heart, one will, and one conscience, one torch and one illumination.

To enumerate all the events and developments of 1848 would require a volume. Some of the writers who have dealt with the life of Lincoln have either wilfully or unconsciously ignored their mystical import and religious tendency. They have marshalled those transcendent events and occurrences without noting "the Divine Idea" underlying them and throbbing through them. The stages of spiritual progress in the mind of Lincoln were as marked as sign posts separating one country from another. In his mental economy there was no place for guesswork, no time for doing and undoing, no opportunity for mere experimenting, and never in the life of any man were periods of mental and moral progress more precisely and mathematically marked on the highway of time.

Long before 1848 Lincoln's purpose was fixed, but it was not till after 1848 that he seemed to come to the full realization of the social and religious as well as the political import of events. Lincoln did not base his faith on any power in nature, nor on the counsel of individuals or parties when they conflicted with his honest convictions. He stood alone-proof of his absolute trust in a

Supreme Ruler of the universe. Other gifted and successful leaders can be described as "practical, common-sense men." Lincoln was so far unlike all "common-sense men" that what he said and what he did had no parallel in the records of any leader. Behind the matter-of-fact, he was sustained by an unfaltering trust, clearly revealed to intuition, yet beyond all definitions the matterof-fact and obvious can give.

Now, from this year of change and innovation the movement toward the great consummation proceeded without interruption. Midway between that transition year of 1848 and the climacteric year of 1858 the Republican Party was born. Under the blue dome of heaven, on the prairies of Illinois, this pioneer of individual liberty, this prophet of human progress, this man of God entered upon the second period of his God ordained mission.

CHAPTER X

THE GIANT WAKES

FOR three or four years Lincoln was engrossed in his profession to the practical exclusion of politics. But in May, 1854, he was aroused by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. This act was to him a call to arms. One of his biographers declares: "He was aroused as he had never been before in all his life." He again entered the arena, and, in accepting invitations to make addresses, he stipulated in every case that he should talk against the Kansas-Nebraska bill. He came back into politics with an earnestness and zeal that surprised even his friends, for he was afire with the great moral issue which had been raised.

Stephen A. Douglas, the author of the bill repealing the Missouri Compromise, was then a commanding figure in the politics of Illinois. By common consent Lincoln was instinctively selected by the opponents of the obnoxious measure as the man best equipped to meet and combat Douglas. When Douglas came to Springfield to speak at the

annual State Fair it was announced that Lincoln would answer him the next day. Lincoln's speech was a revelation. The Springfield Journal said of it:

It was the profoundest that he has made in his whole life. Lincoln felt upon his soul the truths burn which he uttered, and all present felt that he was true to his own soul. His feelings once or twice came near stifling his utterances. He quivered with emotion. The whole house was as still as death.

This was Lincoln at last aroused by a great moral issue to the fulness of his powers. Before, he had been a political orator of a superior type; now he was as an inspired prophet. The whole man seemed uplifted and transformed. Miss Tarbell says:

He discussed the subject incessantly with his friends as he travelled the circuit. A new conviction was gradually growing upon him. He had long held that slavery was wrong; but that it could not be touched in the States where it was recognized by the Consitution. All that the Free States could require, in his judgment, was that no new territory should be opened to slavery. He held that all compromises adjusting difficulties between the North and the South on the slavery question were as sacred as the Constitution. Now he saw the most important of them all violated. Was it possible to devise a compromise

that would settle forever the conflicting interests? He turned over the question continually.

Judge T. Lyle Dickey tells the following story: When the excitement over the Kansas-Nebraska bill first broke out, he was, with Lincoln and some friends, attending court. One evening several persons, including himself and Lincoln, were discussing the slavery question. Judge Dickey contended that slavery was an institution which the Constitution recognized and which could not be disturbed. Lincoln argued that slavery must ultimately become extinct.

After awhile [says Judge Dickey] we went upstairs to bed. There were two beds in our room, and I remember that Lincoln sat up in his nightshirt, on the edge of the bed, arguing the point with me. At last we went to sleep. Early in the morning I woke up, and there was Lincoln, half sitting up in bed. "Dickey," he said, "I tell you, this nation cannot exist, half slave and half free."

This idea had taken full possession of Lincoln. It shaped all his future course. Like a vision in the night it came to him. He grasped it, and made it a reality. As time went on the idea struck its roots deeper. Its full implication grew clearer to him. He saw with a vividness no one else could match that the extinction of slavery was