Lincoln was not deceived by an outward show of religion. A Southern woman begged the President to have her husband released from a Northern prison, "for," she said, "although he is a Rebel he is a very religious man." Lincoln replied: "I am glad to hear that, because any man who wants to disrupt this Union needs all the religion in sight to save him."

He treated with indifference people who commandeered. A haughty woman came to Lincoln and demanded a colonel's commission for her son. "I demand it," she said, "not as a favour but as a right. Sir, my grandfather fought at Lexington, my father fought at New Orleans, and my husband was killed at Monterey."

"I guess, Madam," was Lincoln's reply, "your family has done enough for the country. It is time to give some one else a chance."

When Hugh McCullough, Secretary of the Treasury in Lincoln's second term, presented a delegation of New York bankers at the White House, McCullough said: "These gentlemen of New York have come on to see the Secretary of the Treasury about our new loan. As bankers, they are obliged to hold our national securities. I can vouch for their patriotism and loyalty, for, as the good Book says, 'Where the treasure is there will the heart be also.'"

To which Lincoln replied: "There is another text, Mr. McCullough, I remember, that might equally apply, 'Where the carcass is there will the eagles be gathered together.'"

Lincoln condemned as tedious a certain Greek history. When a diplomat present said: "The author of that history, Mr. President, is one of the profoundest scholars of the age; no one has plunged more deeply into the sacred fount of learning."

"Yes," replied Lincoln, "or come up drier."

When in Chicago in 1860, the mayor, John Wentworth, asked Lincoln why he did not get some astute politician to run him, Lincoln replied that "events and not a man's own exertions made presidents."

To Henry C. Whitney, Lincoln remarked: "Judd and Ray and those fellows think I don't see anything, but I see all around them. I see better what they want to do with me than they do themselves."

They were deceived, not by Lincoln, who never cared what individuals thought, but by Nature, which often sets a trap for people who live in a world of their own illusions. Nature, the medium through which the Divine mind manifests, is, so to speak, a mask through which egoists cannot penetrate and by which the cunning are led to destruction. Lincoln let them talk and even act, knowing that they themselves were the tools for their own undoing. While the ward politicians and others, who thought themselves far superior, laid their plans, schemed, and intrigued, the man of clear vision awaited unperturbed the events which he knew would put them all in their proper places. Little did they dream that they were mere incidents among the million of incidents that go to the making of one epoch-making event.

The practical mystic is little concerned with incidents. The multitude do not know in what direction they are going, moved and influenced as they are by the incidental, the accidental, the shifting illusions in which they live, but the man who knows why they are influenced also knows why he is influenced.

Lincoln was patient with the men who considered him a sort of political accident. He understood their point of view. He did not entertain feelings of revenge. Hundreds of men, like John Wentworth, are only mentioned to-day because of some passing incident which connected them with the man whom they regarded as a failure in politics.