ever since. Subsequent study of his life and writings has enabled me to analyze the then unanalyzed impression which he produced on the young men of his generation. He was an embodied challenge to the conscience of the nation. He takes a place in American history which belongs to Amos in the history of the Hebrew people; like Amos, a son of the people; like Amos, with a plumb-line of righteousness by which he measured the institutions of his country; like Amos, bringing every political question to the test, What is right? and by that test insisting that all political questions should be determined.

Vague stories are told, some historical, some legendary, to illustrate Abraham Lincoln's faith offered to a God efficient in the affairs of this world. The first expression of such faith that I can find from Lincoln himself is in his Address to his fellow-citizens of Springfield as he starts on his eastward journey to his first inauguration:

"I now leave, not knowing when or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail. Trusting in Him who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell."

From this simple faith in the God who watches over nations as over individuals he never departed. Subsequent events only served to deepen and strengthen it. But in his earlier life, before burdens too heavy for him to bear alone had driven him to look for help to the Helper of men, Lincoln was an agnostic. He wrote in his youth an essay against Christianity, which, fortunately for his reputation, a wise friend threw into the fire. But if that is the only indication of an anti-Christian faith, there is no indication in his youth of any religious faith, Christian or other. Says Mr. Herndon, "Mr. Lincoln had no faith. In order to believe, he must see and feel and thrust his hand into the place. He must taste, smell, or handle before he had faith or even belief."

Mr. Herndon's estimate is confirmed by that of Lincoln's wife. "Mr. Lincoln," she says, "had no faith and no hope in the usual acceptation of those words. He never joined a church; but still, as I believe, he was a religious man by nature. He first seemed to think about the subject when our Willie died, and then more than ever by the time he went to Gettysburg; but it was a kind of poetry in his nature, and he was never a technical Christian."

What profounder religious faith than was expressed in Lincoln's Springfield Speech, Mrs. Lincoln looked for, I do not know; and what is meant by a "technical Christian" I am not quite sure. But if Lincoln had in the early part of his life no faith and no hope, it is certain that from his earliest years he had a conscience. Whether it was inherited from his mother, or acquired by education, or received by a susceptible soul from that mysterious Being in whom we have our life, it certainly dominated his whole nature and controlled his whole conduct. From his youth up he was known among his rough companions as "Honest Abe." They were accustomed to refer to him their controversies and accept his arbitrament, generally without question. If ever there is a time in the life of man when his conscience takes the second place and his passion comes to the front, it is when he is in love. I think Abraham Lincoln's letter to Mary Owens in 1837 a unique specimen in love literature, of lovemaking by conscience:

"I want in all cases to do right, and most particularly so in all cases with women. I want at this particular time, more than anything else, to do right with you; and if I knew it would be doing right, as I rather suspect it would be, to let you alone, I would do it. And for the purpose of making the matter as plain as possible, I now say that you can now drop the subject, dismiss your thoughts (if you ever had any) from me forever, and leave this letter unanswered, without calling forth one accusing murmur from me. .. Nothing would make me more miserable than to believe you miserable-nothing more happy than to know you were so."

He was a man of eager professional ambitions; but his notes prepared for a law lecture in 1850, which was, so far

as I know, never delivered, show that in his innermost thought his professional ambitions were subordinated to his conscience. He says:

"There is a vague popular belief that lawyers are necessarily dishonest. I say vague, because when we consider to what extent confidence and honors are reposed in and conferred upon lawyers by the people, it appears improbable that their impression of dishonesty is very distinct and vivid. Yet the impression is common, almost universal. Let no young man choosing the law for a calling for a moment yield to the popular belief-resolve to be honest at all events; and if in your own judgment you cannot be an honest lawyer, resolve to be honest without being a lawyer. Choose some other occupation rather than one in the choosing of which you do, in advance, consent to be a knave."

Lincoln was a man of strong political ambitions; but from the outset of his life his political ambitions were subordinated to his desire for public righteousness. In 1836 he was running for the first time for office. His defeat then would have probably been a permanent end to his political hopes. A Mr. Robert Allen had said that he was in possession of facts which, if known to the public, would destroy Lincoln's prospects, but through favor to Lincoln he would not divulge those facts. Lincoln writes him:

"No one has needed favors more than I, and, generally, few have been less unwilling to accept them; but in this case favor to me would be injustice to the public, and therefore I must beg your pardon for declining it. the candid statement of facts on your part, however low it may sink me, shall never break the tie of personal friendship between us."

It would be difficult to find a more striking illustration of the dominating power of conscience than in this declaration, that an act just to the public and destructive to the writer's ambitions would not sunder the ties of friendship between the writer and the man who had destroyed his political hopes.

A year later, at twenty-eight years of age, Lincoln delivers a Lyceum address in Springfield. He warns the young men to whom he speaks of impending national peril. He fears no attack of foreign foe. "As a nation of freemen," he says, "we must live through all time, or die by suicide." The

domestic peril which he fears is not intemperance, nor gambling, nor even slavery, but a lack of conscience, a disregard of justice, "the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgments of courts, and the worse than savage mobs for the executive ministers of justice." He is nominated by the Republicans of Illinois against Stephen A. Douglas to be United States Senator. He prepares with care his speech of acceptance and reads it to his friends. It opens with these pregnant sentences, since become famous in the political history of America:

"A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this Government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved-I do not expect the house to fallbut I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other."

His cautious friends protest. One calls it a fool utterance. Another says it is ahead of the times. A third argues that it would drive away a good many voters fresh from the Democratic ranks. Even his Abolition friend, Herndon, doubts its wisdom. "This thing," replies Lincoln, "has been retarded long enough. The time has come when these sentences should be heard, and if it is decreed that I should go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked to the truth. Let me die in the advocacy of what is just and right." In his subsequent debate with Douglas he nails this flag to the mast and keeps it flying there:

"The real issue in this controversy is the sentiment on the part of one class that looks upon slavery as a wrong, and of another class that does not look upon it as a wrong. That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles-right and wrong -throughout the world. They are the two principles which have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle."

Such was the man who came to New York, and in this hall forty-nine years ago issued his challenge to the sleeping conscience of the city. He was in the commercial metropolis

of the nation, the Corinth of America. All its life was centered in and dominated by its commercial interests. Its great religious societies and its most influential pulpits, with a few notable exceptions, were silent respecting the wrong of slavery. Cotton was King, and New York was his capital. Nowhere more than in New York was compromise popular, and uncompromising hostility to slavery abhorrent to popular sentiment; nowhere more than in New York might the woe have been pronounced against those that "close their eyes that they may not see, their ears that they may not hear, and their hearts that they may not feel, lest they should be converted." Even the most radical anti-slavery journal in the city damned the Western orator with faint praise. With a moral courage rarely exceeded, though happily not without frequent historic parallels, Abraham Lincoln, in this city and to this audience, reissued his challenge to the conscience of the nation.

"If slavery," he said, "is right we cannot justly object to its nationality-its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension-its enlargement. All they ask we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right and our thinking it wrong is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy."

In that issue, so stated, compromise was impossible.

The slavery question seems so simple to us now; but it was not simple to the men of that generation. Let us go back and attempt to conceive it as it appeared to them. The year 1620, which saw the Pilgrim Fathers landing on Plymouth Rock, saw a vessel of slaves landing on the Virginia coast. For nearly two hundred years slavery existed in every State in the Union except Massachusetts, and some citizens of Massachusetts engaged in the slave trade. Partly from moral, partly from economic reasons, it was gradually abolished in the Northern States. But the invention of the cotton-gin created a greatly increased demand for cotton, and the greatly increased demand for cotton, created a greatly increased demand for negro labor, and this gave slavery