency have met incisive, balanced examination, to the end that his own view of duty as president might come clear to his own judicial eye, and all gain the approbation of all mankind. In his loftiest originality, where his conscious power and right to elect the path he takes is most self-evident, the way he takes is also owned to be an unimpeachable obligation. Here is another signal hint for the seeker after the living and abiding source of Lincoln's words and deeds. Somewhere within this sense of duty, so sane and free and serious, lives the very Lincoln whom we seek.

This judicial evenness within the free and reasoned movements of Lincoln's action and argument is due to a balanced store of moral ballast. His stalwart mind and sturdy will and steadfast consciousness that duty binds his life stand leagued together in a partnership employing infinite wealth. With these resources he daily ventures vast investments. This speech is such a venture, laden with most goodly merchandise. Indeed he ventures here, as everywhere, his all. His fear of God, his self-respect, his neighbor love, his thirst for things that last—these are the priceless treasure he examines with a searching insight, estimates with judicial carefulness, enjoys with soul-filling admiration, and then responsibly invests. On these and these alone he chooses and resolves to seek returns. These are the only seas where sail his ships. Here is all his merchandise. Here is the only exchange where Lincoln ever resorts. Here and here alone can one make computation of his wealth. If he has wisdom, it is here. Here is all his liberty. Here is a full register of his life's accounts, and of his full accountability. Here are all his goodly pearls. These are the jewels that delight his heart. And if only students have the eye to see, within this joy deep secrets are revealed.

Just here this study has to pause. For while it seems to be facing straight for that in Lincoln which is innermost—his essential and immortal self, transcending all the mere phenomena of life—and standing where nothing intervenes between our eager search and his steadfast soul, the outlook, as it is scanned by different eyes, reflects in different minds world-wide diversity. Lincoln sees this difference, and deals with it in this speech. He knows his chosen estimates of God and man and government, of prayer and equity and happiness, of right and wrong and penalty, awake resentful protest. Just here his manhood shows its breed. Without resentment, but without surrender, he takes and keeps his oath, expecting that God, humanity, and time will vindicate his insight and his choice. This valiant expectation stands today fulfilled, a commanding testimony that Lincoln's personality, though so simply childlike in its every trait, has majestic permanence and comprehension. Its inmost attributes, as purified in him, reflect and clarify to other souls, however opposite and hostile they may seem, their own essential and enduring rank. This gives pointed intimation that in Lincoln's conscious life, deep underneath his daily words and deeds, there is a conscious unity, the very seat of freedom and law, a shrine of reverence, an altar of love, a throne of truth, a fountain-head of purity—a unity that no antagonist can overcome, that neither time nor death can decompose.

But an objection still persists. Some man will say that the search for Lincoln's personality, as thus far carried on, has only dealt with ethics, whereas research in personality is at bottom a problem of pure psychology; and that in pure psychology the position holds impregnable that naught beneath men's words and deeds can ever be discerned; that naught indeed is real for this investigation but sensible phenomena; that a human soul is something it is impossible to place.

This matter plainly claims respect. As an objection it is inveterate; and whenever urged, it gains wide heed. In treating with it some things rise up for hearing. To begin with, the intimation cited in the former paragraph will honor pondering. Though that paragraph is intent on ethics in its every word, no paragraph in all the volume more strictly so, still its statements clear more ground than a single hasty glance is liable accurately to survey. It is concerned with ethics truly—again be that conceded. But in no concern of morals whatsoever did Lincoln vacate intelligence. Never was pure intelligence more intellectually engaged than when Lincoln's mind was scanning moral problems. In such engagements Lincoln's total being was occupied. And if amid the clustering multitudes of moral judgments and decisions that attend his moral inquiries and activities, there is witness to the presence of a freeborn judge whose identity remains continuously and consciously single and the same, that fact sheds searching light upon the problem with which this paragraph deals.

Let one listen again to this address—listen with a due intentness as it speaks of Union and destruction and defense; of bondage and lash and unpaid toil; of offenders, offenses and woe; of malice and charity and right; of God and Bible and prayer; of widows and orphans and wounds; of war and sorrow and peace; of Nations and centuries and Providence. Here are trilogies and tragedies and millenniums, in ethics and religion and philosophy—but borne from perishing lips to perishing ears upon the perishing vehicle of a passing breath. This human breath is frail, these human words are faint, this scene bursts forth and vanishes. But those trilogies! They are more than flitting words, and shifting scenes, and dying breath. The actor outlasts the scene; the speaker outlives his word; the mortal breath is not the measure of the man. He by whom these massive trilogies were marshaled and deployed before a national audience, upon a Nation's stage, to form a national spectacle, and expound a Nation's history, does not perish with his breath, nor vanish with this scene. Before, within and afterwards he lives, pre-arranging, fulfilling and surviving this mighty drama of his life, mightily resembling God. A speech and scene like this bear witness to an author and actor outdating and outranking both scene and speech. An author looms within this speech, self-moved, creative, free. An actor moves within this scene, self-made, poetic, unconstrained. Speech and scene, voice and form are not the man. These are but his fading vesture. Deep within those solemn trilogies, as within a kingly robe, conveying to his vestment all its dignity, though all unseen among its shapely folds, stands Lincoln's living, Godlike self. It was to this the people paid their deference. Through those clear syllables that came to utterance upon those mortal lips it was Lincoln's immortal soul that became articulate. In those ringing accents Lincoln's self became identified. If ever a human personality crossed a human stage, not as actor echoing the words and attitudes of other men, but as an author and creator, fulfilling within himself, in God's fear, on other men's behalf, and with an eye to deathless destinies, his own responsible trust, that man was Lincoln in this second inaugural address. There he asserted and declared himself.

Here then, in the tone and impress of this address is the sovereign place to find the tone and impress of Lincoln's soul. If that living soul ever gave a conscious hint of its living lineaments and hidden dwelling place, here is that hint's finest published utterance. Here, then, is the total measure of our task. Upon this transparent speech, and not upon vacant air, is the student of psychology to direct his eye. Here is the final challenge. Deep within the deeps of this supreme address, clear within the rhythms of these resounding trilogies, what does one see and hear?

To the question thus defined an answer something such as this must be returned:

Here in this inaugural address is designation and signature of a man astute to comprehend a Nation's history, reverent towards responsibility, a champion and exponent of liberty, commending with radiant earnestness that all his fellow men so walk with God, so cherish equity, and so walk in charity as to secure in all the earth an amity that time can never disrupt.

Something such is the personality which this address attests. While this speech exists, this testimony will endure. Its word stands firm. And its signature is plain. He who wrote the speech has left upon its manuscript his clear and sacred seal. He who gave its body shape was a freeman none could bend, heedful of the arbiter none might disobey, humble towards God, loyal to himself, a friend to every man, an aspirant for life.

Surely these are intimations of personality. Here is Lincoln, a vivid plenitude in living unison of timeless quietness and harmony, ordaining freely his own law of even heed for self and brother man, for God and spirit life. Here is the full manhood of a living soul, Godlike and earthly-born. None of its features are solidified in flesh, to be again and soon resolved. All its face is spiritual; all its action free, self-ordered, and self-judged; all preserving jealously its own kingly honor; all beaming graciously on other men; all bearing homage up to God; all vivid with immortality; abhorring mightily all pride and hate, all falsehood and decay; all sharing sacrificially with other men the cost and shame entailed in righting human wrong. This is Lincoln's personality. In Godlike, friendly, undying self-respect; in heavenly, upright, immortal kindliness; in humane, divine, self-honoring heed for spirit-life—in each and any one of these four identical affirmations is Lincoln's personality exhaustively engrossed, each and any one declaring that he contains within himself a free and deathless soul, akin alike to God and man, and bound therein by the self-wrought law of love and truth.

These terms define a life at once of human and of heavenly range, at once inhabiting and transcending realms of change, at once self-ruled and environed with responsibility. Here is elemental personality, in inwrought and indivisible unity, with measureless capacity for versatility, easily blending fulness of vigor with complete repose, vestured and transfused with native symmetry and grace. In some such living, breathing words, themselves transfigured and illumined by the quickening verities they strive to body forth, may the pure, immortal soul of Lincoln, and of every child of man, be defined, unburdened, and declared.

Something thus must written words describe the soul that surged beneath this speech, and freely gave this speech its being. Surely such an undertaking must not be despised. That aspiring, creative spirit, so earnest and so resolute, far more than any speech its vision or its passion may body forth, demands to be portrayed. Grand as are these paragraphs, their author has a far surpassing majesty. Fitted as are these accents to reach and stir the auditors of a continent, the soul from which these accents rise has an access to all those auditors far more intimate.

If readers of this essay spurn the effort which it undertakes, let them not be scorners merely. From among their number, let some one arise, artist enough in insight and handicraft to make some truer delineation of that living Lincoln, the abiding origin and author of this and his every other noble speech and deed. Such an artist is sure to find, if ever the conscious soul of Lincoln shines through his hand, that when the inner face of Lincoln is portrayed, that portrait will carry speaking evidence of a joyful and abiding consciousness of liberty and law, of self and brother man, of things eternal, and of God; that in his countenance, so sorrow-shadowed and yet so serene, will shine a close resemblance to every other man; that through his quiet eye will gleam that image of God in which he and all his fellow men have been made; and that deep within it all will beam a radiant assurance that by the way of sacrifice the awful mystery of sin has been resolved.

Hitherward must men who seek the soul of Lincoln turn their eye. Humble, gentle, and loyal, eager after the life that is its own reward, at once dutiful and free, lavishing out his life to take the sting from sin—this is the soul of Lincoln. In this image every man will see himself reflected, either in affinity, or by rebuke, herein revealing how all men resemble God. Something such is man. Something such is our common manhood. Something such is our inherent testimony as to our origin and source. And something such is the task of him who would frame a valid definition of personality. No undertaking is more profound, none more supreme. And once it is accomplished, forms of statement will have been found availing to embody all man can ever know of self or God.