ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S CARDINAL TRAITS

A STUDY IN ETHICS

WITH AN EPILOGUE ADDRESSED TO THEOLOGIANS

BY

C. S. BEARDSLEE

Boston: Richard G. Badger

the gorham Press

The Copp Clark Co., limited

TORONTO

Copyright 1914, by C. S. Beardslee
All rights reserved

The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A.

To my sister Alice—
A living blend
Of love and loyalty,
Of modesty and immortal hope.

PREFACE

Abraham Lincoln was a man among men. He was earnest and keen. He was honest and kind. He was humble and inwardly refined. He was a freeman in very deed. His conscience was king.

These few words contain the total sum of the following book. In unfolding what they severally mean, and what their living unison implies, the aim has been to bring to view the clear and simple beauty of a noble personality; to show how such a human life contains the final test of any proper claim in all the bounds of Ethical research; and to stir in thoughtful minds the query whether such a character as Lincoln's life displays, instinct as it is with Godliness, may not yield forms of statement ample and exact enough for all the essential formulas of pure Religion.

Assuredly his aspirations were ideal. Quite as certainly his ways with men were practical. The call and need today of just his qualities are past debate.

If only in our national senate chamber the ever-shifting group of senators could hear the voice of Lincoln at every roll-call and in each debate! If only in all our universities our studious youth could glean each day from Lincoln, as he speaks of politics and of logic, of ethics and of history! If only in every editorial room, where current events are registered and reviewed, Lincoln's wit and wisdom might illumine and advise! If only at every council, conference, or convention, where leaders of our churches debate religious themes, the reverence of Lincoln might preside! If only in the council chambers where directors meet to plan and govern our modern enterprises in industry and finance, Lincoln's broad humaneness might be felt! If only every artist at his exalted and elusive task could every day obtain new views of Lincoln's full nobility! If only toilers in the shop and field could feel each day the friendly brotherhood in Lincoln's rough, hard hand!

Then toil, while losing naught of eagerness, would become content. Art, while losing naught of beauty, would become unfailingly ennobling. Commerce, while losing naught of enterprise, would grow benign. Religion, while retaining a becoming dignity, would not fail to be sincere. The public press would grow more savory and sane. Our schools would be nurseries of manliness. And our conscience would be embodied in our law.

But Lincoln's face is vanished. Lincoln's voice is hushed. What remains is that Lincoln's sentiments be republished every day in lives that reverence and reproduce his excellence. To indicate this path, to embolden and embody this aspiration is the service this volume undertakes.

Throughout this study, thought is fastened centrally upon Lincoln's last inaugural address. There Lincoln stands complete. And that completeness is vividly conscious in Lincoln's own understanding. Eleven days after its delivery, and one month before his death, he wrote to Thurlow Weed, saying that he expected that speech "to wear as well as—perhaps better than—anything I have produced." Of almost incredible brevity, containing as it left his hands, but five short paragraphs, the compass and burden of thought within that address are every way notable. It is in fact Lincoln's digest of the course and trend of our national life; while on the side of character it is replete with telling intimations of Lincoln's own moral effort, purpose, and point of view. Here are in visible action all the elements of essential manhood, all the virtues of a balanced character. Here are insight, judgment, resolution. Here is momentum. Here is something that endures. Here are ends worth any cost. Here is wariest use of means. And here are wrongs, engendering anguish, and mortal strife. And here are ultimate alternatives. And all is grasped and even merged in Lincoln as he speaks. Here is wealth of ready matter and direct allusion quite enough for any volume to lay open and assess.

Such a moral inventory and evaluation this study undertakes. Its method is to subject this short address to the strictest ethical analysis, to identify the elements that are integral and cardinal in the moral being of God, and man, and government. Then, to articulate and unify these elements into a vital ethical synthesis, to demonstrate and manifest the living unison of character. Then, to designate and undertake to clarify the major problems which such an analysis and such a synthesis of such a speech and such a man open to a student's mind.

In this procedure it is the aim to show how from first to last in Lincoln's life his mental clarity and his moral honesty are held in model parity; how in his daily walk law and liberty go hand in hand; how his cardinal moral qualities are to be defined; and how these elemental virtues may avail in their own authority and right to guide the eyes of men towards beauty, to guard the souls of men against despair, to find the stable base of government, to overcome all guilt by grace, to prove the perfect manliness of patience, to ground the thought of men upon reality, to pierce the gloom of woe, to find the core of piety, to perfect persuasive speech, and to win a vision of the soul. Hereby and thus it may at last stand plain that in the soul of Lincoln there is a moral universe; and that within the verities and mysteries of this universe he alone is truly wise and fully free who knows and proves the worth of faith.

That so broad a study should be based upon so brief a speech, or indeed upon Lincoln's single personality, may seem to some a fatal fault. Such a thought, when facing such a method and such a theme, is surely natural. As to its validity there need be no debate. The field is free. Let any number of other speeches, or of other people be assembled and placed beside the material handled in this book, for its re-examination. In such a process, the further it is pursued, if only Lincoln and the words of this inaugural are also held in thorough and continual review, it may come the more fully clear that in a theme like ethics mere multitude is not the measure of immensity; that the structure of this book is organic, not mechanical; that the single chapter on Lincoln's Moral Unison comprehends all that the volume anywhere contains or intimates; that all the problems handled in Part IV are only sample studies, and handled only suggestively; that the volume might be expanded indefinitely or much reduced, and its significance remain in either case unchanged; that correspondingly Lincoln's last inaugural and Lincoln's public life, each and both, outline in very deed a moral universe; that to rightly understand this single character and this one address is to understand humanity, and identify the ethical finalities; that to scan the soul of Lincoln in his religious attitudes is to gaze upon God's image, and face the reality and the rationale of the true religious life; and that, in consequence, any reader who hesitates to venture such vast conclusions upon so scant material may finally be induced to submit to a substantial remeasurement his present estimates of brevity and breadth.

CONTENTS

LINCOLN'S CARDINAL TRAITS

PART I. INTRODUCTION

Lincoln's Mental Energy

In ethics, if anywhere, a master needs to be mentally sane and strong. Truth cannot be trifled with here. Error here, whether in judgment or as to fact, is fatal. Insight to exactly discern, and balance to considerately compare must be the mental instincts of a moralist.

How was this with Lincoln? What was his outfit and what his discipline mentally? Was he unfailingly shrewd? Was he sufficiently sage? Was he by instinct and by habit truly an explorer and a philosopher? Did he have in store, and did he have in hand, the needful wealth of pertinent facts? Had he the logical strength and breadth to set them all in order and to see them all as one?

Such inquiries are severe—too severe to be pressed or faced by anyone in haste. But in this study of Lincoln such inquiries are not to be escaped. To fairly answer them is worth to any man the toil of many days. For just as surely as such research is resolutely pushed through all its course, the eye will come to see where wisdom dwells, and to learn what mental judgment and mental insight truly mean. And it will grow clear as day that Lincoln mentally, as well as physically, was no weakling; that in intellect, as in stature, he stands among the first.

In many places this stands clear. There is no better way to trace it out than to start from his last inaugural. To fully explore one single paragraph of this address, the paragraph with which it opens, will make one's examination of Lincoln's mental competence all but complete. Its opening sentence alludes to his first inaugural. That one allusion will repay pursuit.

There Lincoln assumed the presidency. In that act and under that oath he stepped to the executive headship of the Republic. By that step he faced seven states in secession. It was a civil crisis, never one more grave, or dark, or ominous. It threatened to subvert our national history and to undermine our national hope. It was crowding on towards bloody war a debate that dealt with the very basis of manhood in men. To see the meaning of that crisis and to govern its issue required an eye and a mind of Godlike vision and poise.

Here is an excellent place to examine the outfit and the action of Lincoln's intellect. His first inaugural is a masterpiece of intellectual equipoise and energy. Any mind that will fasten firmly upon the substance and the sequence of its thought may feel distinctly the struggle, and the strength, and the steadiness of Lincoln's mind. His arguments and his admonitions are impressive models of sanity and power. Which is the more notable, his insight or his outlook, it is hard to tell. The marvel is that the soberness and the force of his appeal rest quite as firmly upon the prophetic as upon the historic base. So clear is his grasp of the past, so sure is his sense of the present, and so deliberate is the poise of his judicial thought that his vision into the future has been found by time to be unerringly true.

Let any student put this to test. That address is an appeal. From beginning to end it pleads. Set all its parts asunder. Then bind them all together as Lincoln has done. And so find out what are its elements; whence they are gathered; what is fact; what is principle; what is prophecy; on what plan they are assembled; by what art they are displayed; to what they owe their force; if in any spot of its argument there is a break; and if the onset of the whole is irresistible. Distinct replies to these distinct inquiries will tell one all he needs to know about Lincoln's mental strength. Without wandering any further one can find that Lincoln's methods and conquests attest a student's patience, and a scholar's power; that his wisdom was ripe, entirely adequate to devise safe counsel for a Nation in civil strife.

A striking feature of the address is its philosophic finish. Though solidly set in concrete facts, and fitted ideally to the day of its delivery, it is replete with counsel good for every time, so phrased as to become the very proverbs of civil politics. Total paragraphs are little more than clustered apothegms of consummate statesmanship. To get the style and cast of Lincoln's mind let any student comprehend the girth, and ponder the weight of each following sentence, all gathered from this one address:—

The intention of the lawgiver is the law.

I hold that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual.

Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments.

It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination.

Continue to execute all the express provisions of our national Constitution, and the Union will endure forever.

Can a contract be peaceably unmade by less than all the parties who made it?

That in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual is confirmed by the history of the Union itself.

No State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union.

Think, if you can, of a single instance in which a plainly written provision has ever been denied.

All the vital rights of minorities and of individuals are so plainly assured to them by affirmations and negations, guarantees and provisions in the Constitution, that controversies never arise concerning them.

If the minority will not acquiesce, the majority must, or the government must cease.

If a minority in such case will secede rather than acquiesce, they make a precedent which in turn will divide and ruin them.

Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.

A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.

Unanimity is impossible.

One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.

Physically speaking we cannot separate.

Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws?

Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws among friends?

Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always.

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inherit it.

The chief magistrate derives all his authority from the people.

Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people?

If the Almighty Ruler of nations, with his eternal truth and justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South, that truth and that justice will surely prevail by the judgment of this great tribunal of the American people.

This people have wisely given their public servants but little power for mischief.

Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.

Here are six and twenty sentences, culled from this one address, that are nothing less than the maxims of a political sage, as lasting as they are apt. As a glove fits a hand, so did these counsels fit that day. As the needle guides all ships that sail, so their wisdom directs all politics still. They embody sure witness of an eye that is keen to see—none more narrowly; and of a mind that is trained to think—none more thoroughly. Their author was a man who knew. He knew the past. He knew things current. He knew what their coming issues were sure to be. He knew the grounds of government. He knew the omens of anarchy. He knew the awful possibilities in fraternal hate. And he knew the need and the awful cost of patient forbearance. Here is a man well past childhood intellectually. He has the eye and the mind of a man long schooled by discipline. And he has a tongue expert in speech, well freighted with tremendous sense, but lucid too, and graceful, and void of all offense. This one address displays a man, though pathetically unfamiliar with childhood schools, of consummate intellectual balance and force.

But, for its cherished end this inaugural proved pathetically incompetent. And when it became his duty to pronounce a second inaugural oath, the Nation had been four years in terrible war. That war levied a terrible tax upon the president's intellectual strength. The mental perplexities of those endless days and nights cannot be told. Much less can they be understood. It may be doubted whether any other man could have brought a mind to uphold and command those years with any approach to Lincoln's mental honesty. It was, under God, within the steadfast, tenacious grasp of Lincoln's exhaustless and invincible mental loyalty that our national destiny lay secure. To all the phases of all the problems of all those years, and to his own judgment and endeavor concerning them all, this same first paragraph of his second inaugural also alludes. This allusion, too, if any one would compass the full measure of Lincoln's mental strength, demands review, and will reward pursuit. The records are well preserved. And they bear abounding witness to Lincoln's almost superhuman sanity and insight and energy and mental equilibrium. If any one will follow through this honest and perfectly honorable hint, he will come to feel that the mind of Lincoln was the Nation's crucible in which all the Nation's problems were resolved.

Lincoln's Moral Earnestness

In the central paragraph of his last inaugural Lincoln enshrined compelling demonstration of his moral soundness. That single paragraph is nothing less than a solid section of a finished moral philosophy. It reckons right and wrong incapable of any reconciliation, God as Almighty Judge, and all his judgments just. But that opinion was no word in haste. Deliberate as he always was, when voicing any estimate as President, never was he more deliberate than when penning that moral explanation of the war. In four stern years he had been revolving surveying and pondering that sternest of all debates:—Should the war go on or should it cease? Every argument on either side, that heart or thought of man could feel or see, had been driven by every sense into the faithful heed of his honest soul. He bent his ear obediently to every plea, binding his patient mind to register fairly every weighty word, designing with absolute honesty that, when at last he spoke the executive decree, his decision should bind the Nation for the single perfect reason that it was right. And when finally and persistently he upheld the war and ordered its relentless prosecution to the end, no one may truthfully charge that opinion and command to ignorance or malice, to prejudice or haste. Moral grounds alone were the basis and motive of that conclusion and behest. The war was caused by slavery. With Southern success slavery would spread and become perpetual. If slavery was not wrong, nothing was wrong. That this great wrong should be restrained and in the end removed, the war must be put through.

But that was not all his thought and argument in this last inaugural. The war, for the time, parted the Nation sectionally. But the sin and guilt of slavery, in Lincoln's feeling, rested upon the Nation as a whole; and upon the Nation as a whole he adjudged the burden of its woe. Here the moral grandeur of Lincoln comes fully into view. His affirmation of that awful iniquity, inwrought in two centuries and a half of slavery, is no pharisaic indictment of the South. It is a repentant confession of his own and all the Nation's equal part in its infinite wrong. Among the guilty authors and abettors of that wrong he identifies himself. He deems the war God's righteous judgment upon the national inhumanity, and meekly bows his head, among the humblest and most afflicted of those who suffer and sorrow beneath that scourge.

That kindly fellowship with all the Nation in the sorrows of the war, with its lowly confession of all the guilt, and its patient endurance of all the atoning cost, proclaims and demonstrates that Lincoln's respect for righteousness was supreme. It betokens a living sense of law, a hearty assent to duty, a careful reckoning of guilt, an uncomplaining readiness to own and rectify all wrong, a manly purpose to inaugurate a new rule of equity, a reverent acknowledgment of God, an ideal esteem for manhood everywhere, freedom from the dominion of greed, friendliness for the erring, pity for the hurt and poor. Above all it shows the faith of a moral seer in its manifest confidence that human evil, and all its awful sorrow, are under the joint divine and human control and can be absolutely and joyfully overthrown and done away.

Here is a type of manhood that, under the discipline of God, grew sterling to the core, and by a signal favoring Providence provided an ample basis for a national moral ideal. Here is an ideal where conscience and righteousness stand in close affiance, where liberty springs from equity, and where pity never fails. Here is a person and a name worthy and able demonstrably to inspire and lead to national triumph a new political league. And here is an official whose spontaneous honesty has left upon all his state papers an indelible moral stamp, creating thereby out of his official documents a national literature of finished beauty and excellence and power.

PART II. ANALYSIS

His Reverence for Law—Conscience

Deeply set within the heart of Lincoln in this last inaugural was his binding sense of right. This obligation was civic. The speech can be described as a statement of what a loyal citizen under confederate law is bound to do, when his civic loyalty is put to a final test. It is an illustration of obedience facing rebellion. It is an exposition of a confederate's duty, when confederates secede. It is a civilian's announcement of the law that is singly and surely sovereign, when the sole alternative in the Nation's life is dissolution or blood. It is a revelation of the law that still prevails among and above a Republic of freemen, when all law is faced by the challenge and defiance of war.

Here is a supreme exhibit of a solid co-efficient in Lincoln's character. It shows in a commanding way how moral duty held dominion in his life. He had no predilection for war. That he must face its menace, or forswear his fealty to his freeman's covenant, was a pathetic fate. And when in that alternative he upheld his oath and endured the war, it is past all denial that he was bowing under an inexorable constraint. He was plainly ordering his speech and conduct in submission to an all-commanding, all-reviewing moral regimen. His will was listening to a moral behest. His judgment was pondering a moral choice. His eye was forecasting a moral award. He was shaping sovereign issues with a sovereign responsibility.

This experience and this expression of Lincoln's life unearths foundations in his character which demand precise examination. What was the nature of the law which held and swayed the soul of Lincoln with such an overmastering control? Whence came its authority? Wherein rested its validity? Is there record of its origin and authorship? Where is it recorded? By whose hand was it transcribed? Precisely what are its so imperative terms?

In attempting an answer, one's first impulse is to say that in this address Lincoln was speaking as citizen and official, as subject and chief executive of an openly organized civil government, with written Constitution and laws; and that what he was saying in this inaugural address contained and involved no more and no less than those regulations expressed; that he simply adopted and echoed what they defined and described; that the sole and only authority he assumed to cite or urge was this well-known published law of the land; and that in those open records one may find in fullness and precision the full definition of the nature and validity, the authority and authorship and origin, the very terms and abiding form of all the moral mandates he here obeyed.

In such a statement there is abounding truth. Lincoln explicitly shows explicit allegiance in all his political life to the dominion of our national law. He revered our Constitution. And that the Constitution should likewise be revered by all was all he gave his life to realize. Grounded as that Constitution was upon our American Bill of Rights, acknowledging as it did that all men were created equal, owning as it openly did the sovereignty of the popular will, and allowing no other lord, he found within its reverent and reverend affirmations the dignity, authority, and power all-sufficient and supremely valid for him as a fellow-citizen among his fellowmen.

But in such a statement something is left unsaid. As one listens through this address to Lincoln's voice, he instantly and continuously feels that he is hearing there no mere echo of quoted words. There is in the vibrant tone a note that is original. His voice is his own. His words are of his own selection. His phrases were fashioned by himself. His paragraphs embody the shape and bear the stamp of his peculiar and painstaking invention and argument. In his utterance are the inflection and accent, the very passion of unforced and independent conviction. He speaks as one who finds within himself, in some true sense, the authority for what he says.

But not merely are his words valid for himself, as he shapes his ordered speech. They are irrepressible. His convictions throb with urgency. The constraint to which he bows is enthroned and exercised within. The law he obeys is just as truly a law he ordains. But on either view it is a mandate which he humbly and grandly obeys. It is an imperative to which he yields his life.

Just here emerges another phase of his amenability to law. It operates as an impulse to plead. It drives him to the rostrum, and makes of him one of the foremost masters of public address our civic life and history have produced. As Lincoln voices this address he is speaking not merely to himself, nor for himself, nor to ease and unburden his mind, nor yet to open and indicate his view. As he spoke those words his eye was fixed upon a mighty multitude of his fellowmen. As he unfolded his thought before their attentive, waiting minds, it was as though a banner were being unfurled to symbolize and signify to a Nation's multitudes the sovereign duty of all true patriots. In that transaction he became undeniably prophet and lawgiver to the Nation. The obligations that supremely bind his life he urges and attests as binding with equal and evident urgency upon the millions upon millions of the members in the same free and solemn political league. When his speech is done, he would have all who hear conjoined indefeasibly with him in loyalty to his law. Every sentence of the address bears evidence of this design. He is aiming to bring the Nation's conscience and will to embody and obey the identical mandates that govern him.

But his appeal is vestured in ideal deference. He deals with law. But he does not command. Throughout his solemn exposition there is no note or hint of dictatorship of any sort. Not a breath in any accent suggests any undertaking to coerce. He simply strives, as a man with his friend, to persuade.

And yet as he sets forth his speech, within the comely apparel of its courteous words gleams the regal form of duty, imperial offspring of inflexible law. Those words were no empty phrasings of indifferent platitudes, disposed and pronounced to dignify a passing pageant in the formal rounds of our civic life. They trembled with anxiety. He spoke of nothing less than the Nation's life and death, the Nation's duty, and the Nation's doom. The honor of the Republic was being sternly tried, to see if it was sound or rotten in its very heart. Lincoln was dealing with things that all men owned to be above all price. He was striving, as for life, to achieve agreement as to duties that should transcend all possible denial. He was trying to fasten upon every American conscience constraints that no American conscience could possibly escape.

Here is a cognizance of law and deference before its claims that is curiously composite, if not complex, or even innerly contraposed. He acknowledges the written Constitution to bind all citizens with supreme authority; and gives his solemn oath to honor, uphold, and execute its plain behests. He as plainly betrays the presence within his individual breast of a moral sovereign to which he bows with just as loyal reverence. And before every man with whom he pleads he orders his behavior, even while he pleads, as before a throne whose moral majesty he has no right or power to nullify. And yet within the terms embodying such a deference he expounds the genesis and justifies the conduct of a long-drawn civil conflict, in which his own official decrees can be carried out only by the aid of the death and desolation entailed by war. And when, despite death-dealing guns and deferential pleas alike, vast multitudes of men, even all the captains and armies of the South, despise his arguments and defy his arms, he continues to urge his convictions and appeals, and to reinforce his words with war.

Can such a complex attitude be shown and seen to rest in moral harmony? Were his conscience, and the Constitution, and his deference before other men, and his summons of the land to arms equally and alike compelling morally, all indeed morally akin? Beneath the unsparing gaze of his conscience-searching eye, under all the awful testing of his loyalty to oath, in all his patient and persistent pleadings for other men's agreement, and through all the torture and distress of war, what explanation and account can be given of any obligation adequate to bind and justify his course? Instinct himself with deference, and averse to any form of tyranny, how could he so rigidly refuse to yield? Prone toward conciliation in every fiber of his life, how did he inwardly, how could he openly vindicate his unbending determination to uphold his faith, and carry through the war?

This forces a final and vital inquiry touching the nature of the law that was so regnant and compelling in Lincoln's personal life; and that he was struggling here in this address with such consuming desire, and by the unabetted efficiency of oral appeal, to implant in other breasts. From Lincoln's balanced words it stands apparent that the problems bound up in this inquiry beleaguered him on every side. His throbbing syllables, and the tactics by which his sentences are arranged, attest impressively that while he was facing problems too profound for human thought to solve, he was also facing laws that he could not escape, and dared not disobey. It was not for his kind heart to sanction and encompass such a war, and stand so solidly against the solid South, while yet behaving with so unfeigned respect for every other man, except beneath compulsion of a law supremely gentle and invincibly severe. He was plainly viewing some behest too plain to be denied, too sacred to be disobeyed, too insistent to be withheld, and yet too reverend and benign to suffer any champion to be rude—a behest around whose throne hung sanctions, true to fact, waiting to adjudge, certain to descend.

In the effort now to trace in the soul of Lincoln the birth and growth and manly stature of this deep sense of law, some things stand plain. In this, his consciousness of sovereign duty and supreme allegiance, Lincoln stands entire. In this address will and thought and sentiments combine. He is not swept against his will. What he decides he eagerly desires. And with his will and wish his best intelligence co-operates. If any man essay to overthrow his argument, he has the total Lincoln to overturn. Determined, impassioned, and convinced, he confronts all men, whether they be adversaries or friends. In his contention and defense his being is completely unified. He is employing upon his master task his total strength. Distressful, dark and difficult as is his environment and time, he suffers and ponders and resolves, with forces undivided, none reserved. With such convictions, such desires, and such determination, the assurance in his onset was in itself triumphant.

Upon what foundations now for such unyielding confidence and appeal did Lincoln take his stand? For Lincoln's own deliberate reply, let all men read again, and then again, and still again, this second inaugural address. Those words are appareled with a beautiful charity. But from deep within their kindliness resounds the clear, firm voice of heaven-ordered, all-prevailing law—a law that comprehends beneath its strong and high dominion the long career of American slavery, defining its sin, awarding its doom, and dealing justly with the contending imprecations and the pleading intercessions that strangely voice the deep confusion of embattling hosts. American slavery, its sin and doom—in his exposition of that dark theme, Lincoln gave his exposition of all-compelling law.

All men were created equal. The right of all men to liberty is likewise a primitive endowment. Upon this one broad base, and upon no other, did Lincoln ever set up any claim to voice for himself, or for his fellowman, a civic obligation. To that creative decree can be traced all the civic appeals that Lincoln ever made. In fixing there the ground of every plea, he had indomitable assurance of faith that he was defining and declaring for every man an irreducible and ineffaceable moral law. All men were created equal. All men were divinely entitled to be free. That fiat of God Americans had tried and dared to invalidate. Its authority it was now the Almighty's purpose, by the obedient hand of Lincoln, to reinaugurate. Its simple terms, that had forever been indelible, were now to be made universally legible, and everywhere visible, by the obedient consent of all his fellowmen.

In all of this the chiefest thing to note is that this same all-commanding moral law is born within. Written precepts and published constitutions are but transcriptions. They are not original. They are only copies. Not at the tip of a moving pen, but in our forefathers' reverent and independent hearts, did our noble Constitution come to birth. And in the time of Lincoln it was in Lincoln's heart that this venerable law was born again. In the heart of Washington, in the heart of Lincoln, in the heart of every man, as fashioned and over-shadowed evermore by God, all moral regimen has its stately origin.

To this grave oracle, deep within Lincoln's Godlike soul, did Lincoln fashion utterance. To this same reverend oracle, deep-lodged within the Godlike soul of every listener, Lincoln made appeal. Here is all the urgency of all his argument. Here is the secret of all his confidence. Herein alone shines all his moral majesty.

Something such was Lincoln's exposition to himself, and to his time, of the majesty and mandatory force of civic law. Its authority rests in God. Its validity rests as well in man. It has been written down most nobly in our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Its terms spell freedom and equality for all. In the light of our common human sentiments, kindling within us from heavenly fires, its printed copies may be easily revised. And while its concrete regulations are far too manifold for any general document to possibly contain, its dictates are all as concrete and corresponsive to our human civic life as is the heaven-born and reverent human friendliness with which the life of Lincoln was continually graced.

Deferring then to future pages all specific analysis and appraisal of the pregnant interior wealth of Lincoln's sense of moral obligation, two momentous affirmations touching Lincoln's reverence for law lie already right at hand. The law he reverenced held high and wide dominion. It shaped and swayed and judged at once and alike both his own and his Nation's destiny.

And its terms were plain. It was no timid, dusky lamp, held in trembling hand, throwing uncertain rays, and flickering towards extinction. The law that shines in this inaugural is a glowing, radiant orb, bringing day when first it dawned, and shedding still full light of day over all the earth.

His Jealousy for Liberty—Free-Will

This second inaugural address had its birth in the breast of a man freeborn, and resolute to remain forever free. To find within this speech this living seed, to trace and sketch its bursting growth, and to gather up its fruit, is well worth any toil or cost. To begin with, this speech is undeniably Lincoln's own. That in any sense it was born of any other man's dictation, Lincoln would never admit, and no other man would ever affirm. As its words gain voice, every listener feels that Lincoln was their only author, and that even in their utterance, though in the living presence of an un-numbered multitude, this speaker was standing in a majestic solitude. That exposition of the war, of the Union, and of slavery was of and by and for himself. What he was uttering was original. The convictions he affirmed were his personal faith. The decision his words so delicately veiled was his personal resolve. The issue towards which they aimed was the outlook of his lone heart's hope. The appeal he voiced was warmed and winged by his own desire. The argument he so deftly inwrought was his invention and device. The words he singled out were his selection. The total aspect and onset and effect of the address, as it looked and worked on the day of its delivery, and as it looks and works today, were of his unforced and free election and intent. All the volume, burden and design of those pregnant, urgent, far-seeing paragraphs are the first hand product of a freeborn man, adapted and addressed to men freeborn.

Here is for any student of ethics an imposing spectacle. For here is a commanding demonstration that mortal man is in very deed a responsible author of moral deeds. That this inaugural scene gives this stupendous truth an indeniable vindication, no man may lightly undertake to disapprove. But within that undeniable verity are involved all the mighty revolutions of a moral universe.

This import of this speech can never be made too plain. To this end let any reader note the fact that in that stern day, and in this plain speech, Lincoln faced, and that under a pitiless compulsion, an exigent alternative. When he penned, and when he spoke its freighted words, he stood in the very brunt of war. His thoughts were tracing battle lines. His eye was fixed on bayonets. Before him stood far-ranging ranks of men in mutual defiance, men at variance upon fundamental things, men in conflict over claims irreconcilable by God or man. By no device of argument or of compromise could those contending claims become identical, or even mutually tolerant. Men's paths had parted. Armies had taken sides. Difference had deepened into intolerance; intolerance had heightened into hate; and hate had flared up into war. Secession had proclaimed that the Union must dissolve, that confederates were foes, that one Nation must be two. And men based their reasons for rending the land and for rallying ranks in arms, upon opposing views of God's decree, and of the nature of men. One side claimed that God ordained that black men should be slaves. This claim the other side denied; and avowed instead that God in his creation and endowment of the human race ordained that all men should be equal and free. So appalling and so passing plain in our political life was the alternative which this inaugural had to confront.

Equally plain upon the face of this inaugural is the fact that, in the presence of that dread and stern alternative, Lincoln made a choice. He picked his flag. He chose the banner of the free. The standard of the slaveholder he spurned. Responsibly, deliberately, he selected where to stand, fully and consciously purposing that in such selection he was enlisting and employing all the voluntary powers of his life. Here was conscious choice. He did select. He did reject. He could have taken another, an oppugnant stand, as many a familiar confederate did. Two paths were surely possible. And they did undeniably diverge. That divergence he soberly surveyed, and traced down through all its devious ways to their final consequence. In act and motive, in judgment and intent, he was self-poised, self-determined, self-moved. When, in this second inaugural scene, removed from his former inaugural oath by four imperious years of sobering and awakening thought, but facing still a frowning South, he swore a second time to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution—that was a freeman's choice. And it was Lincoln's own. Between his soul and heaven, as he registered that resolve, no third authority intervened. As he stood and published and defined that reiterated pledge, his soul was sovereignly, supremely free.

And within that sovereign freedom its even-balanced deliberation should not be overlooked. Those days that filed between those two inaugurals had been replete with studied meditation. The mighty problems precipitated by the war he had taken and turned and poised and sought to estimate and solve in every possible way. He pondered every ounce of their awful gravity. He paced the total course of their development. He knew our history, with all its ideals and all its errors by heart. He inspected with peculiar carefulness the drift and trend of our national career. It is doubtful if any one ever studied so incessantly the current of our affairs, or peered so anxiously and with such far-sighted calculation into the hidden and distant issues of the stupendous enterprise in which he was predestined to act so commanding a part. So when his free decision was ushered forth and projected among the contending determinations of his day, to play its part, it was the ripe conclusion of a thoughtful mind, like the well-poised verdict of a judge.

And his free choice was resolute. His will was without wavering. The side he made his own was forced to face the musketry and forts, the arsenals and fleets, of a would-be nation of angry, determined men—men who would rather die than yield. The choice he made involved the shedding of human blood. This he sadly knew. In four endless years he had been compelled to defend his resolution with arms. And now as he volunteered his oath a second time, his free decision involved again the frightful corollary of war. This meant that within his voluntary oath was a conscious determination, too vigorous and resolute for any threat to daunt, for any form of terror to reverse. His choice was no feeble leaning to one side. Into its formation and into its fulfillment poured all the energy of his life. It was vastly, radically more than impulse, or propensity, or easy, unconsidered inclination. It was a freeman's choice, poised and edged and energized by a freeman's will. It had firmness like the firmness of the hills.

This choice of Lincoln was ponderous. His exercise of freedom, as shown in this inaugural, was dealing, not with things indifferent, not with trifles void of moral moment, nor with empty, immaterial suppositions. When Lincoln shaped and welcomed to himself this preference, he was handling nothing less than the affronts of human arrogance, the greed of human avarice, the cruelty of human slavery, and a confederate's disloyalty. That preference was his free election to enthrone within himself, and within all other men, the stability of a firm allegiance, the grace of human friendliness, the worthy valuation of human souls, and the surpassing beauty of a true humility. It was between such values that his election took its shape. His decision dealt with things primary, enduring, and universal. It was concerned with the elemental affections and convictions of men, while all the time supremely respecting the decrees and judgments of Almighty God. Upon such a level, and amid such values, did the will of Lincoln trace out its path. It was a Godlike energy, sovereign, soberminded, original, free.

But though this freedom of Lincoln, as it reigns through this inaugural, was individually his own, and wrought out into precise experience in personal singleness and independency, by no manner of means was he standing in this scene in moral isolation. He was beset about and wrought upon from many sides by mighty moral energies. For one thing, a vast Republic held him fast in the bonds of loyal citizenship. It was a Republic composed of freemen, to be sure. But those freemen were by no means a miscellany of mutually indifferent and disconnected units. They had formed a Union. That Union had a definite and inviolable integrity. That corporate integrity laid an unrenounceable obligation upon all its membership. It was the sacred respect for the sacred honor of that political bond that proved a man a patriot. To assert the freeman's right to cast aside those bonds proved a man a traitor, and gendered unto bondage. Here unfolds a veritable mesh of moral obligations—obligations of compelling potency. It was precisely in defence and demonstration of those enveloping claims that Lincoln advocated and prosecuted a defensive but relentless war.

The South resented all such claims. They were resolute that national bonds should be defied, that their authority should be annulled. And this they urged explicitly in the very name of freedom. This defiant protest Lincoln's opposite preference had to face. This involved his mind in the study of a problem that is never out of date—a study that will test any student's moral honesty to the quick. Lincoln's championship of moral liberty had to grapple, in the counter championship of Southern arms, a type and sort of freedom that he forever disowned for himself, and that he could never consent to in any other man. This drove him into the study of the nature of a human soul and the nature of social bonds. This inquiry uncovered two foundation rocks, laid deep by our forefathers beneath the fabric of our republic, supports to human honor and stability which no man nor any confederation of men can undermine and overthrow without turning upside down the fundamental supports of harmony and honor among civilians that are free. These two foundation rocks are the divine design that all men should be equal and free; and the certain corollary that governments among men derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. The equality of freemen when they stand apart, and their free consent, when they join in a political league—these are the immovable pillars of character and order among intelligent men. Upon such foundations this government has been placed. That sure basis the South assailed. In the name of freedom that assault must be repulsed. The national environment, the national integrity, the national honor, the existence of the Nation, conceived as it was in liberty, made all such liberty as the South preferred, not a freeman's right, but a sorry simulation, a moral wrong. Government of the people, by the people, was freedom to the core, the core of civic righteousness. In such a government popular and everlasting allegiance was elemental uprightness. Among freemen, the cornerstone of civics is a plighted troth to liberty.

Thus Lincoln argued. And with him to argue thus was to obey. As thus conceived, obedience to his civic pledge went hand in hand with liberty. Enlistment under a government and laws framed by fellow-freemen was to him no limitation of his personal rights. Instead it involved and assured for every bondman a full emancipation, and for every freeman full title forever to every unalienable right. Such a view was indeed ideal, as Lincoln soberly knew; but for that ideal every power of his kingly manhood was ready to struggle and suffer and serve. To bind his hand to such a league was his free choice. To live in loyalty to such a bond was a living pride and joy. Such an agreement was to the end of his days unresented and unconstrained.

But it cost him dearly. No indentured bonds-man ever wrought out sorer toil. None ever suffered through longer, heavier, sadder days. It wore away his life. The war was to his tender soul, as he termed it, "a dreadful scourge." But as he interpreted its trend, its certain winnings outvalued and outweighed its woe. It was freely and willingly, not by any irksome and alien coercion, that he opened his soul to all its sorrows, and poured out all his strength to direct and hasten its consummation. He saw unerringly that it had to do with government by free consent, with the tenure of a freeman's oath, with the validity of a freeman's right. And by a preference that in his freeman's breast was irrepressible, he selected with an open, far-ranging eye to take his place in that terrific conflict in the very brunt, that the Nation and all the world and coming ages might see and enjoy its happy issue in a Union built and compacted indissolubly upon the inviolable oaths and rights of men who are free.

This was Lincoln's law of liberty. It secures to men their freedom; but it binds those freemen in a league. Their civic life is not a solitude. It is a covenant.

But when freemen form a league, their solemn oath, as this inaugural shows, embodies awful sanctions. From such a league and covenant, seven confederate parts were affirming and defending their right to secede, and that by force of arms. This forced freedom to a final definition, and a final test. What follows when a Republic fails? What form of civic order lies beyond, when a league of freemen is violently dissolved? Where will freedom find sure footing, when the fundamental laws of freemen are defied? On this stern question Lincoln fixed his eye. And as his vision cleared and deepened, he grew to see that if freedom among men could ever survive, a freeman's mutual covenant must be inviolate. A freeman's compact must be kept, else on all the earth freedom could find no resting place. If this should ever be denied, that denial must be sternly smitten to the ground. Thus for the very cause of freedom, and as a freeman, Lincoln was driven into war. He was put where he had no other choice. He was forced to fight.

But in that war the havoc and disaster were mutual. Both sides suffered terribly. The conflict dealt out torture that neither party could evade. It was mighty ponderings on these conditions that wrung from Lincoln's heart the heart of this inaugural, wherein he traces with a humble, deep-searching carefulness the cause of all the war to that prolonged infraction of the law of liberty in the lot of the American slave; and the guilt of that enormous sin to North and South alike; and the moral explanation of the sorrows of the war to the judgments of Almighty God.

Herein he learned that among freemen freedom is in no sense arbitrary and absolute. Laws lie in its very being. Their presence is spontaneous indeed, as is every impulse of their promulgation and rule. But they must be obeyed. If their self-framed mandates are disobeyed, then freemen are no longer free. If freemen dare to bind and rob their fellows and aggrandize their own advantages, then the yoke they bind on other men, by a sanction no mortal can escape, will be bound upon their own necks, until their false advantages are all surrendered, and the freedom that is claimed by anyone is given equally to every other man. To the fulfillment and preservation of that law Lincoln freely bowed his life. This is the core of this address. Thus Lincoln illustrates true liberty. In the crucible of war was his vision of the worth of freedom finally refined. It was through a costly sacrifice of peace. But it was alone and all for freedom, for freedom and for nothing else, that his peace and ours was sacrificed.

This exposition of Lincoln's pure ideal of independent, virile manhood has embraced, in passing, a phase of the vast environment in which he felt his manhood framed, that calls for separate remark—the relation of his human freedom to the rule of God. The war is traced in this address to a threefold origin: it was projected in the resolution of the South that slavery should be given leave to spread; it was accepted in the decision of the North that the present bounds of slavery should not be passed; the whole affair was overturned, and the war was over-ruled in the purpose of Almighty God, that North and South, as a single Nation, guilty in common for slavery as a national sin, should make full requital for all its cruelty. In this thought of Lincoln, the conflicting purposes of the North and the South, and his own determination too, were being made to bow beneath the mightier dominion of Almighty God. In the realm of human politics this is a rare and notable confession. And that it was published beneath the open sky, at noon, before a peopled Nation's open eye, as a thoughtful explanation of his inaugural oath as president of a mighty government upon the earth, must be conceded to mightily enhance its notability. It lacks but little of rising to the rank of prophecy. But equally notable with its publicity is its conscious, free submissiveness. Clear to discern, he is also prompt to own the over-mastering rule of God. His attitude in this inaugural is an attitude of explicit subordination to a higher power. But it is clear as day that this subordination is voluntary. There is no sign of reluctance or unwillingness, as though he were being forced, not even though all expectations of his own were being over-ruled in the inscrutable plans of God. This address reveals this man in a mood and tone of complete submission, ready for rebuke, surrendering all his ways to God. This posture of acquiescence, in God's revolution of his plans, and reconstruction of his hopes, is the factor to notice here, as we examine the actual operation of Lincoln's will. Above his private liberty, above his high official authority, above the great Republic in which his own decisions merge, reigns the hidden hand of God. To the power and majesty of that unseen sway he summons every dignity and every desire of his own to render unreserved obedience.

In seeing and saying this, however, one must never omit to observe and add that Lincoln's eye observed with solemn joy a precious moral meaning in the divine omnipotence. Heaven's unexpected guidance and consummation of the war were only adding clarity and emphasis to the principle of liberty. It only drove the demonstration home, and that with irresistible cogency, that human bondage must be avenged. And so in fact Lincoln's solemn reverence for the divine control was a girdle confirming the strength of the fine jealousy that guarded for himself and for all mankind the sacredness and the majesty of the human will. Within the deeper deeps of his own free preference he coincided and co-operated with the will of God. His obedience to God, his allegiance to his civic covenant, and his individual, cherished preference coalesce ideally; while each, without any diversion or loss, preserves its own integrity.

Thus with life-exhausting, sacrificial toil, with genuine originality, ever exemplifying in his chastened life all the burden of his thought, by a decisive choice between divergent paths, with the careful deliberateness of a full-grown man, with unconquerable determination, gravely sensible of every ponderous consequence, in unbroken and intimate companionship with all his fellow-men, with vision sharp to detect and uncover every simulation and counterfeit of his wish, through solemn fellowship with redemptive sorrows, bowing without repugnance to every sanction that free equality enjoins, and in humble reverence for the all-commanding, all-subduing will of God, Lincoln here unfolds the central and infolded implications in his all-consuming jealousy to be free.

His Kindliness—Love

A genuine and generous goodwill to other men breathes warmly through this second inaugural, as the glowing breath of life pervades the bodily frame of a living child. This manifests itself, as seen in his impassioned zeal for freedom, in a vivid consciousness of companionship. He felt his life and destiny interlaced inseparably with all Americans, nay with all the world of human kind. With this widely expanded and ever expanding Republic, he felt himself in these inaugural scenes peculiarly identified. In that great pageant he was deeply sensible of holding the central place. His inaugural oath, though his single, individual act, announced his conscious purpose to be the Nation's head. In that station his person became supremely representative. It was for him to incorporate nobly, mightily, judicially, the national dignity, authority, and design.

Many phases of this profound coincidence of the life of Lincoln with the Nation's life come into sight whenever his life's career is carefully reviewed. But among all the illustrations of his self-submergence deep within the overflowing fullness of our national history, there is one that demonstrates his tender kindliness beyond all possibility of refutation. This is his profound participation with the Nation in her fate because of slavery. Around this awful issue circles all the thought of this, as of the first address. That this puissant co-efficient of our national history was somehow the cause of the existing war he said that all men felt. He registered his own opinion that all the sorrows of the war were in requital for that sin. Into those sorrows no man entered more profoundly than did Lincoln himself. They sobered all his joy. They solemnized him utterly. It is true few heard his groans. In his patience he was mainly silent. None ever heard him make complaint. All impulse to resentment was subdued. But the nation's sorrows were on his heart. Through all those days he was our confessor, self-sacrificed, sorrow-laden, faithful absolutely, but uncomplaining. Upon his head an angry, unanimous South, and many thousands in the North dealt vengeful, malicious blows, denying him all joy, crying out against him ruthlessly. All this he bore, as though he heard them not, and continued day and night to seek the Nation's peace. With marvelous freedom from malice himself, with fullness of charity for all, he taught a Nation how a Nation's sorrows should be patiently borne. And yet through all the days, in all this land, no man was more purely innocent of the Nation's sin of slavery than this same man. Here is friendship. Here is neighborly compassion written large. This is generosity, untinctured with any selfish reservation. Amid all the sorrows and fortunes of our history no sight is half as pathetic as this deep, free, silent companionship of Lincoln with his Nation's griefs in the deepest period of her affliction. And yet he almost seemed to cherish his fate. He bore it all so quietly, and with such a steady heart and eye, that in his seeming calm we are unconscious of his pain. He gives no hint of faltering and drawing back. He even strove repeatedly to lure the Nation to his side, to enter into sacrificial fellowship with the hapless South. But to nothing of this would the people hear.

This commanding fact, the moral mutualness of the innocent Lincoln's sorrows with the sorrows of a guilty land, is a primary factor in this historic scene. From such a moral complication momentous questions emerge. How can such confusion of moral issues be ever justified? Why do guilty and innocent suffer and sorrow alike? In such a glaring moral inequality how could Lincoln himself ever bring his candid mind to honestly acquiesce? Why should a later generation suffer vengeance for their father's sins? Why the black man's fate? How can moral judgments diverge so hopelessly upon such basic moral themes? If God's judgment is just, why are his judgments upon such inhumanity so long delayed? How about those kindred sufferings of those earlier days that for total generations were unavenged? Questions such as these must have risen in Lincoln's mind as he drained his bitter cup. Such questions are not to be evaded or suppressed. It should rather be said that Lincoln's undeniable gentleness in enduring, as the Nation's head, and for his country's sake, a Nation's curse for a national sin forces just such questions into sharpest definition, and focuses them insistently and unavoidably before every thoughtful eye. They are shaped and fastened here solely to render aid in indicating, as they undeniably do, the supreme refinement of Lincoln's friendliness. He held by kindly fellowship with his fellowmen, even when that fellowship involved his innocent life in the moral shame and pain of their reprobation and woe. Here is an interchange of guilt and innocence, in Lincoln's undeniable experience, undeniably resolved and harmonized. Here is human kindliness, triumphant, transcending all debate.

Around this exalted illustration of the strength and purity of Lincoln's benevolence cluster many statements eager to be heard. His kindness showed in many ways, but they were all but varying, accordant forms of pure neighborliness. His mastery of all malice, his unfailing charity, the kindliness of his cherished hope, his companionship with others' sorrow, his longings for peace at home and among all men, his pity for the bereft, his tenderness before our human wounds, his reluctance to go to war, his championship of the oppressed, his willingness to bear another's blame, his silence before abuse, his mighty predilections towards universal friendliness, are all concordant and coincident types and forms of his prevailing, spontaneous companionship with men. Each phase deserves elaborate description. But it is in closer keeping with the treatment here to name some general qualities of his kindliness, qualities that are common to all its forms.

His friendliness was immediate. When human needs appealed for comfort and aid, it was not his way to send a deputy. He appeared himself. Here is something nothing less than marvelous. An intimate friend of all, he stood in conscious touch with all the Nation's citizenship. At first thought this may seem to be in consequence and by means of his eminence and office as the people's president. As chief executive of the people's will, and as foremost representative citizen, he stood for every man in that man's place; and his universal friendliness found open avenues to every individual citizen's consciousness. Here is truth. But this truth only partially meets this case. The operations of his benevolence were somehow independent of space and time. His tours while president were short and few. Back and forth between the White House, the war office, and the soldier's home he wore a historic path. It is almost overwhelmingly sad to realize how almost all his movements while president were within the sorrow-shadowed walls and the hidden solitudes of his official home. As said before, he seemed to exist apart from men, in a pathetic isolation. Nevertheless, it is plain to all that Lincoln's uncalculating generosity reached, like the shining of the sun, to the limits of the land. It is most surprising when one thinks. But when one thinks, it is most clear that there was in Lincoln's kindliness a Nation-wide capacity for intimacy. In the open genial presence of his good-will all men feel they have an immediate and equal share. And this holds true whether one is near enough to feel the warmth of his living breath, or whether half a continent intervenes.

This fact forces into view and consciousness the pure excellence of his love. It was in its nature deeply real. He did in verity live close to every man. He wore no distant air. He practised no reserve. He felt and proved himself to be the kin of all. His pictured face and published speech were a perfect symbol, a convincing pledge to every honest man of close and equal partnership. His ways are often said to have been homely. But their very homeliness was all human and all humane. And in his presence, or in the presence of any truthful impress or echo of his life, no honest nature but feels itself instantly at ease and quite at home. This habitude in him of overcoming distance, and absence, and all other obstacles to his far-ranging love, and winning entrance everywhere into the affections of all kindly men, is a notable stamp upon the total texture of his friendliness. He stood with men in personal partnership, immediate, intimate, real.

And in all his intimate and immediate fellowship with men his personal contribution was entire. In his co-partnership he had no treasure too precious to invest. He gave his all. Imposing, almost impossible as is the meaning of these words, all mankind do recognize, and that with wondering reverence, that when Lincoln rose to take the presidential oath, he held nothing back. In his service of the Union he invested his life, his honor, his hope, even all he had. It was little else he had to give. His lineage was of the lowliest. His education was of the meagerest, and wholly a by-achievement. In social graces he was quite unversed and unadorned. He was no flatterer. The fawner's dialect he never knew. He would not boast. To beg he was ashamed. He was too honest for any knavery. Pure integrity was his only asset. As he took his stand at the presidential post, he stood without a single decoration, unsupported, all alone. It was literal truth that when he took his official oath the only bond he had to furnish was his naked honor. But that possession was no counterfeit. Its value did not fluctuate. It was solid gold. In his honest rating, the plighted faith in the words of his official pledge was beyond all price. As he discerned and understood the crisis of his day, the Nation's very being was at mortal stake. And when in that momentous hour she summoned him to take the presidency, she laid sovereign requisition upon his total being. And when he obeyed the call, he invested all. No reserve of his possession was kept in hiding for his refuge and reimbursement, in case the Nation failed. He ventured all he had, even all his honor. And this complete consignment by Lincoln to the Nation's use of all his moral wealth, of all his pure and priceless personal worth, was an act of unalloyed benignity. It was for the Nation's welfare that he devoted himself. It was that the Union might be preserved, and that all men might be free, that he plighted his integrity.

This investment of Lincoln's friendliness for the well-being of all the land, even of all the men therein, was not alone immediate, winning direct attachment to every man; nor merely all-absorbing on Lincoln's part, impressing into kindly service every value and every capacity of his total life; it also enshrined a deathless hope. Lincoln's patriotic devotedness was no venture of a day or of a decade. Lincoln's good-will looked far ahead. He had a passion for immortality. His total effort and aim in all his generous endeavors and hopes, as he served in his public life, can be defined as a sovereign aspiration that our government should be so guided and chastened in all its life that the Union should never be dissolved. To his kindly heart no possible event seemed more appalling than that this hope should fail. So far as his words reveal, this central, sovereign passion of his glowing heart was all but exclusively patriotic. He apparently forgot himself in his wistful anxious hope that the Nation's peace might long endure. His faith in the Union's indestructibility may be said to spring out of his undying continual love for his fellowman. Indeed just here seems to be the birthplace of all his prophetic ponderings over the final issues of our civic life. The very stature of the government which his ideal conceived and which he thankfully saw that our Republic designed, was deemed by him to be copied from nothing other than the divinely fashioned moral nature which he found alike in himself and in all his fellowmen. Deep within his friendly heart he cherished the vision of a Republic of freemen leagued together indissolubly as mutual friends. It was to realize and certify that hope that he dedicated his life. And when he pledged and sealed that offering, it was with no design that the seal should ever be broken, or the pledge be ever recalled. Here is another primary quality of Lincoln's friendliness. It was inwrought with personal durability. Grounded as was his civic hope in the freedom and conscience of Godlike men, it was impossible for him to consent that such a hope should ever encounter defeat or decay. Deep and sure within its essential nature were the urgent promptings and the soaring promise of immortality.

These observations upon the immediate directness, the integral whole-heartedness, and the deathless eagerness of Lincoln's friendliness, if thoughtfully compared together, reveal that these distinctive phases of his outpouring good-will are in nature identically the same, and spring from an identical source. This essential coincidence, this mutual convergence deserves attention. It intimates wherein the very essence and being of his neighborly kindness consists. And in Lincoln's life this indication of the precise whereabouts and substance of the essential and innermost quality and being of human kindliness is certain and clear, as in hardly any other man. His benignance in his dealings with men is of well-nigh unparalleled openness and freedom from all admixture and alloy. Lincoln's kindness embodies and conveys Lincoln's self. In every favor from him he is in the gift. In the center of all the friendliness that is characteristic of Lincoln, Lincoln himself stands erect and entire, offering and commending in every case his full-sized, undivided self. This is the core and this the circumference, this is the sum and this the substance of his good-will. It is rich with all his personal wealth, solid with all his personal worth. In him an act of friendship was an inauguration of personal copartnership. In his good-will was all the energy of his life. In his benefactions he gave himself. Just so with his compassions. With the sorrows of humanity it was his way to enter into personal fellowship. This was the form and being of all his generosity. His mastery over all malice when facing a foe, his abounding charity when judging a wrong, his hearty gladness in the presence of human joy, his cordial ways in greeting friends, his fatherly affection for his boy, his love for his native land, his pity in presence of the bereft, his sadness at sight of wounds, his readiness to share evenly with all his Nation all that guilty Nation's painful discipline—all this variety and plenitude of ample, open-hearted tenderness towards other men was alike and always the complete and conscious contribution of himself. In brief, in full, and finally, Lincoln's friendliness, through all its beautiful versatility, was a free and facile, a full and total, personal self-devotion. This is the common content giving all its value to all the forms of his human kindliness.

His Pureness—Life

In the exposition just foregoing, the thought has been drawn into allusions to Lincoln's premonitions or aspirations towards immortality, for the Union, if not for himself. This was in the course of an effort to find the spring-head of his kindliness. And it culminated in the suggestion that deep within Lincoln's being there was enshrined an assurance, however unconfessed or even half unconscious, of personal immortality. And that from within this shrine of living hope, common to him with every man, he drew his inspiration and his very pattern of a national Union and a national peace that would endure forever.

Here is something that calls for examination, for in this we touch a radical quality of Lincoln's moral being. This eager craving after permanence was in him an appetite that could never be fed or satisfied by any things that perish. In itself and in its nutriment there is an irrepealable call for something indefeasable, something utterly superior to all fear of death, something never amenable to any form of dissolution or decay, something spiritually pure, and essentially kindred to the essential being of a deathless soul.

The matter may be approached to start with by saying some things negatively. Lincoln was centrally in no sense a materialist. He was indeed firmly sensitive to the physical majesties of this continent, though in his day they were hardly half disclosed. He calculated with carefulness our material capacities for expansion in power and wealth. He foresaw our certain outward growth into a puissant Nation, the coveted and ample resort and refuge and home of hordes of men from other lands. In his own well-seasoned and resourceful physique he felt and knew the worth of physical virility. He could thoughtfully compute the glittering values, the goodly financial revenues, the days and months and total seasons of physical idleness and delights that accrue to human owners from the unrequited toil of human slaves. And in the current civil war he completely understood that no less a concern than the perpetuity of the American Union was pending upon contests largely consisting of encounters of physical prowess, of tests of muscular endurance and strength.

But not in calculations such as these did his thoughtful studies of human welfare take ultimate resort, or find final rest. His conception of the ideal state, of the ideal citizen, of the ideal life, was not constructed or inspired from carnal elements. He noted with life-long sadness the sordid baseness inseparably attending the fact of owning or being a slave. He deeply saw that those battles in the Wilderness were no mere conflicts of beasts. And never could he imagine or allow that his personal weight, and force, and worth were ratable by gymnastic tests. It was not upon things like these that Lincoln's attention and hope were fixed, when his hopes and plans for our prosperity took form. To the whole world of his material environment he was marvelously indifferent. On every perusal of his life one grieves at the story of his poverty, and the sad infrequency and meagerness in his daily life of the pleasures and recreations which are for the comfort and happiness of men in material things. But in this he seems as though unconscious of any disappointment. For himself as for the Nation, and for the Nation as for himself, his satisfaction and confidence were not born and fed of things that perish in their use. Luxury in food or attire, however toothsome or attractive to other natures, stirred but the feeblest hankerings, if any at all, in him. Towards sensualism of any sort, whether gluttony, drunkenness or lust, his sound and temperate manliness did not incline. And in his estimate of personal character his eye and respect did not rest in outer attitudes, on printed, age-long codes of manner. He was no slave of stately ceremonies, or artificial etiquette. Nor in religion did he bind his tongue to creeds however hoary, nor to rituals however august. He swore not by the oaths of any sect, however ancient and renowned. Neither in this mountain nor in that did he worship God.

But on the other hand, and now to speak affirmatively, Lincoln lived no penury-stricken life. The resources within his personality were well-nigh incalculable. Few men in all our national catalogue have been endowed by God with so sterling and abundant interior wealth. And of all American patriotic benefactors few indeed have left in their single individual name and right such priceless legacies to their native land. What is life? What is human life? Wherein, completely and precisely wherein, is man distinguishable from the beast? For answer, study Lincoln and see. In the full development of such a study many massive verities will unfold. But the feature in Lincoln's manhood, which this chapter is set apart to designate and clarify, is the simple purity, the elemental spirituality of all his elemental traits. His dominant sentiments, his primary convictions, his main and all-mastering decisions were never born to die. They were instinct with life, with life indeed, a life never failing, ever more abundant and free.

This interior vitality, this unalloyed and undecaying purity may be described one way as a real idealism. But in ascribing idealism to Lincoln, it needs to be said at once that Lincoln's idealism, real and glorious as it must surely be confessed to be, was transparently and unvaryingly practical. In one way it may be defined as hope. A waiting hope was a standard characteristic of Lincoln's attitude. His sorrowful eye held fast to things as yet unrealizable. It is impressive to see how often and how fondly he mentioned the future, the "vast future," as he termed it, of our American career. The secret of the beauty and of the power of some of his loftiest and most spontaneous rhetoric is due to just this solemn eagerness towards the coming days. As one comes to study more intently into the outlay of his heroic strength, his struggle and toil are seen to be leashed about his consuming wish that the Nation in its undivided might could be unified about the speedy fulfillment of his prophetic aims. He never forgot the mighty lesson, nor lost the living inspiration of his own advancement from humblest station of ignorance and toiling poverty to the presidency. That transformation he loved to humbly hold before the attention of his fellow Americans, as a pattern of what might anywhere occur again. He loved to linger upon the possibilities of upward movement in the ranks of all laboring men. Large place and honorable position were given to this arousing theme in his first annual message to Congress. This general topic—the far-set, soaring possibilities of human betterment—held constant and commanding eminence in the ranging measure of his eagle-searching thought. For the Nation, and for its every inhabitant, he was a true idealist.

But Lincoln's idealism, again be it said, was no wild indulgence of a vagrant and untrained imagination. It was utterly sober-minded. It took its form and found its force in the center of his sanest thoughtfulness. The terms in which its description has just been illustratively traced show it to be perfectly rational, and even matter-of-fact. Lincoln's idealism was nothing else but a heedful interpretation of the proper destiny of man. It was a reflection in terms of carefulest thought, albeit also in the guise of ardent hope, of the essential lineaments in the nature of man. And no human portrait by any artist was ever truer to fact, while yet tinged with fancy, pure and free. In all his picturing of things yet to be, but not yet in hand, his eye was fastened with an anatomist's intentness upon the actual human nature imperishably present in every man. Nothing that Lincoln's idealism ever proposed ever diverged from the bounds of the original fiat creating all men equal and free. That undeniable initial verity, itself the keystone of our national Constitution and Bill of Rights, supplied to Lincoln's hope its total and only inspiration. In those ancient and elemental realities, realities that deeply underlie and long outlast all the cults and customs and centuries which human thought is so prone to differentiate and divide, Lincoln detected solid foundations and ample warrant for age-long, undissolving expectations. In every human face there are outlines that are forever indelible. These unfailing lineaments Lincoln had the eye to see. And what is vastly more, he had the courage and the honesty to adopt them as the pattern of the platform, and to voice them as the notes of the battle-peal of his statesmanship. And this he did right wittingly, knowing assuredly that therein his vision had caught the gleam of things eternal; that therein he had made discovery that man, even the humblest of his race, could claim to be, as he phrased it to a company of blacks, "kindred to the great God who made him." This amounts to saying that Lincoln's statesmanship may be completely and precisely defined as the studied and deliberate exploitation, upon the field of politics, of those forces, central and common in all mankind, that are Godlike, immortal, spiritual.

Here we reach a definition that outlines with close precision a trait of Lincoln's full-formed character that held a primary place in winning for Lincoln his immortal renown. He attached himself to things themselves immortal. His ideal hope had no admixture of clay, nor even of gold. He made no composition or compromise with anything that dies. His supreme desire was of a nature never to decay. It was pure with the deathless purity of the human soul. To this pure principle, eternal loyalty to the immortal dignity of man, he signed and sealed his soul's allegiance with bonds that even death could never relax. Such statements describe a primary co-efficient in Lincoln's ethical life. Abjuring the unnumbered allurements of the material world, allurements whose fascinations unfailingly fade, and reposing his confidence wholly in treasures that time and use only brighten and refine, Lincoln reveals in the realm of ethics the singular excellence of an ideal that can kindle in an immortal man an immortal hope. Purging every sort of baseness out of the central life, and enthroning an all-refining pureness in the sovereign desires and visions and designs, he has inaugurated in the field of civics an idealism that will honor every man, fit actual life, and endure forever. Personal pureness, this pervades the life of Lincoln as crystalline beauty pervades a block of marble.

This refining trait in Lincoln, this inner hunger for his living soul's true nutriment, this thirst for the pure, perennial springs, finds signal illustration in the closing sentence of this last inaugural, where he pleads with all his fellow-citizens to so conduct all civic interests as to secure among ourselves and with all Nations a "lasting peace." That craving after permanence in civic harmony betokens an impulse towards immortality; and rests down, as the entire inaugural explains, upon that only basis of enduring civic quietude, an honest and universal recognition and respect for those indelible and universal lineaments of personal dignity which the Creator of men has traced upon every human soul—lineaments from which the obscuring dross of centuries was being purged in the Providential fires of an awful war. Just this was the meaning of the war, as Lincoln understood its work. That earth-born sordidness which marked all slaves as common chattels, was being burnt out of our national life, as our basest national sin. Thenceforth, forevermore, it was Lincoln's living hope that all mankind might peacefully agree to supremely cherish and mutually respect those human values that human unfriendliness, and centuries of contempt, however deeply they may obscure, can never obliterate. Upon such enduring foundations, and upon such foundations alone, Lincoln clearly saw, could human peace endure.

And upon this same foundation rests his first inaugural as well. In all those months of special study, ensuing between his election in November of 1860 and his inauguration in March in 1861, and for an ample seven years before, Lincoln was feeling after civic perpetuity. And when he stood before the Nation to publish his first inaugural address, his supreme concern was fixed upon the threatened and impending ruin of the Republic. He there faced a menacing South, irreconcilable, and resolute for dissolution or blood. That outcrying situation brought final issues near. Must the Union perish? Could the Union endure? Civic dissolution or civic perpetuity—this was the immediate, the unrelieved, the ominous alternative. In the fiery heat of civic hate, flaming into civil war, Lincoln had to seek for civic principles that hate could not subvert, nor the fires of war consume; principles too strong to admit defeat, too pure to be dissolved.

Never did a statesman bend over a graver task, nor with a more honest and patient heart, nor with a mind more divinely fashioned and furnished to comprehend and penetrate the actual case in hand. As in a chemist's alembic, he fused and tried our Constitution and all our history. Into that first inaugural he incorporated the issues of his thought. And this was its simple, sole result:—Slavery is "the only substantial dispute." With the people is "ultimate justice." With God is "ultimate truth." We are not "enemies." We are "friends." In this supreme dispute let us confer and legislate as friends, and then as friends live together in an amity that shall be perpetual. This is the uncompounded essence of his first inaugural, as of all his political philosophy. In universal freedom, by mutual persuasion, and in even friendliness, let our Union forever endure. Here again is a statesman's publication and heroic defense of a pure, immortal hope, voiced in an appeal and upheld by arguments as spiritual and pure as the inmost being and utmost destiny of the living souls of men.

No study of the transcendent momentum in Lincoln's life of spiritual realities can fairly overlook his speech in Peoria, October 16, 1854. It is, as he said at the time, "substantially" a repetition of an address at Springfield, twelve days before. It "made Lincoln a power in national politics." It was the commanding beginning of his commanding career. That year, 1854, began the convulsion which made him president, involved the war, and ended in his violent death. As matters stood on New Year of 1854, slavery was, by act of Congress in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, thenceforth forbidden to spread anywhere in United States territory north of the southern boundary of Missouri. In the early half of 1854 Senator Douglas drove through Congress a bill, creating the territory of Nebraska, which declared the Compromise prohibition of 1820 "inoperative and void." Thenceforth slavery might spread anywhere. This is the "repeal" of the Missouri Compromise.

That "repeal" brought Lincoln to his feet. And from the day of that Peoria speech Lincoln was, to seeing eyes, a man of destiny. For, not for that day, nor for that century, nor for this continent alone did Lincoln frame and join that speech. Let any logical mind attempt a logical synthesis of that address, marking well what affirmations are supreme. Not out of conditions that vary with the latitudes, nor out of opinions that change as knowledge improves, and not from sentiments that bloom and fade as do the passing flowers, was that address constructed. It handles things eternal. Its central propositions outwear the centuries. Its conclusions are compounded from stuff that is indestructible. And the piers upon which they rest are as steadfast as the everlasting hills. Freedom, union, perpetuity were its only positive themes. Let us "save the Union" was its central call; and "so" save it as to "make and keep it forever worth the saving"—so save it "that the succeeding generations of free, happy people, the world over, shall rise up and call us blessed to the latest generations." The perpetual Union of freemen—this was his one pure hope. Of this freedom slavery was a "total violation." Such a Union the principle of secession made forever impossible. And in the continual presence of tyranny, and under ever impending threats of disruption, perpetuity in peace was an impossibility. Liberty, equality, loyalty—only upon these enduring verities could self-government ever be built, or ever abide. Here is stability. Here is harmony. Here are truths "self-evident." Against cruelty, disloyalty, and pride these eternal principles are in "eternal antagonism." And when the two collide, "shocks and throes and convulsions must continually follow." Against human slavery, and all that human slavery entails, humanity instinctively and universally revolts. It is condemned by human righteousness and human sympathy alike. "Repeal the Missouri Compromise, repeal all compromises, repeal the Declaration of Independence, repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature."

Thus Lincoln bound together the arguments of this appeal. The irrepealability of the human sympathies in the nature of all men, the undeniable humanity of the black, self-government built upon the creative fiat of freedom and equality for all—upon these enduring propositions a Nation could be built whose resources either to eliminate all evils, pacify all convulsions, and resolve all debates, or to achieve a lasting progress, dignity and peace, would be inexhaustible. Thus, at the very start, his eye pierced through the political turmoil of his time, fixing in the central place before the Nation's gaze those "great and durable" elements which "no statesman can safely disregard."

Plainly notable in all this is that powerful and habitual proclivity in Lincoln to find out and publish abroad those civic propositions and principles that are inwrought with perpetuity. He was straining and toiling towards a triumph that time could never reverse. Foundations that were sure to shift, or disintegrate, or sink away, he was resolute to overturn, and clear away. He chose and strove to toil and speak for the immortal part in man, for ages yet to come, and for the immediate justice of Almighty God. And so he fashioned forth a programme that, like the programme of the Hebrew prophets, circumvented death.

His Constancy—Truth

This second inaugural contains a fine example of free and reasoned reliability. It is in fact, in its total stature, a stately exhibit of deliberate steadfastness. Let this short document be read, meanwhile remembering that other inaugural document, and not forgetting all the unspeakable strain and struggles of those four intervening years. The man who spoke in 1861, and the man who speaks now again in 1865, stands forth in the heart of those bewildering confusions of our political life, a living embodiment of civic constancy. In his person national firmness stands enshrined. In those ripe convictions, in those cool and poised determinations, in those ardent, prophetic desires—steadfast, consistent, and sure—are traceable the rock-like foundations of our confederate Republic. In those inaugurals stands a monument not liable soon to crumble away. But within that monument insuring its durability, rests as within and upon a steadfast throne, Lincoln's everlasting fidelity.

To win clear vision of this fine trait, let one read again this second inaugural, and locate truly the center of gravity of its second paragraph. There Lincoln is tracing in broad, plain strokes the origin and on-coming of the war. In the center of his steady thought the interest centrally at stake was the Union. On the one hand he recalls his own address at his first inauguration, "devoted," as he says, "altogether to saving the Union without war." On the other hand, he recalls "insurgent agents" seeking to destroy it without war. War was deprecated and dreaded by both parties. But one would make war rather than let the Nation survive. And the other would accept war rather than let the Nation perish. "And the war came." As a register of Lincoln's capacity for free, intelligent stability, no passing glance can in any sense exhaust or apprehend the depth and sweep and energy of those last four words. When loyalty to the Union was the issue and interest at stake, Lincoln would "accept war." "And the war came."

When Lincoln voiced those four words, his eye was looking back through four dreadful, bloody years—years, whether in prospect or in reminiscence, fit to make any human heart recoil. But as he surveys those scenes of hate and carnage and desolation, retracing and reckoning again the sum of their awful sorrow and cost, and rehearses again his resolution to "accept the war," it is without a shadow or a hint of wavering or remorse. In fact he is recalling that fateful day of four years before with an eye to review and vindicate that fateful resolve. At the end of those eventful and sorrow-laden years, he is as steady as at their start. Not by the breadth of a hair have his footing and purpose, his judgment and endeavor been made to swerve. Then as now, now as then, his loyalty is absolute. And in that sturdy loyalty of that lone man a seeing eye discerns nothing less than the unbending majesty of a Nation's self-respect. It is the Nation's sacred honor that he has in sacred charge. In him the integrity of the Nation at large finds a champion and a living voice. In his firm-set decision the Nation's destiny takes shape. In those short pregnant words the proud consistency of our total national career, and his superb reliability, become, instantly and for all time, freely, nobly, and completely identified. This is not to say that in the teeming history of those eventful years Lincoln's mind and will and sentiments had stood in stolid immobility. He freely concedes that the years have brought him lessons he had never foreseen. And his central attitude in this second scene is a reverent inquiry into the ways of Him whose purposes transcend all human wisdom, and require full centuries to complete. But strong and clear within his reverent and lowly acceptance of divine rebukes, stands unbent and unchanged his steadfast, invincible pledge to reveal, on his own and on his Nation's behalf, the sovereign grandeur of civic reliability.

In his first message to Congress this integral trait of his personal and official life finds majestic and most definite explication. It is the passage explaining to Congress, in precise and minute recital, just how the war began. It deals with those ominous events in Charleston harbor, centering about heroic Major Anderson, a federal officer, and within Fort Sumter, a federal fort. That assault upon a national garrison by Confederate guns was no haphazard event. At just that moment, and in just that spot the national crisis became acute. Upon that spot, and upon those events Lincoln's eye was fixed with a physician's anxiety. There he knew he could feel the pulse of the resentment and resolution of the South. Day and night he held his finger upon its feverish beat. And as the fever rose, he marked with exactest attentiveness its registration of one condition of the Southern heart:—Was that heart so hot with civic hate that, when every lesser issue was set aside, and the only issue under review was the right of the Republic to stand by its officers and its flag, then those Southern leaders would fire upon those officials in a federal fort, and pull down that flag upon federal soil? If in a federal fort the major in command, and his uniformed men, while making no aggression nor voicing any threat, but acting only as peaceful exponents of the Nation's authority, and being in exigent need of food, were to be visited by a national transport bearing nought but bread, upon such a ship, upon such a mission, would seceding soldiers open fire? If they would, and if that onslaught passed without rebuke, then that Nation's federal integrity was dissolved. Such was the unmixed issue, and so sharply edged was its final and decisive definition under Lincoln's hand. And on his part there was here no accident. With foresight, and by careful design Lincoln "took pains" to make the problem plain. With impressive and ideal carefulness he guided the action of his own heart to its final resolution, and predetermined the final verdict of the world.

In the last supreme alternative, when government agents stand in need of food, and citizens who repudiate all loyalty fire upon government transports freighted only with bread, what shall a government do? This was the naked question that Lincoln faced, when he decided to accept and prosecute the war. Upon this one plain question, and upon his one convinced determination he massed and compacted his first Congressional address. Right well he understood its point, its gravity, and its range. And surpassing well was he fitted to be the man to frame and demonstrate the true reply. In all the land no finer, firmer exemplar of elemental constancy could ever have been found to guide and cheer the Nation's course in this extremest test of elemental self-respect. Let those words be written and read again. It was a test of national self-respect, elemental and supreme. It was a question that concerned, as Lincoln saw and said, "the whole family of man." "Government of the people, by the same people"—can or cannot such a government "maintain its own integrity against its own domestic foes?" Can it "maintain its own integrity?" Can it master "its own domestic foes?" Can men who assume their self-control be trusted to maintain their self-respect? Here is a problem that is in verity elemental and supreme. What, in very deed and in solid fact, what is civic reliability? Where, among all the governments by men, where can steadfastness, civic steadfastness be found? Nowhere, Lincoln had the eyes to see; nowhere, but in the civic constancy of men at once governing and governed. Only thus and only there, only so and only here, in this heaven-favored land, did Lincoln see, can any government of men by men find fundamental base and final form that shall be consistent, stable, and real. This is government indeed. Here is elemental, civic verity. A community held in common self-control upon the basis of common self-respect—such a union alone has constancy. This is the sublime and radical civic truth that Lincoln forged out upon his steadfast heart, as he bent with mighty ponderings over those scenes in Charleston harbor, and reviewed and expounded their pregnant implications in his initial message to Congress in 1861.

In many ways this constancy of Lincoln rewards attentive thought. For one thing, it was radiant with intelligence. Indeed in him the two became identified. As thus conceived, it shows as pure and clear consistency. His fully tried reliability was the well-poised balance of a mind long-schooled in the art of steadiest deliberation. When Lincoln held immutably fast, it was due to his invincible faith that the conviction to which he clung involved abiding truth. This quality tempered all his firmness. Just here one finds the genesis and motive of all his skilled invention of reasoned, pleading speech. Lincoln's prevailing power of urgent argument roots in the deep persistency of his convinced belief. It was because of an impassioned confidence, an assurance that was vibrant with a note of triumph, that his grasp of any ruling purpose was so unwaveringly firm. This was his mood and attitude in all the major contentions of his life. To the central tenets that those contentions involved he held with all the firmness of the rooted hills. Touching those primary principles in his character and politics his mind and faith seem to have attained an absolute confirmation. And from those settled positions he could never be moved. Constancy in him was nothing more nor less than the energetic affirmation of intellectual rectitude.

His steadfastness, thus, was a mental poise. It can be defined as ripened judgment, a conclusion of thought, safeguarded on every side by a discernment not easily confused, by a penetration not easy to escape. This involved a wonderful flexibility. While steadfast unto the grade of immutability, where honor was involved, no student of his ways could call him obstinate. While firm and strong enough to hold the Nation to her predestined course upon an even keel, he held her helm with a gentle, pliant grasp. Being in every mental trait inherently honest and deliberate, he could at once be resolute and free.

This blend within his being of thoughtfulness and determination, of openness and immutability, this candid, conscientious, mental poise, this Godlike apprehension of the larger equilibrium, qualified him peculiarly to interpret the major movements of his time, to trace in the deep, prevailing sentiments of the human soul the chart of our national destiny.

Here is in Lincoln something wonderful. Among the millions of his fellowmen he counts but one. But in the range and grasp of his thought, in the eager passion of his heart, in the controlling power of his commanding will, he comprehends them all. Stable and heedful at once, he could challenge unanswerably every man's esteem. His symbol is the firm, benignant oak, the sheltering, abiding hills. Thus he stood to help and hold, to serve and rule among his fellowmen. Thus he wrought coherence into our great career. Thus he linked together those mighty political events with a logic which succeeding times have proved powerless to refute, but strong and glad to confirm. He had marvelous capacity to divine. With him to reason was to illuminate. Things bewilderingly obscure, within his thought and speech grew plain. He was our prime interpreter. He explained the Nation to itself. But in every such elucidation the Nation was made to co-operate. His instinctive, habitual attitude toward other men was that of a conferee. He was sensitively open to complaints and appeals. Delegations and private supplicants always found him courteous. This courtesy was never formal. To a degree altogether noteworthy the words of other men found entrance into the counselings of his mind. He was not merely accessible. He was impressible, sensitive, quick to appreciate and honor the sentiments of another man. With the earnest plea of balanced, honest argument, hailing from whatever source, he was facile to correspond. His judgments and decisions were amenable to estimates wholly novel to him. Indeed, to an almost astonishing degree his major movements were commensurate with the progress and pace of the national events that environed his life. In some of his mightiest accomplishments he seemed to do little more than register the conclusions of the national mind.

All this is to say that Lincoln's constancy was poise, not obstinacy; a well-reflected equilibrium, not a stiff rigidity. All his steadiness was studied. Never can it be said of Lincoln that his verdicts were snap judgments. On the contrary, with him deliberation and delay were so habitual and so excessively indulged, while pondering some massive, political perplexity, that the patience of some of our greatest statesmen repeatedly broke down, and he was charged repeatedly with criminal, and all but wanton indifference, inertia, and neglect. But never was sorer libel. Through it all he was only too intent. Through it all his eye refused to sleep, while his steady and steadying mind pursued the vexing task, until its permanent solution stood clear. And then, with his eye steadily single to the guiding hand of God, to the Nation's immortal weal, and to his own unsurrendered integrity, he would publish and fulfill his studied and sturdy resolve. Upon the basis of these internal mental conquests did all his firmness rest. Hence his life-long evenness and freedom from fluctuation.

But this challenges still further study. Given this notable blending in his mental habits of independent stalwartness and amenability to others' views, what is the inmost secret and explanation of his undeniable consistency? It lay in his human sincerity. His affinity with his neighbor was a reality. The Nation's deepest concerns were as deeply his own. Hence his ultimate convictions, though ripening in a single decade, proved to be in deep and enduring agreement with the ultimate convictions of the Nation at large, though requiring a full century to mature. The sentiments that were essentially his own were seen, when openly published upon his lips, to be the sentiments essential and common to his fellowmen. His personal aspiration was a national goal. His personal character was a national type. Truly representative, he was at the same time as truly unique. Always facing towards other men, he always stood erect.

This was Lincoln's constancy. It was not the stubbornness of an arbitrary will, although his will had regal energy. It was not a frigid intellectualism, although in mental penetration he could not be surpassed. It was not a tide of swelling enthusiasm, although the supreme emotion of his heart was the passion of an ideal patriotism. His commanding constancy, potent to compose a Nation's turbulence, was but the outer stature of his typical interior integrity. It was the open assertion and attestation of his personal self-respect.

Thus Lincoln's convictions and verdicts were unfailingly his own. And thus those verdicts and convictions had continental breadth. Dealing with a Nation's destiny, he came to be clothed with a Nation's majesty. In his own great heart, as in a Nation's crucible, he assembled and resolved the Nation's complexities; and in his own pure desire, as in a Nation's purified hopes, he defined and described our national goal. Of all things narrow and peculiar, of all things partisan and sectional, he purged his eye, until with malice toward none, with charity for all, with reverence towards God, he could see the total vastness of the things with which he had to deal.

Here is a loyalty worthy of the name—the plighted troth of one in whom the Nation's noblest hopes stand forth already realized, assured, secure. This defines and describes the force at play in this last inaugural. In the volume of those words Lincoln's message and Lincoln's manhood were identical. Its utterance was the voice of his self-respect. Herein Lincoln the patriot and Lincoln the man are one. Here was Lincoln's standard. His search for verity was a study of himself—of himself as true kindred of God and of his fellowmen. This is the core of Lincoln's honesty. This is the key to Lincoln's constancy. This is the secret of Lincoln's authority. This was the goal of Lincoln's quest for verity. This was for Lincoln the one reality. As child of the one great God, as closest kin of every man, he is our model champion and exemplar of the one abiding truth—personal self-respect. That this should be held unperverted and preserved intact was in the thought of Lincoln the primal equity, the very substance of a man's integrity.

His Humility—Worth

The name of Lincoln is linked inseparably with the lot of the slave. That the fortune of the lowly might be improved was the supreme enterprise of his life. As conceived by him, that enterprise concerned all men. Not for black men alone, and not alone for men in literal and evident bonds, was this, his major interest, engaged. Quite as keenly, nay even more, was his heart concerned for his closer kinsmen of Saxon blood, who never felt the slave driver's lash. But even here his prevailing inclination was a kindly solicitude for people of meager comfort, culture and liberty. Towards men whose fortune was adverse, and from whom more favored ones were prone to turn their face, his heart was prone to be compassionate. His very instincts seemed inclined to make the poor his intimates. And when he stood among the lowly, he never showed a sign that he had entered the shadow of any shame. Richly dowered with nobility himself, himself superior to every fortune, incapable of subjugation by any fate, a master owned among the mightiest, the dominant function of his life was ministration. This was his ambition. And it was sovereign. His towering aspiration was that the needy be relieved, that poor men might have means, that bondmen might be free.

This was a soaring, imperial wish. But it sent him where men were most down-trodden and overborne. It forced his name and reputation to become identified with the gross and low condition of the rudest, most untutored mortals of our land, the humble Afro-American slave. This lowly fellowship he never attempted to disguise nor consented to disclaim. He rather seemed to welcome whatever burden or reproach it might seem to involve. Before and against the white man who held the whip, beside and befriending the black who felt its lash, he chose to take, and persisted to keep, his stand. Many a time was this co-partnership flung in Lincoln's face with stinging words as a mongrel, shameful thing—with most vigorous persistence by Douglas in their famous debates. But it was not in Lincoln to desert and disown the poor, nor yet to apologize, nor to retort, nor even to reply. As champion and companion of the despised and embondaged victims of the white man's greed and contempt, Lincoln stands by the negro, as full of resoluteness, and as free from shame, as though defending his own home.

Here is genuine humility, not an attitude assumed, but a virtue inwrought. That this rare and Christian grace was planted deep in Lincoln's heart, and pervaded the total fullness of his life, may be argued from the very texture of his last inaugural. Upon just this point that document deserves minute attention. From the vantage ground of April 4, 1865, and from the point of view of slavery, that address is a profound and most commanding interpretation of the philosophy and phenomena of our American life. The war, God's Providence, and slavery—they are its sovereign themes. God's Providence shaping into national discipline the tragedy of the war; slavery "somehow" its deepest, fateful "cause:" there are thoughts for thoughtful men, who may wish to understand the meaning of our national life. The point to notice here is to observe how in Lincoln's mind in 1865, the course, and curse, and fate of slavery connect. It is nothing less than a profound elucidation of outstanding American events. It intimates impressively how Lincoln's mind had brooded and pondered over the lot of the African slave. He had reckoned all the value of their unrequited toil. The marks of their bruises and wounds were seared upon his soul. And of all the meaning of that sore humiliation, in terms of our national destiny and of the Divine dominion, he became the supreme and sympathetic expositor. In his unfolding of that meaning was infolded the master motive of his life. Under the hand of God he was having bitter but submissive share in setting forever right the cruel, age-long wrongs of the African slave. That such sentiments should take such shape at such a time is signal demonstration that they were the central sentiments of his heart. He was highly designated to a humble task; and he knew no higher honor than to keep close friendship with the poor, until his high commission stood complete. And to this close affiliation of lowliest lives with the loftiest aims and issues of his great career, he devotes well-nigh the whole of his inaugural address as our Nation's president to expound, therein betraying no slightest sign that he sees in that alliance the slightest incongruity. In that defense and championship of the rights that were elemental to men, though the most despised, he saw his highest dignity as president. And to that lowly aim he shaped and pledged his policy, his party, his fortune, and his fame.

In truth this affinity of Lincoln with his neighbor in need was the very fruitage of the fortune of his life. He was fitted and predestined for it by his birth. His station was of the lowliest. His setting-up was pathetically scant. All his discipline was cruelly stern. In ease and plenty he had no share. Of sweets and luxury he had no taste. Born of parents pitifully poor, nurtured in painful penury, poorly sheltered, scantily clad, accustomed to neglect, intimate with want, trained to disappointment, toiling in untamed scenes against hard odds with rudest tools, the kindred and daily familiar of unassuming men, denied the commonest aids to personal refinement, he was to the atmosphere and temperament of genuine, undisguised humility native born, and fully bred. From such a hopeless start, in such a hostile environment, he made his way alone. It can be said with almost literal truth that he never had any help. His only friend was his modest, resolute heart. His winnings were all by wrestling—and the struggle never relaxed. When every antagonist had been met and overthrown, and his gaunt stature stood in the Nation's arena alone and undefeated, then upon that unbent but unpretending form his Nation and his Nation's God laid a burden, such as no man in all our history had ever borne. When beneath that great final task he meekly bowed, its superhuman responsibility and weight were all-sufficient to crush forever all vain-glorious pride, if in his tried heart any pride had ever entered, and having entered had still remained. Before the majesty of his commission, and amid the inscrutable perplexities of each unparalleled day, he must always be fain, even though never forced, to walk humbly among his people, and before his God. From birth to death, by fortune and by Providence, as though by overmastering fate, he was fashioned for humility.

From all these grounds he was predisposed to modesty. Over against the vastness of his task, facing daily all its formidable difficulties, and sensible evermore of his infinite insufficiency, the posture of his spirit and the tone of his daily speech unfailingly betokened a moderate estimate of his personal significance. The overspreading majesty of the work to which he set his hand, always towering vividly before his thought, kept vividly active the consciousness that he was quite incompetent to accomplish aught, except the God of Nations tendered daily help.

As thus inclined and thus disposed in body and in mind, he became a man of prayer. That he should often fall upon his knees was but the consequence of his daily discovery that his burdens and his strength were widely incommensurate.

Many times those supplications seemed as though unheard. The heavens gave no sign. Then malice raged against him. But then his unsurrendered faith in God, his reverence for his task, and his sobering estimate of himself would show as meekness. It was not his way to retaliate or rail. In darkness, before delay, and beneath abuse, he bore and suffered long without complaint. In this pathetic quietness his humility becomes heroic.

This bent towards lowliness, tempered through and through, as it was, with his clear intelligence, saved him from vaunting and all vanity. There was habitually in his posture a grave solidity. This often seemed like carefulness and caution. But it was born of modesty. If there was ever a time when ever a man might be suffered to boast, the date of this second inaugural was the time, and the author of that inaugural was the man. The hour of that address marked the opening of Lincoln's second presidential term. It was the crowning vindication of his presidential policy. After four years of war the national poll at the last electoral vote had shown the North stronger in men than when the war began. The status of the South was desperate. But five weeks lay between him and the surrender of Lee. Lincoln was not lacking in foresight, nor in careful calculation. His skill therein was preeminent. Wary, discerning, resolute, his assurance of ultimate victory no doubt firm and clear, no breath of boasting was given vent. Instead, with almost painful reserve, he modestly said, "With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured." Lincoln was one of those rarest of men, invincible in resolution, at the same time invincible in reserve.

This inner mood of modesty showed in all his outer furnishing. It was not his way to publish his distinction. For him to signalize his primacy by any decoration would be an incongruity. In any group of men where precedence was emphasized he was ill at ease. Any attempt by him to designate his official elevation by some gilded ornament or plume would have been grotesque. His eyes were not lofty nor his heart haughty. His feet were for the furrow. His hands were for the axe. His lips were for friendly salutation of all the people on the street. Any outer token, intended to mark him for separation or any superiority, would have excited nothing but sorrow in him. Fabrics however costly and rare, jewels however brilliant and pure, designed and disposed for distinction and display, awakening envy and unrest quite as much as admiration and delight, were not for him. Plain man among the lowliest, true nobleman among the noblest, he wore all his honors in uttermost innocence of all parade.

Nor were the features of Lincoln ever intended to be employed as instruments of scorn. Into the hellish ministry of curling contempt those gracious lips could never be impressed. His heart was far too kindly; and that were safeguard enough. But his unalloyed humility was far too potent to ever encourage or permit in him any indulgence of disdain. Truly lowly himself, it was not in him to coldly despise any of his fellowmen. Just here his humility displayed its sterling honesty. And just here his honor and his glory blend. Here is his sure title to nobility—a title that neither time nor eternity can ever tarnish or bedim. By every right is this nobility his. By his earthly fortune, as by a hard, relentless fate, his lot was cast among the poor; and by that same appointment the lot of all earth's poor has gained perennial dignity. But he graced those ranks also as a volunteer. By his own consent, with sovereign free selection, he elected to sustain and overcome all the impediments of the station of his birth, and so to demonstrate the full capacity of the humblest human life for high endeavor and desire. Thus he was alike and at once filled with a deep compassion, and free from high contempt. Here lies the firm foundation of his proud renown. This is the true birthmark of his nobility. He was above the baseness and the meanness of scorning any brother man.

And so he avoided arrogance. It was not the way of Lincoln to forever reiterate, if even to allow, his own importance. He was acutely sensitive, to the meaning and worth of an honorable renown. Especially was his cool, gray eye awake to the future issues of the pregnant deeds of his teeming times. But therein his eager concern was a patriot's anxiety—an anxiety in which he mingled his fortune and fame with the destiny of his native land. Therein the jealousy of his desire for the national welfare burned away, as in sacrificial fires and upon a sacred altar, all ambitions for himself. At any cost to others, or through any other man's neglect, it was not in the heart of Lincoln to demand and heap together honors or advantages for himself. Well might he be justified, if ever such a course were fair, in claiming for himself exceptional rewards. Chief executive of a great Republic, commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the North, assured of the major momentum of military success, in immediate reach of vast and ever increasing resources, whether for war or peace, chosen the second time to be the Nation's head, charged the second time to consummate the Nation's perpetual unity—surely he had ample guaranty for imputing to his own sole hand, in a supreme degree, mighty prowess, imposing achievements, a vast and spreading authority and power. At such a time and amid such surroundings, a generous measure of self-aggrandizement would have seemed quite warranted and well sustained. But never was a mighty commander freer from that uncomely fault. The mention of victory makes him strangely unmindful of himself. The thought of his vast authority makes him the lowliest in the land. Lincoln was not arrogant. He made no effort after aggregated honors, however deserved, much less after honors unearned. In particular he showed no inclination to appropriate another's fame. For one thing, he knew too well the awful cost of magistracy. The right to be commander-in-chief of a Nation's resources and arms, so coveted a right in aspiring men, became transmuted in the cup which Lincoln drank into a terrible, an almost impossible responsibility. Nor was it of his nature to subtract from other men for his own increase. At the price of a brother's freedom, or happiness, or life, the gaining of ease, or wealth, or joy of any sort for himself would be far too dear. In the soul of Lincoln extortion could find no soil. His mien among men was that of indulgent ministry, not of exacting mastery. With the lower level and the lesser meed he could be well content. Morbid jealousy for his own acclaim, hungry greed for another's reward, satisfaction in plaudits that were undeserved, or comfort from robbery or extortion of any sort were sentiments for which the refined and genuine modesty of Lincoln had no appetite or taste. The honors that surrounded and invested him were up-springing, spontaneous and free; in no least measure accumulated, artificial or enforced.

The native purity of Lincoln's lowliness shows best in his reverence for God. He lived in a daily consciousness of Providence. As a statesman he was thoroughly a man of God, full of a patriot's adoring and acquiescent thankfulness, as he watched and studied the wonderful unfolding of God's just and kindly government of this most favored land. This mood of humble reverence was deeply wrought. It was of the texture of his character. It was not a vesture or a posture, a gesture or a phrase, assumed here and discarded there, and often counterfeit. It was essential, like his integrity, pervading and indeed controlling all his responsible life. And it was wholly undisguised. In his most formal public documents—papers in which statesmen as a rule make scant allusion to Deity—Lincoln's allusions to God are their most imposing feature. Beyond all contradiction, Lincoln enacted his public responsibilities in the fear of God. This was the beginning of his wisdom. Just this is the secret of the sanity of this last inaugural. And it is the secret of its immortal beauty. And it is the girdle of its strength. In framing its central argument, and thereby steadying the Nation's heart in the convulsions of war, he was expounding the hidden ways of God. There grew a mighty paragraph. It reads smoothly now. But when it passed through Lincoln's lips, it was the issue of a hard-pent agony. When he voiced those words he stood before an altar, and made confession, like a very priest, for both North and South. All the land had behaved with unbecoming confidence. All alike were under discipline. God was in dominion. Even in their prayers both North and South had been contending against the Lord. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither had been answered fully. The Almighty had his own purposes. The expectations of all had gone astray. The contending struggles of either side, despite their contending prayers, were being turned by the judgments of God against them both into a terrible national chastisement. So Lincoln discerned, and so he humbly, vicariously confessed. But beneath this high dominion his heart too had been bowed down, and overwhelmed, and chastened sore. Repeatedly his counsels had been overturned, and his expectations had been reversed; and that too, as he devoutly believed, by the over-ruling purposes of God. Hence, as in this inaugural scene he faced the future, though he was head of a puissant people, he behaved like a little child. In a chastened sense of the mystery and authority of the overruling designs of Almighty God, he forebore to boast. And then he said in rhythmic words of almost prophetic majesty, and in the attire of all but sacrificial humility: "Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"

This is indeed in prophetic strain. But he forbears to prophesy. He longed with sacrificial eagerness for national prosperity, in lasting freedom and unison and happiness. As he renewed his official pledge to preserve, protect, and defend the world's greatest charter of equality and freedom for all mankind, his heart and hope held high and firm. But his total being was subdued. God had crossed his path. The long-drawn war was God's rebuke. The Nation had gone sadly astray. The Almighty had taken her waywardness in hand. His purposes were in control. And He was supreme. And His ways were unrevealed. Lincoln stood to his task unflinchingly, ready either for sorrow or relief, ready either for death or life, as the Most High might appoint.

Here is statesmanship indeed. But it is altogether unique. A mighty Nation's executive head, discerning, devoted, and devout, holding in his steady hand the charge of a Nation's destiny, pledging in the Nation's name to lay upon the altar, if need be for the Nation's honor, the Nation's life, and there before the altar waiting humbly upon God. Many a theme of profoundest purport opens instantly into view. Just now our eye is fixed upon its illustration of humility.

On the one hand, and in the first place, its exhibition of the dignity of pure manhood is sublime. In this inaugural scene, beneath the awful stress of a Nation in war, upon the basis of the pledged covenant of the free, invincible faith that a free Republic can sustain and fulfill all its solemn responsibility, and with unquenchable hope in the vast and unseen future of his land, Lincoln took his stand, and held his ground, and put on record before God and all the world his reverent and resolute oath. Here is manhood, noble, majestic, decisive, free—a manhood that embraces the worth, voices the hope, and confronts with open breast the destiny of the race.

But in this same scene these mighty energies pause. Lincoln consciously faces God. For himself and for the Nation he makes humble acknowledgment that the Lord is Almighty and Most High. And to God's full sovereignty he yields spontaneous consent. With lowliest submission and confession he concedes and declares that all his rebukes and all his rule are in righteousness.

Here is a place where any man may properly pause. Here the orbit of our proudest being strikes its verge. Here God and manhood meet. Here human power faints. Here human resolution halts. Here human foresight dims. Here human wisdom becomes a void. Here all our pride becomes perforce humility; and all our counselings merge in faith. Here human grandeur touches its outer rim.

But here, too, human eyes awaken. Here human aspirations rise. Here human wisdom becomes newly informed. Here human forecasts brighten into hope. Here human strength revives. Here human purpose tightens. Here in reverence human wisdom begins. Here in human lowliness appears a Godlike dignity. Here our human stature shows its noblest. Lincoln is at the utmost bound of his knowledge, and his liberty; and yet he is displaying just here a discernment and a decision of the most exalted type—a discernment, however, whose insight is a vision of faith, and a decision whose resolve is an exercise of trust. In this scene statesmanship is transmuted into religion, undefiled and pure. Man in his loftiest hope and uttermost need, and God in his transcendent royalty of equity and goodwill meet face to face, and stand in open, free and friendly covenant. Here is at once a portrait of true humility, and the acme of high nobility. Here in childlike trust and childlike faith the wisdom and the freedom of man attain their goal. Here statesmanship and reverence, wisdom and trust, freedom and acquiescence, dignity and lowliness harmonize and interblend. And in the unison either one remains uncompounded and pure.

Here many questions press to be resolved. This signal scene in Lincoln's career—what has it to say about the inner nature of man? What about the nature of God? What about the nature of our human insight into the essential qualities of things? What about the relation of will to thought? What about the sovereignty of character? When human character touches the limit of human life, is it facing night or day? These are ultimate inquiries. And they are immediate. For answer to these inquiries, let Lincoln and Hegel meet. And let the Nations listen to their replies; and so discern what problems clear, where dignity and lowliness convene. For here is a shining scene, where any man may see that in a lowly heart wisdom and nobility may sit together as on a throne. Modesty like Lincoln's is a courtly grace. Reverence such as his beseems a prince. Such humility, reflecting with heavenly beauty the immediate presence of God, may clothe a mighty man, and hold the center of a mighty scene, without unseemliness, and it wants not intelligence. This at least this scene makes clear.

PART III. SYNTHESIS

Lincoln's Moral Unison

The marvelous beauty of the Athenian Parthenon is displayed in four façades. Upon these four sides runs a frieze in a continuous band, crowning all the columns, and binding all the structure into a single shrine. Comprehended within the stately course of that all-encircling frieze is classic demonstration how an impressive manifoldness of sculptural form may present a perfect and impressive unison.

Something such is Lincoln's character, as it stands in this second inaugural. In this address four personal qualities stand forth, as distinct and clear to the eye and thought as are the faces of the Parthenon; while, like the Parthenon, the author of that address is indivisibly and undeniably one. Both are alike composite, and both alike are one. Both embrace diversity, but all in perfect harmony. Both have perfect unity, but without monotony. Like the temple of Athene, greeting from its single altar every horizon of the Grecian sky, Lincoln, voicing his solemn oath as the Nation's president, gives utterance to every moral element in our American life. Here is something worth minute inspection. Here, upreared upon our Western, modern American soil, is a noble work of art, as noble as any in the ancient East—finished, balanced, and enduring—the ripened moral character of a people's patriot.

First to notice narrowly is that Lincoln's moral texture is fourfold. Four virtues stamp this speech. Four strands compose its web. Four hues commingle in its light. Four parts convey its harmony. This four-foldness is discernible distinctly.

Plain to see through all the features of this address, as well-defined as the features of his friendly face, is his kindliness. Of all things, war was most deplorable. Of all things, peace was most to be desired. All malice was to be disowned. All charity was to be indulged. All wounds were to be bound up. All sorrows were to be consoled. There spoke the pleading voice of love. All men were bidden to love their neighbors as they loved themselves. Here the quality of moral kindliness is unmistakably and indelibly distinct.

Quite as plain is his ideal and illustration of integrity. As manifest to all the world is his inflexible uprightness, as is the outer stature of his erect physique. For the equity in the bondman's protest against two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil he had an open ear and a profound respect. In the confidence that the judgments of Almighty God were altogether just he was not ashamed to make public announcement of his abiding faith. Eager that peace among ourselves and with all Nations might always last, he was also eager that it should be just. Firmly based, for his Nation and for himself, upon such foundations of self-respect, resting on God, and resolute for the right, he had no other thought but to strive with unremitting constancy, until his work was done. Here is moral loyalty, plainly visible, and as plainly inviolate.

Quite as clear is his humility. The war, as Lincoln viewed it, was a humbling visitation upon the Nation of the Nation's sins, a mighty rebuke upon all human scorn and pride. In all that sin and scorn and pride—the crime and guilt of slavery—Lincoln had no slightest, conscious, personal share. But the shame and woe of that rebuke, as it fell from the hand of God upon the Nation as a whole, he bore with quiet, meek humility. And to whatever further judgment the Almighty might allot he humbly bowed his head, confessing openly that, in his own heart and thought, God's ways had been proudly misunderstood. Here is reverent humility, and here is humble reverence, undeniable and undisguised.

And just as clear is his supreme esteem for values that are permanent and pure. Above all changing accidents Lincoln honored the Godlike human soul. In harmony herewith his thoughts and arguments were prone to handle centuries. And in rating worth his standard was a man's humanity. Thus he shaped the records and the prospects of our history into a philosophy. Thus he interpreted the war. It was God's vindication of the immortal value of the humblest man. Carnal pleasures and worldly gains, wrung from human lives at the cost of the degradation and debasement of the human soul, and in defiance of God's eternal and indefeasible laws, Lincoln saw to be of all things the most foolhardy and crude. So spiritual and pure was his conception of God and man, and his active understanding of the meaning of historic efforts and events. Ideals, endeavors, and enjoyments, even though normal and worthy, if they dealt with values that were decaying and gross, were cheaply rated by him; while the Nation's perpetuity, each man's spiritual quality, and God's eternal purity held eminence unfailingly in his affection and esteem. Here is spirituality, pure within, and by the inwardly pure plain to see.

As in the shapely quadrilateral of the Parthenon, this fourfoldness in the character of Lincoln is cardinal. Each quality is an element, each conforming with an elemental factor in the nature of every man. This involves that in its essential substance each trait, so far considered, is incapable of analysis. And each refuses to be resolved into something else. Each one is a simple and a constant co-efficient in Lincoln's moral being. Each one exists within his life in a complete integrity, indivisible, self-contained.

His humility, thus, is integral and unmixed. When Lincoln bows, as he does in this inaugural, before his God, and therein offers his life in a bending ministry to all his fellowmen, that reverence and that ministry are, as ministry and as reverence, pure lowliness. The phases of that lowliness may pass through continual transformation. And those changing forms may have changing designations. It may be submission before God's sovereignty, reverence before his majesty, awe before his mystery, obedience before his authority, trust beneath his Providence, confession under his rebukes; but common, essential, and unchanged within them all is simple, pure humility.

So with the fashion of his humble ways among his fellowmen. It also wears a varying guise. It may be modest reticence, abhorrence of parade, companionship with need, submission to abuse, co-partnership with a brother's shame, preferring another's gain, honoring other's worth, seeking ways to serve. But common, essential and unchanged within all these as well, is simple, pure humility. It is a solid moral trait, substantial and irreducible. As illustrated in Lincoln's life, it is entirely dignified and beautiful, essential and inseparable. As shown in his behavior, it corresponds with a relationship, as inherent and inwrought in his very being as his very breath. As a trait of Lincoln's character, his humility has a root, as firm and durable as is the transcendence of God, and as are the opportunity and obligation of every man among his brothermen to bear, forbear, and serve.

It is just the same with his fidelity. It too, is an uncompounded and imperative moral trait. It is a living, facile grace, easily capable of many kinds of affirmation. It may identify itself with truth, in reasoned or implicit faith; with promise, pledge, or oath, in loyalty; with proof by testing fires, as fidelity, steadfastness, or reliability; with unvarying, free adhesion to eternal principles, as consistency; with clear conviction of sure reality, as verity; with ethical straightforwardness, as rectitude, sincerity, or honesty; with even, balanced justice, as equity; with the innermost and final norm of truth in any personal life, as self-assertion, or self-respect. But common within them all, unaltered and unalterable amid all those varied and varying forms, is simple, unmixed constancy. In any analysis of Lincoln's moral life this moral trait will forever demand distinct and distinctive recognition and name. It is based and centered in his estimate and estimation of himself, the eye of his very honor, the core of his nobility, the very sense within his living soul of the life of his integrity. It is the inward attitude of his moral worth, as invincible, insistent, and elemental as any purest action of his self-consciousness.

The same holds true of Lincoln's kindliness. In the balanced harmony of his character the note of human friendliness is a persistent and indispensable strain. Without that melody his moral consonance would be painfully and irretrievably impaired. Like every other fundamental trait, this too may be voiced with every sort of easy, fluent variation. It may spring spontaneously from deep within the heart, as benign and all-embracing benevolence. It may overflow with benefits, in active, bounteous generosity. It may bind together an ideal home in parental, filial, fraternal affection. It may kindle at the altars of one's native land, and influence the heart of the patriotic devotee. It may break through all the accidents of birth and race into universal brotherhood. It may befriend the hurt, and needy, and bereft, as sympathy. It may so prevail as to bear up beneath the cruel sin of alien hearts in the sorrow of vicarious love, to the end that guilty men may be redeemed and reconciled. In myriad ways this human kindliness may speak its gentle words of mercy, grace, and peace. But every word is keyed to kindly fellowship. Through all those variations this note is prevalent. And it is keyed to a relationship as universal and as unavoidable as are the bonds of human brotherhood. This wanting in any moral character in fact or in idea, that moral character is unbalanced and incomplete. Its mighty influence and its constant evidence in Lincoln's active life supply an elemental requisite to that life's harmony. It is his full-voiced answer to the world-wide plea for human friendliness.

And just such affirmations must be made concerning Lincoln's pureness. Like each of the other three, this quality, too, holds a place and eminence distinctly and uniquely its own. No other trait can do its part or take its place. Its function and its office permit no substitute. Nor can its ministry be divided. Its claim is regal. And in any rating and apportionment among the other three this trait must be granted equal primacy. Its presence and its purport in Lincoln's total life are clear and fair and absolutely radical. Its aspect varies like the aspect of the sky. But deep within those variations gleams the pure and shining blue. It may win triumph over greed of appetite in temperance; or over fleshly passion in continence. It may fix supreme desire, not on decaying things, but on undying life; not on things that change and disappoint, but on values that abide and hold their own. It may search far beyond things visible for things unseen; and look within all symbols, discerning what they mean. It may detect within down-trodden, untutored men souls kindred to their Maker. It may transcend all idol forms, and make all worship spiritual. It may see how ends outvalue means; and how bottles should not outvalue wine. In the midst of our universal lot of accident, disease and death it may hold fast, for all the pure in heart, to the hope of a happy immortality. But enduring and undying, common and unchanged within them all is simple, spiritual purity. The soul asserts supremacy. Things that fluctuate and finally dissolve, however befitting and beautiful while they thrive, are admired and valued far beneath the immortal and unchanging worth of God and Godlike souls of men. This clear vision and high evaluation of spiritual things in the thought and life of Lincoln can never be omitted nor excluded in any final analysis of his moral life. It ranks among the elements of his character, as each or any one of its facades holds rank about the Parthenon.

Thus in the composition of Lincoln's moral being there are four solid, permanent, radical integers—his kindliness, his loyalty, his pureness, and his humility. And these four elements of his character face the four cardinal points in the compass of his life—his brother man, his conscious self, his flesh-bound soul, and his sovereign Lord. So inherent in his very structure, so inwrought in his conscious character, so deeply based, so cardinal, and so enduring and irreducible is this fourfoldness in Lincoln's inward life.

And now, as with the Parthenon, this finished circuit of these four constituents makes the outline of Lincoln's character not only clear and cardinal, but inclusive and complete. Combining in their significance and sweep all fleshly and material things; all things superior and supreme; all the realm and range of human brotherhood; and all the truth and worth within his own identity—every factor and relation of his conscious life has been embraced. His neighbor and himself as conscious peers, each in loyalty and love demanding and awarding equal mutual heed; his spirit and his flesh, the two and only two constituents of his personal life; his finite nature, facing, with the daily meed and due of humble reverence, his infinite Creator, the Lord of grace and truth—these exhaust the primal co-efficients of his life; these enjoin and specify his primal obligations; these inspire and consummate every moral excellence. When these four virtues are discovered and admired, when each and all are elected and achieved; when any man stands true and firm in self-respecting constancy; benign and kind in self-devoting love; spiritually refined and pure amid a world of corroding change; bending before the Most High God with the adoration and awe that are forever so beautiful and meet, his moral stature stands fully finished, balanced, and mature. So plain to see, so integral, and so comprehensive are these four qualities of Lincoln's character.

And now a mighty statement is waiting to be made. These four constituents of Lincoln's virtue are not four fractions of his character, each possessing and commanding in solitude and exclusively some separate segment of his morality. Not alone is each one integral, but Lincoln is integrally in each. His kindliness is not the action of a section of his character; it enlists and occupies his being as a whole and indivisibly. In Lincoln's faithfulness Lincoln's stature stands complete. Pureness is by no means an occasional or intermittent exercise of his judgment or choice. Nor in the geography of his life is Lincoln's lowliness local or sectional. The total Lincoln is kindly, faithful, pure, and lowly equally, fully and continually. When in this address he calls the Nation to firmness in the right as God reveals the right, his manhood stands full-sized in its exercise and pledge of patriotic loyalty to duty and oath. When again with pitying heart he makes reference to the slave driver's lash, to those centuries of unpaid toil, to the terrible cruelty of the war with its sorrowful entail of widows and orphans and wounds and graves, and, disowning all malice, voices his great-souled plea for universal charity and everlasting peace, the full flood of his full strength is pouring through his speech. When he reminds his fellowmen how far the worth of man transcends all other wealth, he is professing and commending a faith to which all his hopes stand pledged. And when in humble fellowship with humble men he abjures all hollow boasts and pride, and, bending beneath God's just rebukes, voices for all the land our national guilt, from that humiliation and lowliness no portion of his being is exempt. Each cardinal virtue engrosses and engages all his soul.

And now ensues with a sequence that is irresistible, an affirmation that in all this study of Lincoln's character must stand supreme. Integral as is each several one of these four virtues in Lincoln's life, and integral as is Lincoln's life in each single several trait, these two integrities can be clearly seen to deeply interblend and truly coincide. There is among the four qualities within his life no dissonance. Here emerges Lincoln's moral unison. As in the Parthenon all the elements harmonize and the edifice is one, so in Lincoln moral manifoldness unifies. There is throughout coincidence. The heart that bows towards God, in that very act of meekest acquiescence swells with pity for all who mourn and bleed, with indignant jealousy for equity, and with a supreme esteem for immortal souls. These four virtues do not exist and operate asunder. They do not come into view in this inaugural in sequence, each one in turn displacing and eclipsing the one that went and shone before. They coexist, each one continuing undiminished and unobscured, each one fully active and plain to see, their confluent tides pouring through the same identical phrase, the total strength of Lincoln surging alike in each. Through the whole address thrills Lincoln's whole conviction, all his passion, and the total vigor of his will respecting truth and falsity, hate and charity, greed and purity, pride and humility. Here is moral unison.

To find the secret to this moral synthesis demands and deserves the sharpest scrutiny. That this may be understood it requires to be seen that these four virtues, so clearly distinguishable and so perfectly combined, are as clearly and perfectly akin. Lincoln's equity and charity, as voiced in this address, are not alien energies. They vitally correspond. They bear mutual resemblance. Each springs from deep within himself, from his elemental manhood, a manhood that finds in his brother's life and liberty as deep rejoicing as in his own. And herein he is also kindred with God, as God's purposes and ways are defined in this address. God, too, is deeply just and kind. Here roots Lincoln's meekness under God's rebuke, and Lincoln's firmness in his understanding of what is right. Between his heart's chief wish and God's high will the moral correspondence becomes identity. So deep is the coincidence and agreement of Lincoln's reverence and equity and charity within himself and with his God. The same inwrought agreement shines in the profound affinity of Lincoln's kindliness and faithfulness and lowliness with his pure idealism. In him they are all as fully unified as is his manliness. So deeply intimate is the vital synthesis of Lincoln's moral unison.

This position is pivotal. If either of these four virtues, here defined and designated as elementally distinct and cardinal, can be ever merged into any one, or any two, or all the other three; or if any one can be dissolved, or analyzed into something else still more elemental and pure, that possibility should be made passing sure and clear at just this point. For from the affirmations, thus far laid down, as to the cardinal validity and vital harmony of these four moral traits, and of the four foundations in which these virtues rest, follow other affirmations in the chapters that now ensue, which no artificial postulate can ever uphold.

But here, in passing, two standard affirmations are required. It is not to be asserted or assumed that Lincoln's personal life attained perfection, and transcended sin. In the chapter on humility, and in chapters yet to come his own deep sense of deep unworthiness stands evident. But in his clear and firm ideal and desire, aglow throughout with Godlike grief for all delinquency, appear the qualities above defined.

And then these qualities, which his unique career displays, are, as moral qualities, in no respect unique or beyond the measure of any man. They beseem quite normally the plainest of us all. This truth deserves full heed and unreserved respect. Lincoln was beautifully like a little child. He was indeed a hero and performed heroic deeds. But with all his heroism, as regards his moral qualities, the humblest mortal may be his peer. Here is the hidden secret of the universal and ungrudging admiration which his heroic character commands. He is the world's model and guarantee of a world democracy.

PART IV. STUDIES

His Symmetry—The Problem of Beauty

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.

His Patience—The Problem of Meekness

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.