While I speak to you to-day, the body of the President who ruled this
people, is lying, honored and loved, in our city. It is impossible,
with that sacred presence in our midst, for me to stand and speak of
ordinary topics which occupy the pulpit. I must speak of him to-day;
and I therefore undertake to do what I have intended to do at some
future time, to invite you to study with me the character of Abraham
Lincoln, the impulse of his life and the causes of his death. I know
how hard it is to do it rightly, how impossible it is to do it
worthily. But I shall speak with confidence, because I speak to those
who love him, and whose ready love will fill out the deficiencies in
a picture which my words will weakly try to draw.
We take it for granted, first of all, that there is an essential
connection between Mr. Lincoln's character and his violent and bloody
death. It is no accident, no arbitrary decree of Providence. He lived
as he did, and he died as he did, because he was what he was. The more
we see of events the less we come to believe in any fate, or destiny,
except the destiny of character. It will be our duty, then, to see
what there was in the character of our great President that created
the history of his life, and at last produced the catastrophe of his
cruel death. After the first trembling horror, the first outburst of
indignant sorrow, has grown calm, these are the questions which we are
bound to ask and answer.
It is not necessary for me even to sketch the biography of Mr.
Lincoln. He was born in Kentucky fifty-six years ago, when Kentucky
was a pioneer State. He lived, as a boy and man, the hard and needy
life of a backwoodsman, a farmer, a river boatman, and, finally, by
his own efforts at self-education, of an active, respected,
influential citizen, in the half organized and manifold interests of a
new and energetic community. From his boyhood up he lived in direct
and vigorous contact with men and things, not as in older states and
easier conditions with words and theories; and both his moral
convictions and intellectual opinions gathered from that contact a
supreme degree of that character by which men knew him; that
character which is the most distinctive possession of the best
American nature; that almost indescribable quality which we call, in
general, clearness or truth, and which appears in the physical
structure as health, in the moral constitution as honesty, in the
mental structure as sagacity, and in the region of active life as
practicalness. This one character, with many sides, all shaped of the
same essential force and testifying to the same inner influences, was
what was powerful in him and decreed for him the life he was to live
and the death he was to die. We must take no smaller view then this of
what he was.
It is the great boon of such characters as Mr. Lincoln's, that they
reunite what God has joined together and man has put asunder. In him
was vindicated the greatness of real goodness and the goodness of real
greatness. The twain were one flesh. Not one of all the multitudes who
stood and looked up to him for direction with such a loving and
implicit trust can tell you to-day whether the wise judgments that he
gave came most from a strong head or a sound heart. If you ask them,
they are puzzled. There are men as good as he, but they do bad things.
There are men as intelligent as he, but they do foolish things. In
him, goodness and intelligence combined and made their best result of
wisdom. For perfect truth consists not merely in the right
constituents of character, but in their right and intimate
conjunction. This union of the mental and moral into a life of
admirable simplicity is what we most admire in children; but in them
it is unsettled and unpractical. But when it is preserved into
manhood, deepened into reliability and maturity, it is that glorified
childlikeness, that high and reverend simplicity, which shames and
baffles the most accomplished astuteness, and is chosen by God to fill
His purposes when He needs a ruler for His people, of faithful and
true heart, such as he had, who was our President.
Another evident quality of such character as this will be its
freshness or newness, if we may so speak; its freshness or
readiness,--call it what you will,--its ability to take up new duties
and do them in a new way, will result of necessity from its truth and
clearness. The simple natures and forces will always be the most
pliant ones. Water bends and shapes itself to any channel. Air folds
and adapts itself to each new figure. They are the simplest and the
most infinitely active things in nature. So this nature, in very
virtue of its simplicity, must be also free, always fitting itself to
each new need. It will always start from the most fundamental and
eternal conditions, and work in the straightest, even though they be
the newest ways, to the present prescribed purpose. In one word, it
must be broad and independent and radical. So that freedom and
radicalness in the character of Abraham Lincoln were not separate
qualities, but the necessary results of his simplicity and
childlikeness and truth.
Here then we have some conception of the man. Out of this character
came the life which we admire and the death which we lament to-day. He
was called in that character to that life and death. It was just the
nature, as you see, which a new nation such as ours ought to produce.
All the conditions of his birth, his youth, his manhood, which made
him what he was, were not irregular and exceptional, but were the
normal conditions of a new and simple country. His pioneer home in
Indiana was a type of the pioneer land in which he lived. If ever
there was a man who was a part of the time and country he lived in,
this was he. The same simple respect for labor won in the school of
work and incorporated into blood and muscle; the same unassuming
loyalty to the simple virtues of temperance and industry and
integrity; the same sagacious judgment which had learned to be
quick-eyed and quick-brained in the constant presence of emergency;
the same direct and clear thought about things, social, political and
religious, that was in him supremely, was in the people he was sent to
rule. Surely, with such a type-man for ruler, there would seem to be
but a smooth and even road over which he might lead the people whose
character he represented into the new region of national happiness,
and comfort, and usefulness, for which that character had been
designed.
The cause that Abraham Lincoln died for shall grow stronger by his
death, stronger and sterner. Stronger to set its pillars deep into the
structure of our Nation's life; sterner to execute the justice of the
Lord upon his enemies. Stronger to spread its arms and grasp our whole
land into freedom; sterner to sweep the last poor ghost of slavery out
of our haunted homes.
So let him lie there in our midst to-day and let our people go and
bend with solemn thoughtfulness and look upon his face and read the
lessons of his burial. As he passed here on his journey from the
Western home and told us what, by the help of God, he meant to do, so
let him pause upon his way back to his Western grave and tell us, with
a silence more eloquent than words, how bravely, how truly, by the
strength of God, he did it. God brought him up as He brought David up
from the sheep-folds to feed Jacob, His people, and Israel, His
inheritance. He came up in earnestness and faith, and he goes back in
triumph. As he pauses here to-day, and from his cold lips bids us bear
witness how he has met the duty that was laid on him, what can we say
out of our full hearts but this:--"He fed them with a faithful and
true heart, and ruled them prudently with all his power."
THE SHEPHERD OF THE PEOPLE! that old name that the best rulers ever
craved. What ruler ever won it like this dead President of ours? He
fed us faithfully and truly. He fed us with counsel when we were in
doubt, with inspiration when we sometimes faltered, with caution when
we would be rash, with calm, clear, trustful cheerfulness through many
an hour, when our hearts were dark. He fed hungry souls all over the
country with sympathy and consolation. He spread before the whole land
feasts of great duty and devotion and patriotism, on which the land
grew strong. He fed us with solemn, solid truths. He taught us the
sacredness of government, the wickedness of treason. He made our souls
glad and vigorous with the love of liberty that was in his. He showed
us how to love truth and yet be charitable--how to hate wrong and all
oppression, and yet not treasure one personal injury or insult. He fed
all his people, from the highest to the lowest, from the most
privileged down to the most enslaved. Best of all, he fed us with a
reverent and genuine religion. He spread before us the love and fear
of God just in that shape in which we need them most, and out of his
faithful service of a higher Master, who of us has not taken and eaten
and grown strong? "He fed them with a faithful and true heart." Yes,
till the last. For at the last, behold him standing with hand reached
out to feed the South with mercy, and the North with charity, and the
whole land with peace, when the Lord who had sent him called him, and
his work was done!
He stood once on the battlefield of our own State, and said of the
brave men who had saved it, words as noble as any countryman of ours
ever spoke. Let us stand in the country he has saved, and which is to
be his grave and monument, and say of Abraham Lincoln what he said of
the soldiers who had died at Gettysburg. He stood there with their
graves before him, and these are the words he said:
"We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this
ground. These brave men who struggled here have consecrated it far
beyond our power to add or detract. The world will little note nor
long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did
here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated to the unfinished
work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is
rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before
us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that
cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we
here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; and
this nation, under God shall have a new birth of freedom; and that
government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not
perish from the earth."
May God make us worthy of the memory of Abraham Lincoln!