"These are they that came up out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."— REV. vii. 14.

ALL great and noble natures have their great and peculiar trials; and no name stands on the heights of history, as a beacon for the nations, which has not been fitted for its position by trial and suffering. One farseeing woman of our land has said, "Whatever is highest and holiest is tinged with melancholy. The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos. A prophet is sadder than other men; and He who was greater than all prophets was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief."* And another, whose own experience has taught her the taste of Marah's waters, and whose "Uncle Tom" was the creature of her sympathy with sorrow, as well as the truthful exponent of the woes of slavery, has said, with the force of highest wisdom, "Sorrow is the great birthagony of immortal powers; sorrow is the great searcher and revealer of hearts, the great test of truth; . . . sorrow reveals forces in ourselves of which we never dreamed; . ... sorrow is divine. Sorrow is reigning on

* Mrs. Lydia Maria Child.

the throne of the universe, and the crown of all crowns has been one of thorns.”*

It is evident that the ministry of sorrow to the human soul is one which elevates, strengthens, purifies. It is among the "all things" that "work together for good" to the child of God. Abraham Lincoln was among those favored ones for whom the "light afflictions" of this world were to "work the far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory." Of some peculiar trials which his great soul experienced during the years of his presidency, it is here designed to speak; though it may be true that other weights were upon his expanding spirit, and other trials, even more grievous, oppressed his soul: for, evermore, the hidden sorrow is deepest, and only the human heart itself knoweth its own bitterness. By the very greatness of Lincoln's character, we may measure the discipline of trial and sorrow through which he had to pass while a sojourner on earth. This life is the childhood of our existence; and God deals with us all as a father with his children, wisely correcting us in needed discipline, for our highest good.

We know some of the trials of his early life, his bitter grief at the loss of a beloved mother, his struggles amid poverty and other discouragements. And, when he became the President of the vast Republic, there was laid upon him the burden of responsibility which must rest upon a leader in the time of civil war.

His personal friend Col. Deming declares, "The hour when doubt and hesitancy first yielded to the stern command of remorseless duty must have been the soberest, saddest, solemnest of his faithful life, not from doubt of the result, though that was sufficiently perplexing; not

*Mrs. Stowe's "Minister's Wooing."

from fear of the consequences, though these were appalling enough; not from the weight of responsibility, though that might have staggered the most unyielding determination; but it was sad and solemn, because Abraham Lincoln above and beyond all other men loved peace, and hated war; because sieges, battles, strife, swords, bayoets, rifles, cannon, all the paraphernalia and instruments of brute force, were abhorrent to his enlightened and benevolent nature. Shall we raise the latch, and enter into the secret chamber of that capacious and genial soul when this fell resolve was first reached; when the frightful vision of war, in all its terrors clad, supplants there the hope of conciliation and the dream of peace? I speak what I heard from his own lips, when I say, that it was reached after sleepless nights, after a severe conflict with himself, and with extreme reluctance. By a strange and cruel freak of fate, the duty of waging the bloodiest war in history was imposed upon the most peace-loving and amiable ruler in all time; upon a man whose maxim was, in the language of one of his favorite texts, 'Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth;' and into whose mind had been thoroughly ingrained that traditional notion of our politics, that the first drop of blood shed in a sectional strife was the death-knell of the American Union.

"Let us enter in where that now disembodied spirit was, in the recesses of its clay tenement, in stormy debate with itself. What throes, what agony, do we witness! what heart-rending sobs, what heaven-piercing prayers, that the cup may pass from his lips! Here was that conservative mind, trained to habits of professional caution, with the strongest bias towards legality and moderation, which had uniformly steered itself by the certain lights of jurisprudence; which had invoked no

remedies but the peaceful ones of the courts, the Constitution, and the law; which had never combated error but with reason and persuasion alone, and had abjured the ordeal of battle, and the arbitrament of force, as absolute and heathenish enormities, - here are all these mature, earnest opinions, and prepossessions, all dominant from fifty years of independent sway, wrestling impotently with the war ideas, and the overmastering war revelation, of yesterday. What an unwelcome intruder the conviction is to the serene virtues, which had hitherto exclusively occupied this holy sanctuary! Domesticated here are Justice and Mercy (and 'earthly power is likest God's when Mercy seasons Justice'),-Justice and Mercy, which hold the balances quite evenly, but the hair's weight which oscillates them uniformly found in Mercy's scale; and how repulsive it is to these righteous and discriminating attributes to let loose upon the people a wild and furious avenger that devours alike innocence and guilt!

"Here, too, dwell sensibilities and affections so acute, that they fling wide open the doors of the soul to every one who approaches in misfortune's name, grant the prayer of sorrow before it is half uttered, and which the inarticulate wail of infancy instantly melts into tears of most compassionate tenderness. How are these sensitive fibres wrung and tortured when it suddenly flashes upon them that the loving hand, which has learned only to soothe and relieve the miserable, is commissioned by inexorable fate to break the fourth seal of the Apocalypse, and, 'behold, a pale horse! and his name who sat on him was Death, and Hell followed him; and power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth to kill with the sword and with hunger and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.'

"Movelessly, movelessly rooted also in this great heart is a superfine sense of humor, craving hilarity and harmless mirth, and joy-inspiring wit and anecdote, as the only effectual relief to an over-anxious spirit and an overtaxed brain; and how reluctantly does this part of his nature admit to close companionship the gloomy forebodings, the little memories, the dreadful uncertainties, the everlasting shrieks, dirges, vengeful tragedies, and heart-rending atrocities, of war!"

This vivid portrayal of Lincoln's character and feelings shows us one of his peculiar trials. He suffered during the struggle which preceded his decision that the war must be prosecuted; and he suffered during its continuance by the constant jarring of the machinery he was seeking to keep in motion. His motives were misunderstood, his character maligned, and his plans often frustrated, by those whose best good he was continually studying.

In common with his loyal countrymen, he felt the gloom of those hours of the war when defeat lowered our beautiful banner; but he felt it with peculiar force because he was the leader. "How nobly the President bore himself during this interval of darkness that could be felt, when bold men trembled at every click of the telegraph, let two tributes, offered by unfriendly voices to his stoicism, attest: the first is from no less a master of it than Napoleon the Third, who epigrammatically says, 'Mr. Lincoln's highest claim upon my admiration is a Roman equanimity, which has been tried by both extremes of fortune, and disturbed by neither.' The second is from a hostile Englishman, who says, that,' tried by years of failure, without achieving one great success, he not only never yielded to despondency or anger, but, what is most marvellous, continually grew in self-possession and magnaminity.'