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.