sages of stability, and the great sun by day following his steady course, there where the voices of the storm proclaimed the power of the Spirit, and the soft breath of Spring whispered of His enduring love; is it not likely, I say, that in those long mystical evenings, pregnant with hallowed memories and vibrant with the suppressed emotions of a nation of thirty million souls slowly but surely approaching a tremendous crisis in which the bravest sons of all those states should struggle passionately to the death in war;—is it not likely that she should pray that this child might be a son, and that he might be the Moses destined to lead another race out of bondage?

You have the result of those meditations in the life and actions and work of her son. Unless we are willing to stand by the law of chance and trust our present and future to the casting of the dice by blind fate, we must accept this argument to account for Abraham Lincoln.

And then one night in February while the strong winds, big with the events of a new spring, wrestled about the little cabin in the deep woods, the child was born.

What an hour was that for the world! How far on another course might the Ship of State have been blown, and where might it be drifting today, had that soul in its rugged little body, not come into our world!

If we were to attribute intelligent power to the planets after the manner of the ancients, we should have to agree that at the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the planet Mars and the planet Venus were both in the ascendant, for never has a spirit come to this earth in which the powers of war and the powers of love were so entwined. But we need not seek beyond the natural divinity of the mother and the rugged and primal nobility of the father and his forebears to cast the

horoscope of this great world figure. The very time of his conception was pregnant with the child of freedom. The newest nation of the earth, itself a child of liberty, born in pain and travail, fought for while yet a helpless babe in the cradle of liberty, was now in the vigorous strength of youth; and while the bloom of adolescence was still hardly more than seen upon its cheeks, was a nation divided against itself. Out of that division and remating was to be born another child of Democracy-the Union.

This tremendous event had its inception about the cradle hewn out of the maple log, in the still, sheltering forest where, more than anywhere else, God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.

Chapter II
CHILDHOOD

BRAHAM LINCOLN was born February 12, 1809, in a desolate region, three miles from Hodgenville,

Kentucky, a place that today would not be given the name of even a settlement, so crude was it in every way, so much it lacked of everything that goes to make for civilization. No, not everything, for there, as in every frontier settlement, or cabin of American pioneers, was the courage, the will, the fearless determination, and the primal virtues of mind and heart that are the warp and woof of all society, and especially of the society of that period of America.

A strange thing is this coming of a new human being into the world! It would seem that the cradle of a child born for great deeds must be the center of unnumbered forces flowing to it from all the stars of the universe. We believe that all the planets and their stars are connected by invisible lines with all other planets, and that over those invisible rays, vibrant with thrilling action travel waves of sound and those sounds in heavenly harmonies break upon the farthest shores of infinite space. It must certainly follow that a living soul has its subtle connections with other soul forces in the infinitude of God.

Lincoln, the baby, lying in his rude cradle, sucking his thumbs and gazing with a child's questioning eyes upon a

strange new world, was only one child in a million filling such a place in the evolution of life and its manifestations. Other children were born on that same day, the same hour, one or two at the same moment perhaps. But no child whose history we know had such a heritage of thoughts and feelings, weighted with generations of passion for justice tempered by religious devotion, active and silent, Covenanter, Cavalier and Quaker, as this child, Abraham Lincoln. Not only had his ancestral life been filled with thoughts of universal democracy and active suffering for the principle of it, but the immediate atmosphere wherein he was conceived and brought into the world was colored as the rainbow with the breeding ideas of two great factions at bitter strife, each intent on forcing its particular set of ideas of government on the other, or of going each its separate way in search of those things which each held sacred and necessary to the growth and ultimate happiness of man. And these thought forces were sending out wave upon wave into the surrounding ocean of human perception and understanding.

The soul of that tender boy in the father-made cradle, rocked by the foot of a mother who had become imbued with the idea, from association with the Lincoln philosophy, that such labor as made that cradle and built the cabin over her head, and was clearing the primeval forest to make land from which that labor might win independence and untrammeled action for the individual man, was honorable and the soul of that boy was no doubt tuned to receive the thoughts of liberty and to deny the thoughts of bondage.

Sitting with those humble people in that dimly lighted cabin, did no sensitive soul feel the sacred spell of prophetic. greatness hovering near? Did no gnarled hand of a primitive seer bending forward from a crude oaken chair rest upon the

cradle in which lay the sleeping child? Was there no faint whisper wafted to the grey-eyed mother of the great debt that future ages were to bear toward this new comer into the clean and wholesome woods? There lay the immortal Lincoln, he who was to dictate the Emancipation Proclamation, not only of four million African slaves, but of mankind.

Three great names shine forth in American history and glow with supreme effulgence; Columbus, Washington, Lincoln. Columbus was European and however great his heart, however lively his sympathies, he could hardly have refrained from passing a man of Lincoln's appearance, had they chanced to meet, with scarce a glance and that glance one of curiosity, if not disdain. His schooling, training and accomplishments had all been in another world, an atmosphere of gentle breeding and courtly polish. Lincoln's rugged personality, his plain common sense theories, his loosely fitting garments covering his large angular frame, could but have shocked the stately flowing-robed astronomer, who first saw round the world "in his mind's eye" and in an effort to follow the circle science cast for him alone, first set foot upon the Western Hemisphere. So foreign is he in nature to those who finally made settlement in America, and to their children, who hewed out of the savage tenanted wilderness these democratic states, that his spirit is translated into a goddess, and what part of our country is symbolically given to its discoverer is known as Columbia. Although the country was discovered by Columbus, he is, and always will be, as foreign to it as the language he spoke or the robes he wore.

Washington was born in Virginia, but in a certain sense he was not a native to the soil. He was, indeed, a grand figure in the world; his bearing, his countenance, his manners, and his ideals would have been as much at home in the Roman Re