ultimate success he frankly says that Mr. Lincoln was a man of faith.1

As though to leave no room to question his supreme test of Lincoln's character, Mr. Lowell some months later, in his "Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration," places this wreath on the grave of him who meanwhile had passed out of life: "Wise, steadfast in the strength of God, and true."

'James Russell Lowell, in The North American Review, January, 1864.

XIX

AWAKING A CONTINENT

It is worthy of note that epochal political movements have been preceded by profound and farreaching spiritual awakenings. Sordidness had come to govern the progress of events in the United States. Property rights had gained the ascendancy. Wealth and money-getting was the prime desideratum. The augmentation of the slave power, chiefly through its masterful statesman, John C. Calhoun had well-nigh achieved the ultimate triumph of the cause of human slavery.

The individual conscience of the average man in the North as well as in the South, seemed corroded by the insidious influences of commercialism. Religion here, as in England before the time of the Wesleys, had become formal, retaining the letter without the spirit.

Lincoln's appeal to the moral sentiment of the nation began slowly to arouse a slumbering Christendom by appealing to conscience, exposing national apostasy, turning the light of truth upon

the monstrous crime of slavery, and condensing into a few words a moral maxim which demonstrated the impossibility of the continued existence of freedom and servitude under the same flag.

Silently, like the pervasion of the sunshine in the springtime, there spread across the land a wave of moral fervour, a spiritual awakening, a religious revival such as the nation had never known-an event which has been strangely overlooked by the writers of history. A careful reading of two-score works upon the events of that time fails to reveal the full significance of this phenomenal spiritual awakening in the solution of the vexatious problems of the day. In fact, the whole nation was beginning, perhaps vaguely and unconsciously, to feel the spiritual forces Lincoln had set in motion. East and West the hearts of men were already responding to his touch.

In 1857 a small group of business men began a series of Noonday Prayer Meetings in Fulton Street, New York. There was no bishop, no preacher, no leader. No Dwight L. Moody was yet prepared to lend the power of his great name to the movement. No one stood forth more prominently than another. A company of men, hitherto absorbed in business down in the storm

centre of the business life of the Metropolis, became strongly convinced that the spiritual life of the Church was rapidly becoming extinct, and that as a result, the nation was losing its virility, its moral vigour and its power. They felt, therefore, that a spiritual awakening was essential to the preservation of America itself.

It is not evident that they realized the relation to the national life of the movement in which they were engaged. Apparently, they thought of their noonday gatherings merely as a means whereby they themselves might be strengthened in religious faith and endowed with renewed spiritual fervour. Evidently, they did not understand that their aspirations were but a part of a religious awakening which was preparing for the mighty conflagration that was to purge the nation of its "sum of all villainies"-the traffic in human slaves. Day after day the noon meetings continued. the room in which they were held was overtaxed. Overflow meetings were arranged. Civic issues were not specially discussed. The slavery question received the same casual consideration as the tariff and the currency. These business men simply besought the throne of grace for help-for the need they felt of the refining fire in their own hearts. Their cry was that of the ancient prophet: "Wilt

Soon

Thou not revive us again, that Thy people may rejoice in Thee?"

But a humble lawyer out in the Middle West was seeing farther into the future, lifting up a moral standard to which, as Washington had said before, "the wise and honest could repair," saturating public matters with a spirituality of which no one had perceived that there was need. Deep was calling unto deep. Fire was running to meet fire. Quietly started in New York, the spiritual flame was sweeping from house to house, from church to church, from city to city, from state to state, from ocean unto ocean, gathering in force, augmenting in influence, growing irresistible. Multitudes who knew not God through a vital religious faith joined in the new evangel. Employers excused their employees at early hours that they might attend the meetings; merchants urged their clerks to go; professional men sent their office forces; parents urged their children; colleges and day schools sent their pupils. The churches of all denominations were quickened, from the fervid Methodists to the more formal Episcopalians. Men of all creeds, and many of no creed, joined in the holy propaganda, and with intensified faith and quickened zeal, marched to the inspiring music that had touched the soul of nation