The beauties of Irving and Thoreau, even the deep spiritual insight of Emerson and Whittier, are tame beside the profound feeling, large vision, clear expression, and persuasive eloquence of the two inaugural addresses. While the purely literary authors were dealing with intellectual and moral theories, Lincoln was grappling with actual conditions, which he handled as exhaustively and fearlessly as an imaginative writer marshals and commands the fictitious children of his brain. Without gloss or deception, he laid bare the vital issues, and forced the Nation to face them by the sheer power of his presentation.

Lincoln's life squared with his utterances. How many there are who work themselves into heroic moods in the quiet of the study and easily picture what they would do when facing severe tests; but who would, in actual practice, fail to meet these very tests, even to their own satisfaction. Lincoln, when subjected to such tests as few men ever underwent, was found equal to the emergencies. He met them in the spirit of one who, knowing his ground and believing in the triumph of the right, went steadfastly forward to the goal of his Christian ambition.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, describing the Cooper Institute speech in New York, says:

He was equal to the occasion. When he spoke, he was transformed. His eyes kindled; his voice rang; his face shone and seemed to light up the whole assembly; and for an hour and a half he held his audience in the hollow of his hand. His style of speech and manner of delivery were severely simple.

What Lowell has called the "grand simplicities of the Bible," with which he was familiar, were reflected in his discourse. With no attempt at ornament or rhetoric, without parade or pretence, he spoke straight to the point. If any came, expecting the turgid eloquence or the ribaldry of the frontier, they must have been startled by the earnest and sincere purity of his utterances. It was marvellous to see how this untutored man, by mere self-discipline and the chastening of his own spirit, had outgrown all meretricious arts and found his way to the grandeur and strength of absolute simplicity.

It has been said that Lincoln acquired his education in such an unusual way that he might be able to speak for his time and to his time with perfect sincerity and simplicity, to feel the moral bearings of the questions which were before the country, to discuss the principles involved, and to apply them so as to clarify and convince. This was selfeducation. But how are we to account for the temperamental and spiritual quality of soul as embodied in his words, and in his words translated into deeds? When we attempt to answer that question we shall err if we look for the source of

Mr. Lincoln's power entirely in the mode of his education, hard and disciplinary as it was. We must rather look for it in his spiritual inheritance, for there was something more in him than the quality we call genius. Genius accounts for much, but it does not always work out in the courage, the moral elevation, and the devotion to duty which made Lincoln both a hero and a martyr. In Lincoln, all is harmonious and consistent-deed answering to word. When he spoke for the Nation he so loved, his lips were as though touched with a live coal from the altar. He seemed to be of the same fibre with the prophets of Holy Writ and

it

may be said, without irreverence, that he was a "priest after the order of Melchisedec, without beginning or end of days," combining the kingly and priestly functions essential to the service of his Nation and his time.

The concluding sentence of his Cooper Institute speech, "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty, as we understand it," voiced the faith in which he lived and in which he died. Though dead, he yet speaketh, even as never while he lived; though dead, he remains enshrined in the hearts of the people a living example, as an incentive to higher Christian citizenship, and to the

belief in the unity and justice of the divine purpose "toward which the whole creation moves.

Why was it that this product of the prairies, unlettered and unknown, arose to such heights of moral vision and statecraft? Why was it that he who knew so little of literature could compel the eulogia of the Nation's literary masters? Why was it that this son of an humble frontier settler could rise above the clouds that blind the eyes of ordinary men and see the course a mighty Nation must take to preserve its existence and keep alive the hope of human freedom?

Ask God Who, in creating a continent, upraises a mighty mountain range above the plains, and above the mountain peaks one that towers above all the rest, penetrates all clouds and forever reflects the light of the fleckless skies upon the crags and plains below; and Who, once in a century, raises up a man whose towering personality rises above the common multitudes that throng the hills and vales, as the mountain above its fellows, and for all times sheds the light of his achievements and his glory upon the world, to inspire even those who tread the humbler walks of life that they, ir their sphere, may make their lives sublime.

CHAPTER XXX

THE COMPLETE CHRISTIAN

CLEARED of the charges made by Lamon and Herndon, and repeated since by many that Lincoln was at heart a skeptic, and possibly an infidel, no matter what he may have seemed to some in private words and public utterances, there remains a task which unperformed still leaves the subject open to discussion. It is not enough to remind the reader that only those see who have eyes to see, only those hear who have ears to hear. Even a casual reader of Herndon's extraordinary oration on Lincoln will perceive that Herndon's instinct was to explain all the phenomena of personality without resort to religious faith, and however intimate Lincoln may have been with his law partner, he was dealing with a man who, like Darwin, born the same year as Lincoln, had developed his great intellectual gifts at the expense of his spiritual genius and without Darwin's awakening at last to his loss of power to be moved, as when a young man he stood in the gorgeous loneli