Marvellous revelation of inspired utterance! No wonder the French minister said: "No such document as that ever before came to the French Court." How impersonal, how impartial, how balanced in its judgments, how charitable, how lofty in its inspiration this remarkable document, breathing the spirit of Holy Writ itself! It was addressed to the whole Nation, and not only to this Nation, but to the world. In it we see the clear reflection of Lincoln's religious faith, his broad charity, his magnanimity, his unquestioning submission to the Divine Will, his implicit belief in the righteousness of his cause, his assent to the justice of retribution exacted for the sins of which all the people were directly or indirectly guilty, and his sublime confidence that in the final arbitrament, the Lord of all the earth would do right.

An eminent French ecclesiastic, Monseigneur Du Pannoup, Bishop of Orleans, in a letter to a friend, thanking him for a copy of the address characterized it as "a beautiful page of the history of a great people," and said that he read it with the most religious emotion and sympathetic admiration.

Mr. Lincoln [he added] expresses with solemn and touching seriousness the sentiments of, I am certain,

the noble and best souls of the North as well as the South. What a beautiful day, when there will be a union of these souls in the true and perfect light of the Gospel, but what a beautiful day we behold already when the twice-elected chief of a great nation strikes a lofty Christian note too much absent in Europe, and in official language befitting large affairs, announces the end of slavery and prepares the way for the triumph of justice and mercy in the very spirit of the Holy Scriptures.

But it remained for Walt Whitman to pay perhaps the most memorable tribute yet on record to the mingling of the intellectual and the spiritual in Lincoln. He wrote:

One of the best of the commentators of Shakespeare makes the height and aggregate of his quality as a poet to be that he thoroughly blended the ideal with. the practical or realistic. If this be so, I should say that what Shakespeare did in poetic expression, Abraham Lincoln essentially did in his personal and official life. I should say that the invisible foundations and vertebræ of his character, more than any man's in history, were mystic, abstract, moral, and spiritual. He seems to have been a man of indomitable firmness on rare occasions, involving great points: but he was generally very easy, flexible, tolerant, respecting minor matters. As to his religious nature, it seems to me to have certainly been of the amplest, deepest-rooted kind.

CHAPTER XXXV

LINCOLN'S CHRISTIAN VIEW OF LABOUR

WHEN Lincoln was beating out the music of a soul as just as it was kind, there was no labour problem such as confronts us today. There was at most an isolated and grotesque aberration of the problem furnished by the fact of slavery which had become so ingrained in legality as to blind most people to its awful immorality.

Lincoln was the first American to set himself to disentangle the wrong of slavery from the status given it by history and legislation. He believed slavery an insult to the soul of man and to the heart of God. He said if slavery was not wrong, nothing was wrong. He regarded it not merely as unchristian but also as an inescapable menace to American democracy. "This nation cannot remain half slave and half free," "A house divided against itself cannot stand," were his very words. While others were seeking the way out by compromise and concession, Lincoln though putting paramount the preservation of the Union

was making ready for the time to come-as come he knew it would for the redemption of the promise made to himself long years before in the slave market at New Orleans to "hit that thing hard."

Yet as one looks back on Lincoln's record and his writings, the conclusion is inevitable that almost from the first he saw slavery as but one aspect of the labour problem and applied to it the same fundamental principles of Christianity by which labour at all times must be tested. These words from a speech which he delivered in 1847 are as true today as when they first were spoken:

In the early days of our race the Almighty said to the first of our race, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," and since then if we except the light and air of Heaven, no good thing has been or can be enjoyed by us without having first cost labour. And inasmuch as most good things are produced by labour, it follows that all such things of right belong to those whose labours have produced them. But it has so happened in all ages of the world, that some have laboured, and others have, without labour, enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong and should not continue. To secure to each labourer the whole product of his labour, or as nearly as possible, is a worthy object of any good government.

Here is a concise declaration of essentials. Labour is the law of life. The labourer is worthy

of his hire and is entitled to the product of his toil. Slavery aroused Lincoln's indignation because it violated this first principle. It allowed some to live on the toil of others. "It may seem strange,' he declares, "that any man should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing bread from the sweat of other men's faces."

In a letter to Dr. Ide and others, in 1864, he gives more elaborate utterance to this thought:

To read in the Bible as the Word of God Himself, that "In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread,” and to preach there from that "In the sweat of other men's faces shalt thou eat bread" to my mind can scarce be reconciled with honest sincerity. When brought to my final reckoning, may I have to answer for robbing no man of his goods; yet more tolerable even this, than for robbing one of himself and all that was his. When a year or two ago those professedly holy men of the South met in the semblance of prayer and devotion, and in the name of Him Who said, "As ye would all men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them," appealed to the Christian world to aid them in doing to a whole race of men as they would have no man do unto themselves, to my thinking, they condemned and insulted God and His church far more than Satan did when he tempted the Saviour with kingdoms of the earth. The devil's attempt was no more false and far less hypocritical.

Here Lincoln indicates the principle that he would have applied to the solution of economic