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for self-development and self-conquest, which is the secret of all enduring greatness.

Abraham Lincoln was always nobler than his surroundings and wiser than his companions; but there has been in many places, and not seldom here in this great state to which his name and that of Grant have given imperishable lustre, a somewhat grudging recognition of his nobility and wisdom. His image has been obscured by the breath of men who thought that he was altogether such an one as themselves, and who fastened upon the defects of his massive nature as though they were the substance of his being; men who were fain to magnify their own pettiness by creeping into some crevice of his character.

You will permit me, therefore, to recall a paragraph from one of his early speeches, a paragraph that lives in my mind as the cathedral utterance of Abraham Lincoln, because I can never recall it without the vision of some mighty structure soaring upwards like the dome of St. Peter's or the spires of Cologne's beautiful temple into that ampler ether where a sublime human achievement is made glorious by the greeting of the radiant skies.

Speaking of the slave power, he exclaimed:

"Broken by it, I, too, may be; bow to it, I never will. The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause which we deem to be just. It shall not deter me. If I ever feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country deserted by all the world besides, and I, standing up boldly and alone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors. Here, without contemplating consequence, before high heaven, and in the face of the world, I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause, as I deem it, of the land of my life, my liberty, and my love."

Here is the key to the peculiar character of Abraham Lincoln. His soul was capable of infinite expansion; and under the inspiration of great opportunity and tremendous responsibility his soul did expand to dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect; but it was a soul whose final majesty, whose ultimate harmonious proportions were never quite

comprehended by men who boasted that they, too, were hewn from the same rough quarry and who flattered themselves that they, too, might have expanded to the same grandeur.

Yet, even these could not hide the fact that Lincoln had been always a being apart-friendly, sociable, kindly, helpful; but singularly, although not offensively, unlike his neighbors. The strength of a giant was the servant of "a heart as big as his arms were long." Like Garibaldi, the hero of United Italy, he could not bear the sight or sound of needless suffering. Bigger and stronger than any of his companions, he was the gentlest of them all. But the quality of his mind was wholly different from theirs; indeed it was of a quality exceedingly rare in the whole world. Lincoln had marvellous mental eyesight. He looked not so much at things as into them. His vision was not only accurate, but penetrating. It was a vision unblurred by his own hasty fancies or his own wishes; and a vision undimmed by prevalent misstatements or current misconceptions; a vision never long perturbed by the sophistries of men skilled to make "the worse appear the better reason.

Referring once to the declaration of Galileo that a ball dropped and a ball shot from the mouth of a cannon would strike the ground at the same instant, Lincoln said that long before he knew the reasons for it, it seemed to him that it must be so. Like Galileo, he saw the thing before and not merely after it was proved. He saw that the downward pull on both balls must be the same, and that the outward drive of the one had nothing whatever to do with the time of its fall. We may indeed wonder what might have been his career, if, like Michael Faraday, he had first read books of science instead of the Revised Statutes of Illinois or the Commentaries of Blackstone that he found in a pile of rubbish. Fate decreed, however, that this rare quality of penetrative vision should be applied to law and to statecraft-especially to the problems then challenging the thought of the American people. This vision, moreover, was not only penetrative; it was prophetic. He could foresee consequences as distinctly as he could discern realities. It was not pure guessing, when he exclaimed, "This government cannot endure permanently half

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York Public.

Charles J. Little

Facsimile of Manuscript Tribute from Dr. Charles J. Little,
President of Garrett Biblical Institute, Chicago

ety-Six a St. Branch,

12 East 90th Street.

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free and half slave." It was a prediction derived from steady and consecutive vision. For genuine logic, like the logic of Euclid which fascinated him, is, after all, a continuous seeing. Given the elements of a situation, the mind watches them as consequence follows consequence in sure and certain revelation. Never to befool oneself about an actual situation and never to befool oneself in reasoning upon it-these are the bases of science, physical and political. And science is the modern almanac, the handbook of prediction. When men like Douglas were attempting to manipulate and thwart the laws of God which determine national destiny, Abraham Lincoln was humbly studying them in the spirit of Galileo and of Francis Bacon.

Daniel Webster once declared that it is wholly unnecessary to re-enact the laws of God. The saying, strictly construed, is true enough, but the implications of it, as Lincoln saw, are utterly false. We need not, indeed, re-enact the laws of God, but our statutes, if they shall work benefit and not disaster, must recognize and conform to them. The laws of God, left to themselves, leave us in impotence, and exposed to hunger, disease and disaster. All our mastery of the physical world depends upon our actively using, not upon our passively submitting to, the laws of the material universe. In this sense every flying locomotive is a re-enactment of the laws of God; so is every telescope that opens to mortal vision the splendors of immensity, and every microscope with which we track to their hiding places the mysteries of life and death. So is every temple that we rear, every bridge that we build, every steamship that we construct, every mill that we erect, and every machine into which we conduct the energy of steam or electricity. The whole progress of civilized man may be measured by the extent to which he has learned in his activities to obey and to employ the laws of God. So, too, in the political world, the great structures that we call commonwealths must, in this sense, be re-enactments of eternal principles. If they are to be beneficent and not malignant, those who create and control them must learn the laws by which alone benign results can be obtained. Constitutions can en

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