CHAPTER IV

THE BLENDING OF THE MENTAL AND THE MORAL

IN the dome of the Congressional Library at Washington is this inscription from the Prophet Micah: "What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" No man in American history-no man in the history of the world-ever more completely filled this measure of a man of God than did Abraham Lincoln. But his growth was gradual in godliness. It had its beginnings in the unquestioning faith in the teachings of his mother, in her Bible reading to him. Then he read the Scriptures for himself-read them as he read everything else, thoughtfully and with discrimination.

The religious beliefs of his early years were saturated with superstitions. Belief in the baneful influences of witches, and in the curative power of wizards was everywhere prevalent. To shoot the image of a witch with a silver ball was believed to break the spell she was supposed to exercise over

her victims. The magic divining rod of the waterwizard was followed with implicit confidence, as was the faith doctor, who wrought miraculous cures with strange sounds and with signals to some mysterious power. There were signs, lucky and unlucky, while the phases of the moon were believed to influence the minds of the people, as well as the growth of vegetation. It would have been strange, indeed, had not Lincoln's pensive nature been deeply affected by this atmosphere of superstition. His leaning toward the supernatural manifested itself in his later life when the burden of responsibility for the world's moral progress, if not the fate of civilization itself, seemed to rest upon his shoulders. The fatalistic type of his early religious training was one of the secrets of his never-wavering faith in the ultimate victory of the forces of freedom. While his thinking and his reading gradually broke the spell of the grosser superstitions, they never banished his belief in the significance of visions and dreams.

Lincoln's mystic temperament developed along rational lines, thanks in part to his step-mother's influence, and never turned him aside from the well-surveyed routes his thought travelled to the final goal of his great mission. His reading had much to do in determining the type of his religious

life. His favourite books were the Bible, Æsop's Fables, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Shakespeare's plays, though in addition he read every book he could borrow within a radius of fifty miles. Everything was grist that came to his intellectual mill. He got hold of a copy of the Revised Statutes of Indiana, and read it with as much avidity as the ordinary boy would read a tale of adventure. Nor was his reading superficial. When in the field plowing, he would stop to read, and then ponder on what he had read after resuming his labour. Among other books that fell into his hands was Weems's Life of Washington, a work that added fuel to the glowing flame of patriotism always inseparable from his sense of loyalty to God. One of his most treasured volumes was a borrowed book which he damaged, and then "pulled fodder" for three days to pay for it.

But the Bible was his favourite. Indeed, it was the first book he read with interest and appreciation. Poring over it for hours at a time, his memory became saturated with its language, his soul with its spirit, his life with its teachings. So familiar did he become with the Scripture phraseology, and so imbued with the solemnly grand strain of thought and feeling that pervades the sacred pages, that his utterances often breathe the sub

limity of the prophets, the poetry of Job or the Psalmist, the sweetness and pathos of the Gospels. Hence it was that he was enabled, as at Gettysburg, to fire the finest intellects with enthusiastic admiration and strangely to move and thrill the hearts of the multitudes. In August, 1920, at the unveiling of the Lincoln Statue near Westminster Abbey, Lloyd George said, "I doubt whether any statesman who ever lived sank so deeply into the hearts of people of many lands as did Abraham Lincoln."

In his early teens, Lincoln acquired a facility of expression, both with tongue and pen, unusual in one of his years. He began public speaking to his schoolmates and his fellow-labourers, and wrote compositions on all sorts of subjects. An essay on temperance, written in his seventeenth year, so attracted the favourable attention of Aaron Farmer, a Baptist preacher of local renown, that he sent it to an Ohio newspaper for publication. About this time, too, Lincoln prepared an essay on the American Government, calling attention to the necessity of preserving the Constitution and the perpetuation of the Union. John Pitcher, a lawyer, who afterward became a judge declared this composition "a world beater." It is remarkable that, at so early an age, he should have per

ceived the precise issue upon which he was to wage his battle for human rights, and upon which the political differences that agitated the Republic were to be fought out in the great Civil War.

All these preparatory experiences would, in some natures, have developed a Caligula or a Nero. But Abraham Lincoln was not of the stuff of which tyrants are made; and the time was swiftly approaching when the American people would need a leader, not simply of commanding intellect but also of heart big enough to encompass all the people, and, in return, win all. Lincoln's experiences and his religious training had deepened and intensified his native kindliness of heart until, later in life, it bordered close upon being a fault. He himself appeared to think so.

It was sometimes hard for him to do justice, so dearly did he love mercy. His compassion extended to dumb brutes and was scarcely less in its intensity than his passion for mercy to his kind. When Thomas Lincoln, with his family, moved from Indiana to Illinois, the streams had to be forded, for bridges were not then in fashion. One day, after crossing a river, the family dog was missing. Looking back, they saw him on the opposite side,