To comprehend the current of history sympathetically, to appreciate
the spirit of the age, prophetically, to know what God, by His
providence, is working out in the epoch and the community, and so to
work with him as to guide the current and embody in noble deeds the
spirit of the age in working out the divine problem,--this is true
greatness. The man who sets his powers, however gigantic, to stemming
the current and thwarting the divine purposes, is not truly great.
Abraham Lincoln was made the Chief Executive of a nation whose
Constitution was unlike that of any other nation on the face of the
globe. We assume that, ordinarily, public sentiment will change so
gradually that the nation can always secure a true representative of
its purpose in the presidential chair by an election every four years.
Mr. Lincoln held the presidential office at a time when public
sentiment was revolutionized in less than four years.... It was the
peculiar genius of Abraham Lincoln, that he was able, by his
sympathetic insight, to perceive the change in public sentiment
without waiting for it to be formulated in any legislative action; to
keep pace with it, to lead and direct it, to quicken laggard spirits,
to hold in the too ardent, too impetuous, and too hasty ones, and
thus, when he signed the emancipation proclamation, to make his
signature, not the act of an individual man, the edict of a military
imperator, but the representative act of a great nation. He was the
greatest President in American History, because in a time of
revolution he grasped the purposes of the American people and embodied
them in an act of justice and humanity which was in the highest sense
the act of the American Republic.