stormed with indignant passion. Lincoln, though he may have had less of official and personal dignity, yet had a more equable temperament. Amidst all the partisan and personal strifes of these years of civil commotion and war the slanders and indignities and evil machinations of his foes, the vexatious criticism and distrust and falling off of friendshis natural serenity and self-command seem never for a moment to have forsaken him. I do not think he has left a harsh or bitter word against his worst or most annoying enemy; for there was no harshness or bitterness in his heart, not in its most secret corner. He was capable of feeling only pity, charity, and forgiveness. Unconsciously he wrote the motto of his own life in the phrase of his last Inaugural,— "Malice toward none, charity for all."

There was, too, a wonderful warmth and tenderness in his moral nature. The people felt the pulsations of a great brotherly heart beating within that gaunt, ill-compacted frame, and making even it almost beautiful. His eyes were great deeps of sympathy and honest affection; transparent, yet no one ever saw to the bottom of them. His mouth moved naturally to expressions of sincerity and good-will; and his whole face, which, when in repose, was heavy and melancholic in its cast, was transfigured with a strange and tender beauty, when anything touched the subtle wires that made connection with his heart, and sent upward its thrilling pulses and his heart was always the first part of him to be touched. Pressed on all sides by the gravest public cares and anxieties, he could yet find time to write with his own hand to a poor woman in Boston, who had given five sons to glorious deaths for the republic on the field of battle, and

whose sixth was lying severely wounded, -a letter which, to that lone woman, will always be a more precious legacy of wealth than all the riches which a grateful government or a generous public could give her. After a wearying day in his office, burdened with dispatches to be read, with papers to be examined and judged, with personal calls and questions innumerable, private and public, to be disposed of, seeking finally, long past the accustomed hour, to retreat to his private room for rest, he hears without the door a sound like the hushed cry of a child. Immediately weariness is forgotten, the usher is summoned and asked, if a woman with child in her arms is in the ante-room. "Yes, sir, been trying three days to see you, and on a very important matter, if I may be permitted to say it," was the answer. "Let her come in at once," responded the president. And soon the poor woman goes out again, with light steps now, her hunger and weariness forgotten, and covering her baby with kisses and tears of joy; for she has saved her soldier son's life. Thus did our dear president never weary of kind and merciful deeds. He could not help doing them.

And this moral tenderness compensated in considerable measure for his want of intellectual enthusiasm, and sent some throbs of warmth even through his mental dryness and coldness. It shows itself in his official papers, otherwise so wanting in fervor, and gives to them sometimes a pleading, persuasive earnestness and pathos, that might almost draw the tears from an enemy. When his pen goes down to this part of his nature, his words, always clear and strong, come forth mellowed with beauty, and rise sometimes into real grandeur. What could be more gentle, or

more touching in its simple eloquence, than the closing words of his first Inaugural address: "I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic cords of memory, stretched from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

This natural kindness of his heart showed itself everywhere, in all his domestic and social and public life; made him the good husband and father, as well as good president; and held those who were his intimate friends very close to him with a rare greatness of love. Combined with his sense of justice and his democratic principles, it rose also to the height of philanthropy, and made him, in the providence of God, the natural and inevitable leader of this nation in its struggle with the powers of despotism and slavery, and the trusted and now glorified redeemer of an oppressed and outraged race.

But not alone by these rare qualities was his moral nature characterized. All the moral sentiments and faculties appear to have been fully and symmetrically developed in him. No vices, are recorded against him; and this, in itself, indicates a rare virtue. We should not credit him, perhaps, with the most delicate moral sensitiveness. His moral strength lay rather in principles and habits than in nicety of feeling. He had a large and powerful conscience, which ruled his own conduct with a puritanic severity; but he had no moral squeamishness, which repelled him from all contact

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with vice itself and from vicious men. He knew very well that the world, in the present ethical state of mankind, could not be governed by saints alone,- that the good could not withdraw from the bad, but must stand together with them, in order that the whole may be made better as fast as possible. He did not remove men from office, or decline to appoint men to office, because of any bad habits they may have had, provided their bad habits would not detract from their usefulness for the work assigned them. It is reportedand probably with truth-that, when, during the siege of Vicksburg, some delegation asked for the removal of General Grant because of his alleged intemperate use of whiskey, the President replied, that he would like to ascertain what kind of whiskey General Grant was in the habit of using, that he might give it to some of the other generals. Yet the president himself was temperate to the degree of total abstinence; and he made this reply, not because he was insensible to the evil of intemperance in the army, but because he believed, what has proved to be the case, that General Grant, with the immense responsibility that was placed upon him, would have strength to resist temptation, and so give unimpaired his consummate ability to the salvation of the republic. President Lincoln was no moral Pharisee. He was a Pharisee in no respect. He had none of the "I-am-holier-than-thou" spirit. He grasped the hand of every man as a brother. He was no moral exquisite, standing aloof from his kind, with nerves too delicate for contact with men of common frailties.

Yet, though his moral nature was not of the extremely sensitive order, it was extraordinarily strong and sure, and

was never harmed by contact with vice. He was eminently above being influenced by evil example. He had an integrity upon which the foulest slander of partisan strife has left no stain; an honesty that at once summoned and held the confidence of the country; a frankness and sincerity that astonished politicians accustomed to concealed and sinister ways; a simplicity of habit that excited the derision of fashionable and conventional circles of society; a conscientiousness that knew no indirection, and startled the habitués of political circles in Washington; an ambition that aimed only at his country's welfare, and saw only his country's glory; an unselfish, unswerving, unflagging devotion of himself and all his means and abilities to what he saw to be right; a humility that never knew pretence, and never even allowed him credit for his good deeds; and a moral courage that, though not bold at radical innovation, was never prevented from innovation by any thought of popularity or unpopularity, and which held to every step that had been taken from a conviction of its justice, and to every principle that had been adopted because it was right, with a firmness that was anchored to the very throne of God. Here are moral qualities that made Abraham Lincoln preeminently the moral leader for the times. When we sum them up, we have a greatness of moral nature for which we shall not soon find the peer among the great magistrates of the world.

President Lincoln's moral qualities rose naturally into the religious; and of the religious character of the man, we come, finally, to speak. But here he has a right to the reserve which covers every person's deepest and inmost life. Because we have put a man into a public position and made