This investment of Lincoln's friendliness for the well-being of all the land, even of all the men therein, was not alone immediate, winning direct attachment to every man; nor merely all-absorbing on Lincoln's part, impressing into kindly service every value and every capacity of his total life; it also enshrined a deathless hope. Lincoln's patriotic devotedness was no venture of a day or of a decade. Lincoln's good-will looked far ahead. He had a passion for immortality. His total effort and aim in allhis generous endeavors and hopes, as he served in his public life, can be defined as a sovereign aspiration that our government should be so guided and chastened in all its life that the Union should never be dissolved. To his kindly heart no possible event seemed more appalling than that this hope should fail. So far as his words reveal, this central, sovereign passion of his glowing heart was all but exclusively patriotic. He apparently forgot himself in his wistful anxious hope that the Nation's peace might long endure. His faith in the Union's indestructibility may be said to spring out of his undying continual love for his fellowman. Indeed just here seems to be the birthplace of all his prophetic ponderings over the final issues of our civic life. The very stature of the government which his ideal conceived and which he thankfully saw that our Republic designed, was deemed by him to be copied from nothing other than the divinely fashioned moral nature which he found alike in himself and in all his fellowmen. Deep within his friendly heart he cherished the vision of a Republic of freemen leagued together indissolubly as mutual friends. It was to realize and certify that hope that he dedicated his life. And when he pledged and sealed that offering, it was with no design that the seal should ever be broken, or the pledge be ever recalled. Here is another primary quality of Lincoln's friendliness. It was inwrought with personal durability. Grounded as was his civic hope in the freedom and conscience of Godlike men, it was impossible for him to consent that such a hope should ever encounter defeat or decay. Deep and sure within its essential nature were the urgent promptings and the soaring promise of immortality.
These observations upon the immediate directness, the integral whole-heartedness, and the deathless eagernessof Lincoln's friendliness, if thoughtfully compared together, reveal that these distinctive phases of his outpouring good-will are in nature identically the same, and spring from an identical source. This essential coincidence, this mutual convergence deserves attention. It intimates wherein the very essence and being of his neighborly kindness consists. And in Lincoln's life this indication of the precise whereabouts and substance of the essential and innermost quality and being of human kindliness is certain and clear, as in hardly any other man. His benignance in his dealings with men is of well-nigh unparalleled openness and freedom from all admixture and alloy. Lincoln's kindness embodies and conveys Lincoln's self. In every favor from him he is in the gift. In the center of all the friendliness that is characteristic of Lincoln, Lincoln himself stands erect and entire, offering and commending in every case his full-sized, undivided self. This is the core and this the circumference, this is the sum and this the substance of his good-will. It is rich with all his personal wealth, solid with all his personal worth. In him an act of friendship was an inauguration of personal copartnership. In his good-will was all the energy of his life. In his benefactions he gave himself. Just so with his compassions. With the sorrows of humanity it was his way to enter into personal fellowship. This was the form and being of all his generosity. His mastery over all malice when facing a foe, his abounding charity when judging a wrong, his hearty gladness in the presence of human joy, his cordial ways in greeting friends, his fatherly affection for his boy, his love for his native land, his pity in presence of the bereft, his sadness at sight of wounds, his readiness to share evenly with all his Nation all that guilty Nation's painful discipline—all this variety and plenitude of ample, open-hearted tenderness towardsother men was alike and always the complete and conscious contribution of himself. In brief, in full, and finally, Lincoln's friendliness, through all its beautiful versatility, was a free and facile, a full and total, personal self-devotion. This is the common content giving all its value to all the forms of his human kindliness.
In the exposition just foregoing, the thought has been drawn into allusions to Lincoln's premonitions or aspirations towards immortality, for the Union, if not for himself. This was in the course of an effort to find the spring-head of his kindliness. And it culminated in the suggestion that deep within Lincoln's being there was enshrined an assurance, however unconfessed or even half unconscious, of personal immortality. And that from within this shrine of living hope, common to him with every man, he drew his inspiration and his very pattern of a national Union and a national peace that would endure forever.
Here is something that calls for examination, for in this we touch a radical quality of Lincoln's moral being. This eager craving after permanence was in him an appetite that could never be fed or satisfied by any things that perish. In itself and in its nutriment there is an irrepealable call for something indefeasable, something utterly superior to all fear of death, something never amenable to any form of dissolution or decay, something spiritually pure, and essentially kindred to the essential being of a deathless soul.
The matter may be approached to start with by saying some things negatively. Lincoln was centrally in no sense a materialist. He was indeed firmly sensitive to the physical majesties of this continent, though in hisday they were hardly half disclosed. He calculated with carefulness our material capacities for expansion in power and wealth. He foresaw our certain outward growth into a puissant Nation, the coveted and ample resort and refuge and home of hordes of men from other lands. In his own well-seasoned and resourceful physique he felt and knew the worth of physical virility. He could thoughtfully compute the glittering values, the goodly financial revenues, the days and months and total seasons of physical idleness and delights that accrue to human owners from the unrequited toil of human slaves. And in the current civil war he completely understood that no less a concern than the perpetuity of the American Union was pending upon contests largely consisting of encounters of physical prowess, of tests of muscular endurance and strength.
But not in calculations such as these did his thoughtful studies of human welfare take ultimate resort, or find final rest. His conception of the ideal state, of the ideal citizen, of the ideal life, was not constructed or inspired from carnal elements. He noted with life-long sadness the sordid baseness inseparably attending the fact of owning or being a slave. He deeply saw that those battles in the Wilderness were no mere conflicts of beasts. And never could he imagine or allow that his personal weight, and force, and worth were ratable by gymnastic tests. It was not upon things like these that Lincoln's attention and hope were fixed, when his hopes and plans for our prosperity took form. To the whole world of his material environment he was marvelously indifferent. On every perusal of his life one grieves at the story of his poverty, and the sad infrequency and meagerness in his daily life of the pleasures and recreations which are for the comfort and happiness of men in material things. But in this heseems as though unconscious of any disappointment. For himself as for the Nation, and for the Nation as for himself, his satisfaction and confidence were not born and fed of things that perish in their use. Luxury in food or attire, however toothsome or attractive to other natures, stirred but the feeblest hankerings, if any at all, in him. Towards sensualism of any sort, whether gluttony, drunkenness or lust, his sound and temperate manliness did not incline. And in his estimate of personal character his eye and respect did not rest in outer attitudes, on printed, age-long codes of manner. He was no slave of stately ceremonies, or artificial etiquette. Nor in religion did he bind his tongue to creeds however hoary, nor to rituals however august. He swore not by the oaths of any sect, however ancient and renowned. Neither in this mountain nor in that did he worship God.
But on the other hand, and now to speak affirmatively, Lincoln lived no penury-stricken life. The resources within his personality were well-nigh incalculable. Few men in all our national catalogue have been endowed by God with so sterling and abundant interior wealth. And of all American patriotic benefactors few indeed have left in their single individual name and right such priceless legacies to their native land. What is life? What is human life? Wherein, completely and precisely wherein, is man distinguishable from the beast? For answer, study Lincoln and see. In the full development of such a study many massive verities will unfold. But the feature in Lincoln's manhood, which this chapter is set apart to designate and clarify, is the simple purity, the elemental spirituality of all his elemental traits. His dominant sentiments, his primary convictions, his main and all-mastering decisions were never born to die. They wereinstinct with life, with life indeed, a life never failing, ever more abundant and free.
This interior vitality, this unalloyed and undecaying purity may be described one way as a real idealism. But in ascribing idealism to Lincoln, it needs to be said at once that Lincoln's idealism, real and glorious as it must surely be confessed to be, was transparently and unvaryingly practical. In one way it may be defined as hope. A waiting hope was a standard characteristic of Lincoln's attitude. His sorrowful eye held fast to things as yet unrealizable. It is impressive to see how often and how fondly he mentioned the future, the "vast future," as he termed it, of our American career. The secret of the beauty and of the power of some of his loftiest and most spontaneous rhetoric is due to just this solemn eagerness towards the coming days. As one comes to study more intently into the outlay of his heroic strength, his struggle and toil are seen to be leashed about his consuming wish that the Nation in its undivided might could be unified about the speedy fulfillment of his prophetic aims. He never forgot the mighty lesson, nor lost the living inspiration of his own advancement from humblest station of ignorance and toiling poverty to the presidency. That transformation he loved to humbly hold before the attention of his fellow Americans, as a pattern of what might anywhere occur again. He loved to linger upon the possibilities of upward movement in the ranks of all laboring men. Large place and honorable position were given to this arousing theme in his first annual message to Congress. This general topic—the far-set, soaring possibilities of human betterment—held constant and commanding eminence in the ranging measure of his eagle-searching thought. For the Nation, and for its every inhabitant, he was a true idealist.
But Lincoln's idealism, again be it said, was no wild indulgence of a vagrant and untrained imagination. It was utterly sober-minded. It took its form and found its force in the center of his sanest thoughtfulness. The terms in which its description has just been illustratively traced show it to be perfectly rational, and even matter-of-fact. Lincoln's idealism was nothing else but a heedful interpretation of the proper destiny of man. It was a reflection in terms of carefulest thought, albeit also in the guise of ardent hope, of the essential lineaments in the nature of man. And no human portrait by any artist was ever truer to fact, while yet tinged with fancy, pure and free. In all his picturing of things yet to be, but not yet in hand, his eye was fastened with an anatomist's intentness upon the actual human nature imperishably present in every man. Nothing that Lincoln's idealism ever proposed ever diverged from the bounds of the original fiat creating all men equal and free. That undeniable initial verity, itself the keystone of our national Constitution and Bill of Rights, supplied to Lincoln's hope its total and only inspiration. In those ancient and elemental realities, realities that deeply underlie and long outlast all the cults and customs and centuries which human thought is so prone to differentiate and divide, Lincoln detected solid foundations and ample warrant for age-long, undissolving expectations. In every human face there are outlines that are forever indelible. These unfailing lineaments Lincoln had the eye to see. And what is vastly more, he had the courage and the honesty to adopt them as the pattern of the platform, and to voice them as the notes of the battle-peal of his statesmanship. And this he did right wittingly, knowing assuredly that therein his vision had caught the gleam of things eternal; that therein he had made discovery that man,even the humblest of his race, could claim to be, as he phrased it to a company of blacks, "kindred to the great God who made him." This amounts to saying that Lincoln's statesmanship may be completely and precisely defined as the studied and deliberate exploitation, upon the field of politics, of those forces, central and common in all mankind, that are Godlike, immortal, spiritual.
Here we reach a definition that outlines with close precision a trait of Lincoln's full-formed character that held a primary place in winning for Lincoln his immortal renown. He attached himself to things themselves immortal. His ideal hope had no admixture of clay, nor even of gold. He made no composition or compromise with anything that dies. His supreme desire was of a nature never to decay. It was pure with the deathless purity of the human soul. To this pure principle, eternal loyalty to the immortal dignity of man, he signed and sealed his soul's allegiance with bonds that even death could never relax. Such statements describe a primary co-efficient in Lincoln's ethical life. Abjuring the unnumbered allurements of the material world, allurements whose fascinations unfailingly fade, and reposing his confidence wholly in treasures that time and use only brighten and refine, Lincoln reveals in the realm of ethics the singular excellence of an ideal that can kindle in an immortal man an immortal hope. Purging every sort of baseness out of the central life, and enthroning an all-refining pureness in the sovereign desires and visions and designs, he has inaugurated in the field of civics an idealism that will honor every man, fit actual life, and endure forever. Personal pureness, this pervades the life of Lincoln as crystalline beauty pervades a block of marble.
This refining trait in Lincoln, this inner hunger for his living soul's true nutriment, this thirst for the pure,perennial springs, finds signal illustration in the closing sentence of this last inaugural, where he pleads with all his fellow-citizens to so conduct all civic interests as to secure among ourselves and with all Nations a "lasting peace." That craving after permanence in civic harmony betokens an impulse towards immortality; and rests down, as the entire inaugural explains, upon that only basis of enduring civic quietude, an honest and universal recognition and respect for those indelible and universal lineaments of personal dignity which the Creator of men has traced upon every human soul—lineaments from which the obscuring dross of centuries was being purged in the Providential fires of an awful war. Just this was the meaning of the war, as Lincoln understood its work. That earth-born sordidness which marked all slaves as common chattels, was being burnt out of our national life, as our basest national sin. Thenceforth, forevermore, it was Lincoln's living hope that all mankind might peacefully agree to supremely cherish and mutually respect those human values that human unfriendliness, and centuries of contempt, however deeply they may obscure, can never obliterate. Upon such enduring foundations, and upon such foundations alone, Lincoln clearly saw, could human peace endure.
And upon this same foundation rests his first inaugural as well. In all those months of special study, ensuing between his election in November of 1860 and his inauguration in March in 1861, and for an ample seven years before, Lincoln was feeling after civic perpetuity. And when he stood before the Nation to publish his first inaugural address, his supreme concern was fixed upon the threatened and impending ruin of the Republic. He there faced a menacing South, irreconcilable, and resolute for dissolution or blood. That outcrying situation brought finalissues near. Must the Union perish? Could the Union endure? Civic dissolution or civic perpetuity—this was the immediate, the unrelieved, the ominous alternative. In the fiery heat of civic hate, flaming into civil war, Lincoln had to seek for civic principles that hate could not subvert, nor the fires of war consume; principles too strong to admit defeat, too pure to be dissolved.
Never did a statesman bend over a graver task, nor with a more honest and patient heart, nor with a mind more divinely fashioned and furnished to comprehend and penetrate the actual case in hand. As in a chemist's alembic, he fused and tried our Constitution and all our history. Into that first inaugural he incorporated the issues of his thought. And this was its simple, sole result:—Slavery is "the only substantial dispute." With the people is "ultimate justice." With God is "ultimate truth." We are not "enemies." We are "friends." In this supreme dispute let us confer and legislate as friends, and then as friends live together in an amity that shall be perpetual. This is the uncompounded essence of his first inaugural, as of all his political philosophy. In universal freedom, by mutual persuasion, and in even friendliness, let our Union forever endure. Here again is a statesman's publication and heroic defense of a pure, immortal hope, voiced in an appeal and upheld by arguments as spiritual and pure as the inmost being and utmost destiny of the living souls of men.
No study of the transcendent momentum in Lincoln's life of spiritual realities can fairly overlook his speech in Peoria, October 16, 1854. It is, as he said at the time, "substantially" a repetition of an address at Springfield, twelve days before. It "made Lincoln a power in national politics." It was the commanding beginning of his commanding career. That year, 1854, began the convulsionwhich made him president, involved the war, and ended in his violent death. As matters stood on New Year of 1854, slavery was, by act of Congress in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, thenceforth forbidden to spread anywhere in United States territory north of the southern boundary of Missouri. In the early half of 1854 Senator Douglas drove through Congress a bill, creating the territory of Nebraska, which declared the Compromise prohibition of 1820 "inoperative and void." Thenceforth slavery might spread anywhere. This is the "repeal" of the Missouri Compromise.
That "repeal" brought Lincoln to his feet. And from the day of that Peoria speech Lincoln was, to seeing eyes, a man of destiny. For, not for that day, nor for that century, nor for this continent alone did Lincoln frame and join that speech. Let any logical mind attempt a logical synthesis of that address, marking well what affirmations are supreme. Not out of conditions that vary with the latitudes, nor out of opinions that change as knowledge improves, and not from sentiments that bloom and fade as do the passing flowers, was that address constructed. It handles things eternal. Its central propositions outwear the centuries. Its conclusions are compounded from stuff that is indestructible. And the piers upon which they rest are as steadfast as the everlasting hills. Freedom, union, perpetuity were its only positive themes. Let us "save the Union" was its central call; and "so" save it as to "make and keep it forever worth the saving"—so save it "that the succeeding generations of free, happy people, the world over, shall rise up and call us blessed to the latest generations." The perpetual Union of freemen—this was his one pure hope. Of this freedom slavery was a "total violation." Such a Union the principle of secession made forever impossible. And in thecontinual presence of tyranny, and under ever impending threats of disruption, perpetuity in peace was an impossibility. Liberty, equality, loyalty—only upon these enduring verities could self-government ever be built, or ever abide. Here is stability. Here is harmony. Here are truths "self-evident." Against cruelty, disloyalty, and pride these eternal principles are in "eternal antagonism." And when the two collide, "shocks and throes and convulsions must continually follow." Against human slavery, and all that human slavery entails, humanity instinctively and universally revolts. It is condemned by human righteousness and human sympathy alike. "Repeal the Missouri Compromise, repeal all compromises, repeal the Declaration of Independence, repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature."
Thus Lincoln bound together the arguments of this appeal. The irrepealability of the human sympathies in the nature of all men, the undeniable humanity of the black, self-government built upon the creative fiat of freedom and equality for all—upon these enduring propositions a Nation could be built whose resources either to eliminate all evils, pacify all convulsions, and resolve all debates, or to achieve a lasting progress, dignity and peace, would be inexhaustible. Thus, at the very start, his eye pierced through the political turmoil of his time, fixing in the central place before the Nation's gaze those "great and durable" elements which "no statesman can safely disregard."
Plainly notable in all this is that powerful and habitual proclivity in Lincoln to find out and publish abroad those civic propositions and principles that are inwrought with perpetuity. He was straining and toiling towards a triumph that time could never reverse. Foundations that were sure to shift, or disintegrate, or sink away, hewas resolute to overturn, and clear away. He chose and strove to toil and speak for the immortal part in man, for ages yet to come, and for the immediate justice of Almighty God. And so he fashioned forth a programme that, like the programme of the Hebrew prophets, circumvented death.
This second inaugural contains a fine example of free and reasoned reliability. It is in fact, in its total stature, a stately exhibit of deliberate steadfastness. Let this short document be read, meanwhile remembering that other inaugural document, and not forgetting all the unspeakable strain and struggles of those four intervening years. The man who spoke in 1861, and the man who speaks now again in 1865, stands forth in the heart of those bewildering confusions of our political life, a living embodiment of civic constancy. In his person national firmness stands enshrined. In those ripe convictions, in those cool and poised determinations, in those ardent, prophetic desires—steadfast, consistent, and sure—are traceable the rock-like foundations of our confederate Republic. In those inaugurals stands a monument not liable soon to crumble away. But within that monument insuring its durability, rests as within and upon a steadfast throne, Lincoln's everlasting fidelity.
To win clear vision of this fine trait, let one read again this second inaugural, and locate truly the center of gravity of its second paragraph. There Lincoln is tracing in broad, plain strokes the origin and on-coming of the war. In the center of his steady thought the interest centrally at stake was the Union. On the one hand he recalls his own address at his first inauguration, "devoted," as hesays, "altogether to saving the Union without war." On the other hand, he recalls "insurgent agents" seeking to destroy it without war. War was deprecated and dreaded by both parties. But one would make war rather than let the Nation survive. And the other would accept war rather than let the Nation perish. "And the war came." As a register of Lincoln's capacity for free, intelligent stability, no passing glance can in any sense exhaust or apprehend the depth and sweep and energy of those last four words. When loyalty to the Union was the issue and interest at stake, Lincoln would "accept war." "And the war came."
When Lincoln voiced those four words, his eye was looking back through four dreadful, bloody years—years, whether in prospect or in reminiscence, fit to make any human heart recoil. But as he surveys those scenes of hate and carnage and desolation, retracing and reckoning again the sum of their awful sorrow and cost, and rehearses again his resolution to "accept the war," it is without a shadow or a hint of wavering or remorse. In fact he is recalling that fateful day of four years before with an eye to review and vindicate that fateful resolve. At the end of those eventful and sorrow-laden years, he is as steady as at their start. Not by the breadth of a hair have his footing and purpose, his judgment and endeavor been made to swerve. Then as now, now as then, his loyalty is absolute. And in that sturdy loyalty of that lone man a seeing eye discerns nothing less than the unbending majesty of a Nation's self-respect. It is the Nation's sacred honor that he has in sacred charge. In him the integrity of the Nation at large finds a champion and a living voice. In his firm-set decision the Nation's destiny takes shape. In those short pregnant words the proud consistency of our total national career, and hissuperb reliability, become, instantly and for all time, freely, nobly, and completely identified. This is not to say that in the teeming history of those eventful years Lincoln's mind and will and sentiments had stood in stolid immobility. He freely concedes that the years have brought him lessons he had never foreseen. And his central attitude in this second scene is a reverent inquiry into the ways of Him whose purposes transcend all human wisdom, and require full centuries to complete. But strong and clear within his reverent and lowly acceptance of divine rebukes, stands unbent and unchanged his steadfast, invincible pledge to reveal, on his own and on his Nation's behalf, the sovereign grandeur of civic reliability.
In his first message to Congress this integral trait of his personal and official life finds majestic and most definite explication. It is the passage explaining to Congress, in precise and minute recital, just how the war began. It deals with those ominous events in Charleston harbor, centering about heroic Major Anderson, a federal officer, and within Fort Sumter, a federal fort. That assault upon a national garrison by Confederate guns was no haphazard event. At just that moment, and in just that spot the national crisis became acute. Upon that spot, and upon those events Lincoln's eye was fixed with a physician's anxiety. There he knew he could feel the pulse of the resentment and resolution of the South. Day and night he held his finger upon its feverish beat. And as the fever rose, he marked with exactest attentiveness its registration of one condition of the Southern heart:—Was that heart so hot with civic hate that, when every lesser issue was set aside, and the only issue under review was the right of the Republic to stand by its officers and its flag, then those Southern leaders would fire upon thoseofficials in a federal fort, and pull down that flag upon federal soil? If in a federal fort the major in command, and his uniformed men, while making no aggression nor voicing any threat, but acting only as peaceful exponents of the Nation's authority, and being in exigent need of food, were to be visited by a national transport bearing nought but bread, upon such a ship, upon such a mission, would seceding soldiers open fire? If they would, and if that onslaught passed without rebuke, then that Nation's federal integrity was dissolved. Such was the unmixed issue, and so sharply edged was its final and decisive definition under Lincoln's hand. And on his part there was here no accident. With foresight, and by careful design Lincoln "took pains" to make the problem plain. With impressive and ideal carefulness he guided the action of his own heart to its final resolution, and predetermined the final verdict of the world.
In the last supreme alternative, when government agents stand in need of food, and citizens who repudiate all loyalty fire upon government transports freighted only with bread, what shall a government do? This was the naked question that Lincoln faced, when he decided to accept and prosecute the war. Upon this one plain question, and upon his one convinced determination he massed and compacted his first Congressional address. Right well he understood its point, its gravity, and its range. And surpassing well was he fitted to be the man to frame and demonstrate the true reply. In all the land no finer, firmer exemplar of elemental constancy could ever have been found to guide and cheer the Nation's course in this extremest test of elemental self-respect. Let those words be written and read again. It was a test of national self-respect, elemental and supreme. It was a question that concerned, as Lincoln saw and said, "the whole family ofman." "Government of the people, by the same people"—can or cannot such a government "maintain its own integrity against its own domestic foes?" Can it "maintain its own integrity?" Can it master "its own domestic foes?" Can men who assume their self-control be trusted to maintain their self-respect? Here is a problem that is in verity elemental and supreme. What, in very deed and in solid fact, what is civic reliability? Where, among all the governments by men, where can steadfastness, civic steadfastness be found? Nowhere, Lincoln had the eyes to see; nowhere, but in the civic constancy of men at once governing and governed. Only thus and only there, only so and only here, in this heaven-favored land, did Lincoln see, can any government of men by men find fundamental base and final form that shall be consistent, stable, and real. This is government indeed. Here is elemental, civic verity. A community held in common self-control upon the basis of common self-respect—such a union alone has constancy. This is the sublime and radical civic truth that Lincoln forged out upon his steadfast heart, as he bent with mighty ponderings over those scenes in Charleston harbor, and reviewed and expounded their pregnant implications in his initial message to Congress in 1861.
In many ways this constancy of Lincoln rewards attentive thought. For one thing, it was radiant with intelligence. Indeed in him the two became identified. As thus conceived, it shows as pure and clear consistency. His fully tried reliability was the well-poised balance of a mind long-schooled in the art of steadiest deliberation. When Lincoln held immutably fast, it was due to his invincible faith that the conviction to which he clung involved abiding truth. This quality tempered all his firmness. Just here one finds the genesis and motive of all his skilledinvention of reasoned, pleading speech. Lincoln's prevailing power of urgent argument roots in the deep persistency of his convinced belief. It was because of an impassioned confidence, an assurance that was vibrant with a note of triumph, that his grasp of any ruling purpose was so unwaveringly firm. This was his mood and attitude in all the major contentions of his life. To the central tenets that those contentions involved he held with all the firmness of the rooted hills. Touching those primary principles in his character and politics his mind and faith seem to have attained an absolute confirmation. And from those settled positions he could never be moved. Constancy in him was nothing more nor less than the energetic affirmation of intellectual rectitude.
His steadfastness, thus, was a mental poise. It can be defined as ripened judgment, a conclusion of thought, safeguarded on every side by a discernment not easily confused, by a penetration not easy to escape. This involved a wonderful flexibility. While steadfast unto the grade of immutability, where honor was involved, no student of his ways could call him obstinate. While firm and strong enough to hold the Nation to her predestined course upon an even keel, he held her helm with a gentle, pliant grasp. Being in every mental trait inherently honest and deliberate, he could at once be resolute and free.
This blend within his being of thoughtfulness and determination, of openness and immutability, this candid, conscientious, mental poise, this Godlike apprehension of the larger equilibrium, qualified him peculiarly to interpret the major movements of his time, to trace in the deep, prevailing sentiments of the human soul the chart of our national destiny.
Here is in Lincoln something wonderful. Among themillions of his fellowmen he counts but one. But in the range and grasp of his thought, in the eager passion of his heart, in the controlling power of his commanding will, he comprehends them all. Stable and heedful at once, he could challenge unanswerably every man's esteem. His symbol is the firm, benignant oak, the sheltering, abiding hills. Thus he stood to help and hold, to serve and rule among his fellowmen. Thus he wrought coherence into our great career. Thus he linked together those mighty political events with a logic which succeeding times have proved powerless to refute, but strong and glad to confirm. He had marvelous capacity to divine. With him to reason was to illuminate. Things bewilderingly obscure, within his thought and speech grew plain. He was our prime interpreter. He explained the Nation to itself. But in every such elucidation the Nation was made to co-operate. His instinctive, habitual attitude toward other men was that of a conferee. He was sensitively open to complaints and appeals. Delegations and private supplicants always found him courteous. This courtesy was never formal. To a degree altogether noteworthy the words of other men found entrance into the counselings of his mind. He was not merely accessible. He was impressible, sensitive, quick to appreciate and honor the sentiments of another man. With the earnest plea of balanced, honest argument, hailing from whatever source, he was facile to correspond. His judgments and decisions were amenable to estimates wholly novel to him. Indeed, to an almost astonishing degree his major movements were commensurate with the progress and pace of the national events that environed his life. In some of his mightiest accomplishments he seemed to do little more than register the conclusions of the national mind.
All this is to say that Lincoln's constancy was poise,not obstinacy; a well-reflected equilibrium, not a stiff rigidity. All his steadiness was studied. Never can it be said of Lincoln that his verdicts were snap judgments. On the contrary, with him deliberation and delay were so habitual and so excessively indulged, while pondering some massive, political perplexity, that the patience of some of our greatest statesmen repeatedly broke down, and he was charged repeatedly with criminal, and all but wanton indifference, inertia, and neglect. But never was sorer libel. Through it all he was only too intent. Through it all his eye refused to sleep, while his steady and steadying mind pursued the vexing task, until its permanent solution stood clear. And then, with his eye steadily single to the guiding hand of God, to the Nation's immortal weal, and to his own unsurrendered integrity, he would publish and fulfill his studied and sturdy resolve. Upon the basis of these internal mental conquests did all his firmness rest. Hence his life-long evenness and freedom from fluctuation.
But this challenges still further study. Given this notable blending in his mental habits of independent stalwartness and amenability to others' views, what is the inmost secret and explanation of his undeniable consistency? It lay in his human sincerity. His affinity with his neighbor was a reality. The Nation's deepest concerns were as deeply his own. Hence his ultimate convictions, though ripening in a single decade, proved to be in deep and enduring agreement with the ultimate convictions of the Nation at large, though requiring a full century to mature. The sentiments that were essentially his own were seen, when openly published upon his lips, to be the sentiments essential and common to his fellowmen. His personal aspiration was a national goal. His personal character was a national type. Truly representative,he was at the same time as truly unique. Always facing towards other men, he always stood erect.
This was Lincoln's constancy. It was not the stubbornness of an arbitrary will, although his will had regal energy. It was not a frigid intellectualism, although in mental penetration he could not be surpassed. It was not a tide of swelling enthusiasm, although the supreme emotion of his heart was the passion of an ideal patriotism. His commanding constancy, potent to compose a Nation's turbulence, was but the outer stature of his typical interior integrity. It was the open assertion and attestation of his personal self-respect.
Thus Lincoln's convictions and verdicts were unfailingly his own. And thus those verdicts and convictions had continental breadth. Dealing with a Nation's destiny, he came to be clothed with a Nation's majesty. In his own great heart, as in a Nation's crucible, he assembled and resolved the Nation's complexities; and in his own pure desire, as in a Nation's purified hopes, he defined and described our national goal. Of all things narrow and peculiar, of all things partisan and sectional, he purged his eye, until with malice toward none, with charity for all, with reverence towards God, he could see the total vastness of the things with which he had to deal.
Here is a loyalty worthy of the name—the plighted troth of one in whom the Nation's noblest hopes stand forth already realized, assured, secure. This defines and describes the force at play in this last inaugural. In the volume of those words Lincoln's message and Lincoln's manhood were identical. Its utterance was the voice of his self-respect. Herein Lincoln the patriot and Lincoln the man are one. Here was Lincoln's standard. His search for verity was a study of himself—of himself as true kindred of God and of his fellowmen. This is thecore of Lincoln's honesty. This is the key to Lincoln's constancy. This is the secret of Lincoln's authority. This was the goal of Lincoln's quest for verity. This was for Lincoln the one reality. As child of the one great God, as closest kin of every man, he is our model champion and exemplar of the one abiding truth—personal self-respect. That this should be held unperverted and preserved intact was in the thought of Lincoln the primal equity, the very substance of a man's integrity.
The name of Lincoln is linked inseparably with the lot of the slave. That the fortune of the lowly might be improved was the supreme enterprise of his life. As conceived by him, that enterprise concerned all men. Not for black men alone, and not alone for men in literal and evident bonds, was this, his major interest, engaged. Quite as keenly, nay even more, was his heart concerned for his closer kinsmen of Saxon blood, who never felt the slave driver's lash. But even here his prevailing inclination was a kindly solicitude for people of meager comfort, culture and liberty. Towards men whose fortune was adverse, and from whom more favored ones were prone to turn their face, his heart was prone to be compassionate. His very instincts seemed inclined to make the poor his intimates. And when he stood among the lowly, he never showed a sign that he had entered the shadow of any shame. Richly dowered with nobility himself, himself superior to every fortune, incapable of subjugation by any fate, a master owned among the mightiest, the dominant function of his life was ministration. This was his ambition. And it was sovereign. His toweringaspiration was that the needy be relieved, that poor men might have means, that bondmen might be free.
This was a soaring, imperial wish. But it sent him where men were most down-trodden and overborne. It forced his name and reputation to become identified with the gross and low condition of the rudest, most untutored mortals of our land, the humble Afro-American slave. This lowly fellowship he never attempted to disguise nor consented to disclaim. He rather seemed to welcome whatever burden or reproach it might seem to involve. Before and against the white man who held the whip, beside and befriending the black who felt its lash, he chose to take, and persisted to keep, his stand. Many a time was this co-partnership flung in Lincoln's face with stinging words as a mongrel, shameful thing—with most vigorous persistence by Douglas in their famous debates. But it was not in Lincoln to desert and disown the poor, nor yet to apologize, nor to retort, nor even to reply. As champion and companion of the despised and embondaged victims of the white man's greed and contempt, Lincoln stands by the negro, as full of resoluteness, and as free from shame, as though defending his own home.
Here is genuine humility, not an attitude assumed, but a virtue inwrought. That this rare and Christian grace was planted deep in Lincoln's heart, and pervaded the total fullness of his life, may be argued from the very texture of his last inaugural. Upon just this point that document deserves minute attention. From the vantage ground of April 4, 1865, and from the point of view of slavery, that address is a profound and most commanding interpretation of the philosophy and phenomena of our American life. The war, God's Providence, and slavery—they are its sovereign themes. God's Providence shaping into national discipline the tragedy of the war;slavery "somehow" its deepest, fateful "cause:" there are thoughts for thoughtful men, who may wish to understand the meaning of our national life. The point to notice here is to observe how in Lincoln's mind in 1865, the course, and curse, and fate of slavery connect. It is nothing less than a profound elucidation of outstanding American events. It intimates impressively how Lincoln's mind had brooded and pondered over the lot of the African slave. He had reckoned all the value of their unrequited toil. The marks of their bruises and wounds were seared upon his soul. And of all the meaning of that sore humiliation, in terms of our national destiny and of the Divine dominion, he became the supreme and sympathetic expositor. In his unfolding of that meaning was infolded the master motive of his life. Under the hand of God he was having bitter but submissive share in setting forever right the cruel, age-long wrongs of the African slave. That such sentiments should take such shape at such a time is signal demonstration that they were the central sentiments of his heart. He was highly designated to a humble task; and he knew no higher honor than to keep close friendship with the poor, until his high commission stood complete. And to this close affiliation of lowliest lives with the loftiest aims and issues of his great career, he devotes well-nigh the whole of his inaugural address as our Nation's president to expound, therein betraying no slightest sign that he sees in that alliance the slightest incongruity. In that defense and championship of the rights that were elemental to men, though the most despised, he saw his highest dignity as president. And to that lowly aim he shaped and pledged his policy, his party, his fortune, and his fame.
In truth this affinity of Lincoln with his neighbor in need was the very fruitage of the fortune of his life. Hewas fitted and predestined for it by his birth. His station was of the lowliest. His setting-up was pathetically scant. All his discipline was cruelly stern. In ease and plenty he had no share. Of sweets and luxury he had no taste. Born of parents pitifully poor, nurtured in painful penury, poorly sheltered, scantily clad, accustomed to neglect, intimate with want, trained to disappointment, toiling in untamed scenes against hard odds with rudest tools, the kindred and daily familiar of unassuming men, denied the commonest aids to personal refinement, he was to the atmosphere and temperament of genuine, undisguised humility native born, and fully bred. From such a hopeless start, in such a hostile environment, he made his way alone. It can be said with almost literal truth that he never had any help. His only friend was his modest, resolute heart. His winnings were all by wrestling—and the struggle never relaxed. When every antagonist had been met and overthrown, and his gaunt stature stood in the Nation's arena alone and undefeated, then upon that unbent but unpretending form his Nation and his Nation's God laid a burden, such as no man in all our history had ever borne. When beneath that great final task he meekly bowed, its superhuman responsibility and weight were all-sufficient to crush forever all vain-glorious pride, if in his tried heart any pride had ever entered, and having entered had still remained. Before the majesty of his commission, and amid the inscrutable perplexities of each unparalleled day, he must always be fain, even though never forced, to walk humbly among his people, and before his God. From birth to death, by fortune and by Providence, as though by overmastering fate, he was fashioned for humility.
From all these grounds he was predisposed to modesty. Over against the vastness of his task, facing daily all itsformidable difficulties, and sensible evermore of his infinite insufficiency, the posture of his spirit and the tone of his daily speech unfailingly betokened a moderate estimate of his personal significance. The overspreading majesty of the work to which he set his hand, always towering vividly before his thought, kept vividly active the consciousness that he was quite incompetent to accomplish aught, except the God of Nations tendered daily help.
As thus inclined and thus disposed in body and in mind, he became a man of prayer. That he should often fall upon his knees was but the consequence of his daily discovery that his burdens and his strength were widely incommensurate.
Many times those supplications seemed as though unheard. The heavens gave no sign. Then malice raged against him. But then his unsurrendered faith in God, his reverence for his task, and his sobering estimate of himself would show as meekness. It was not his way to retaliate or rail. In darkness, before delay, and beneath abuse, he bore and suffered long without complaint. In this pathetic quietness his humility becomes heroic.
This bent towards lowliness, tempered through and through, as it was, with his clear intelligence, saved him from vaunting and all vanity. There was habitually in his posture a grave solidity. This often seemed like carefulness and caution. But it was born of modesty. If there was ever a time when ever a man might be suffered to boast, the date of this second inaugural was the time, and the author of that inaugural was the man. The hour of that address marked the opening of Lincoln's second presidential term. It was the crowning vindication of his presidential policy. After four years of war the national poll at the last electoral vote had shown the North stronger in men than when the war began. The status of the Southwas desperate. But five weeks lay between him and the surrender of Lee. Lincoln was not lacking in foresight, nor in careful calculation. His skill therein was preeminent. Wary, discerning, resolute, his assurance of ultimate victory no doubt firm and clear, no breath of boasting was given vent. Instead, with almost painful reserve, he modestly said, "With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured." Lincoln was one of those rarest of men, invincible in resolution, at the same time invincible in reserve.
This inner mood of modesty showed in all his outer furnishing. It was not his way to publish his distinction. For him to signalize his primacy by any decoration would be an incongruity. In any group of men where precedence was emphasized he was ill at ease. Any attempt by him to designate his official elevation by some gilded ornament or plume would have been grotesque. His eyes were not lofty nor his heart haughty. His feet were for the furrow. His hands were for the axe. His lips were for friendly salutation of all the people on the street. Any outer token, intended to mark him for separation or any superiority, would have excited nothing but sorrow in him. Fabrics however costly and rare, jewels however brilliant and pure, designed and disposed for distinction and display, awakening envy and unrest quite as much as admiration and delight, were not for him. Plain man among the lowliest, true nobleman among the noblest, he wore all his honors in uttermost innocence of all parade.
Nor were the features of Lincoln ever intended to be employed as instruments of scorn. Into the hellish ministry of curling contempt those gracious lips could never be impressed. His heart was far too kindly; and that were safeguard enough. But his unalloyed humility was far too potent to ever encourage or permit in him any indulgenceof disdain. Truly lowly himself, it was not in him to coldly despise any of his fellowmen. Just here his humility displayed its sterling honesty. And just here his honor and his glory blend. Here is his sure title to nobility—a title that neither time nor eternity can ever tarnish or bedim. By every right is this nobility his. By his earthly fortune, as by a hard, relentless fate, his lot was cast among the poor; and by that same appointment the lot of all earth's poor has gained perennial dignity. But he graced those ranks also as a volunteer. By his own consent, with sovereign free selection, he elected to sustain and overcome all the impediments of the station of his birth, and so to demonstrate the full capacity of the humblest human life for high endeavor and desire. Thus he was alike and at once filled with a deep compassion, and free from high contempt. Here lies the firm foundation of his proud renown. This is the true birthmark of his nobility. He was above the baseness and the meanness of scorning any brother man.
And so he avoided arrogance. It was not the way of Lincoln to forever reiterate, if even to allow, his own importance. He was acutely sensitive, to the meaning and worth of an honorable renown. Especially was his cool, gray eye awake to the future issues of the pregnant deeds of his teeming times. But therein his eager concern was a patriot's anxiety—an anxiety in which he mingled his fortune and fame with the destiny of his native land. Therein the jealousy of his desire for the national welfare burned away, as in sacrificial fires and upon a sacred altar, all ambitions for himself. At any cost to others, or through any other man's neglect, it was not in the heart of Lincoln to demand and heap together honors or advantages for himself. Well might he be justified, if ever such a course were fair, in claiming forhimself exceptional rewards. Chief executive of a great Republic, commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the North, assured of the major momentum of military success, in immediate reach of vast and ever increasing resources, whether for war or peace, chosen the second time to be the Nation's head, charged the second time to consummate the Nation's perpetual unity—surely he had ample guaranty for imputing to his own sole hand, in a supreme degree, mighty prowess, imposing achievements, a vast and spreading authority and power. At such a time and amid such surroundings, a generous measure of self-aggrandizement would have seemed quite warranted and well sustained. But never was a mighty commander freer from that uncomely fault. The mention of victory makes him strangely unmindful of himself. The thought of his vast authority makes him the lowliest in the land. Lincoln was not arrogant. He made no effort after aggregated honors, however deserved, much less after honors unearned. In particular he showed no inclination to appropriate another's fame. For one thing, he knew too well the awful cost of magistracy. The right to be commander-in-chief of a Nation's resources and arms, so coveted a right in aspiring men, became transmuted in the cup which Lincoln drank into a terrible, an almost impossible responsibility. Nor was it of his nature to subtract from other men for his own increase. At the price of a brother's freedom, or happiness, or life, the gaining of ease, or wealth, or joy of any sort for himself would be far too dear. In the soul of Lincoln extortion could find no soil. His mien among men was that of indulgent ministry, not of exacting mastery. With the lower level and the lesser meed he could be well content. Morbid jealousy for his own acclaim, hungry greed for another's reward, satisfaction in plaudits that were undeserved, orcomfort from robbery or extortion of any sort were sentiments for which the refined and genuine modesty of Lincoln had no appetite or taste. The honors that surrounded and invested him were up-springing, spontaneous and free; in no least measure accumulated, artificial or enforced.
The native purity of Lincoln's lowliness shows best in his reverence for God. He lived in a daily consciousness of Providence. As a statesman he was thoroughly a man of God, full of a patriot's adoring and acquiescent thankfulness, as he watched and studied the wonderful unfolding of God's just and kindly government of this most favored land. This mood of humble reverence was deeply wrought. It was of the texture of his character. It was not a vesture or a posture, a gesture or a phrase, assumed here and discarded there, and often counterfeit. It was essential, like his integrity, pervading and indeed controlling all his responsible life. And it was wholly undisguised. In his most formal public documents—papers in which statesmen as a rule make scant allusion to Deity—Lincoln's allusions to God are their most imposing feature. Beyond all contradiction, Lincoln enacted his public responsibilities in the fear of God. This was the beginning of his wisdom. Just this is the secret of the sanity of this last inaugural. And it is the secret of its immortal beauty. And it is the girdle of its strength. In framing its central argument, and thereby steadying the Nation's heart in the convulsions of war, he was expounding the hidden ways of God. There grew a mighty paragraph. It reads smoothly now. But when it passed through Lincoln's lips, it was the issue of a hard-pent agony. When he voiced those words he stood before an altar, and made confession, like a very priest, for both North and South. All the land had behaved with unbecoming confidence.All alike were under discipline. God was in dominion. Even in their prayers both North and South had been contending against the Lord. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither had been answered fully. The Almighty had his own purposes. The expectations of all had gone astray. The contending struggles of either side, despite their contending prayers, were being turned by the judgments of God against them both into a terrible national chastisement. So Lincoln discerned, and so he humbly, vicariously confessed. But beneath this high dominion his heart too had been bowed down, and overwhelmed, and chastened sore. Repeatedly his counsels had been overturned, and his expectations had been reversed; and that too, as he devoutly believed, by the over-ruling purposes of God. Hence, as in this inaugural scene he faced the future, though he was head of a puissant people, he behaved like a little child. In a chastened sense of the mystery and authority of the overruling designs of Almighty God, he forebore to boast. And then he said in rhythmic words of almost prophetic majesty, and in the attire of all but sacrificial humility: "Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"
This is indeed in prophetic strain. But he forbears to prophesy. He longed with sacrificial eagerness for national prosperity, in lasting freedom and unison and happiness. As he renewed his official pledge to preserve, protect,and defend the world's greatest charter of equality and freedom for all mankind, his heart and hope held high and firm. But his total being was subdued. God had crossed his path. The long-drawn war was God's rebuke. The Nation had gone sadly astray. The Almighty had taken her waywardness in hand. His purposes were in control. And He was supreme. And His ways were unrevealed. Lincoln stood to his task unflinchingly, ready either for sorrow or relief, ready either for death or life, as the Most High might appoint.
Here is statesmanship indeed. But it is altogether unique. A mighty Nation's executive head, discerning, devoted, and devout, holding in his steady hand the charge of a Nation's destiny, pledging in the Nation's name to lay upon the altar, if need be for the Nation's honor, the Nation's life, and there before the altar waiting humbly upon God. Many a theme of profoundest purport opens instantly into view. Just now our eye is fixed upon its illustration of humility.
On the one hand, and in the first place, its exhibition of the dignity of pure manhood is sublime. In this inaugural scene, beneath the awful stress of a Nation in war, upon the basis of the pledged covenant of the free, invincible faith that a free Republic can sustain and fulfill all its solemn responsibility, and with unquenchable hope in the vast and unseen future of his land, Lincoln took his stand, and held his ground, and put on record before God and all the world his reverent and resolute oath. Here is manhood, noble, majestic, decisive, free—a manhood that embraces the worth, voices the hope, and confronts with open breast the destiny of the race.
But in this same scene these mighty energies pause. Lincoln consciously faces God. For himself and for the Nation he makes humble acknowledgment that the Lordis Almighty and Most High. And to God's full sovereignty he yields spontaneous consent. With lowliest submission and confession he concedes and declares that all his rebukes and all his rule are in righteousness.
Here is a place where any man may properly pause. Here the orbit of our proudest being strikes its verge. Here God and manhood meet. Here human power faints. Here human resolution halts. Here human foresight dims. Here human wisdom becomes a void. Here all our pride becomes perforce humility; and all our counselings merge in faith. Here human grandeur touches its outer rim.
But here, too, human eyes awaken. Here human aspirations rise. Here human wisdom becomes newly informed. Here human forecasts brighten into hope. Here human strength revives. Here human purpose tightens. Here in reverence human wisdom begins. Here in human lowliness appears a Godlike dignity. Here our human stature shows its noblest. Lincoln is at the utmost bound of his knowledge, and his liberty; and yet he is displaying just here a discernment and a decision of the most exalted type—a discernment, however, whose insight is a vision of faith, and a decision whose resolve is an exercise of trust. In this scene statesmanship is transmuted into religion, undefiled and pure. Man in his loftiest hope and uttermost need, and God in his transcendent royalty of equity and goodwill meet face to face, and stand in open, free and friendly covenant. Here is at once a portrait of true humility, and the acme of high nobility. Here in childlike trust and childlike faith the wisdom and the freedom of man attain their goal. Here statesmanship and reverence, wisdom and trust, freedom and acquiescence, dignity and lowliness harmonize and interblend.And in the unison either one remains uncompounded and pure.
Here many questions press to be resolved. This signal scene in Lincoln's career—what has it to say about the inner nature of man? What about the nature of God? What about the nature of our human insight into the essential qualities of things? What about the relation of will to thought? What about the sovereignty of character? When human character touches the limit of human life, is it facing night or day? These are ultimate inquiries. And they are immediate. For answer to these inquiries, let Lincoln and Hegel meet. And let the Nations listen to their replies; and so discern what problems clear, where dignity and lowliness convene. For here is a shining scene, where any man may see that in a lowly heart wisdom and nobility may sit together as on a throne. Modesty like Lincoln's is a courtly grace. Reverence such as his beseems a prince. Such humility, reflecting with heavenly beauty the immediate presence of God, may clothe a mighty man, and hold the center of a mighty scene, without unseemliness, and it wants not intelligence. This at least this scene makes clear.
The marvelous beauty of the Athenian Parthenon is displayed in four façades. Upon these four sides runs a frieze in a continuous band, crowning all the columns, and binding all the structure into a single shrine. Comprehended within the stately course of that all-encircling frieze is classic demonstration how an impressive manifoldness of sculptural form may present a perfect and impressive unison.
Something such is Lincoln's character, as it stands in this second inaugural. In this address four personal qualities stand forth, as distinct and clear to the eye and thought as are the faces of the Parthenon; while, like the Parthenon, the author of that address is indivisibly and undeniably one. Both are alike composite, and both alike are one. Both embrace diversity, but all in perfect harmony. Both have perfect unity, but without monotony. Like the temple of Athene, greeting from its single altar every horizon of the Grecian sky, Lincoln, voicing his solemn oath as the Nation's president, gives utterance to every moral element in our American life. Here is something worth minute inspection. Here, upreared upon our Western, modern American soil, is a noble work of art, as noble as any in the ancient East—finished, balanced, and enduring—the ripened moral character of a people's patriot.
First to notice narrowly is that Lincoln's moral textureis fourfold. Four virtues stamp this speech. Four strands compose its web. Four hues commingle in its light. Four parts convey its harmony. This four-foldness is discernible distinctly.
Plain to see through all the features of this address, as well-defined as the features of his friendly face, is his kindliness. Of all things, war was most deplorable. Of all things, peace was most to be desired. All malice was to be disowned. All charity was to be indulged. All wounds were to be bound up. All sorrows were to be consoled. There spoke the pleading voice of love. All men were bidden to love their neighbors as they loved themselves. Here the quality of moral kindliness is unmistakably and indelibly distinct.
Quite as plain is his ideal and illustration of integrity. As manifest to all the world is his inflexible uprightness, as is the outer stature of his erect physique. For the equity in the bondman's protest against two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil he had an open ear and a profound respect. In the confidence that the judgments of Almighty God were altogether just he was not ashamed to make public announcement of his abiding faith. Eager that peace among ourselves and with all Nations might always last, he was also eager that it should be just. Firmly based, for his Nation and for himself, upon such foundations of self-respect, resting on God, and resolute for the right, he had no other thought but to strive with unremitting constancy, until his work was done. Here is moral loyalty, plainly visible, and as plainly inviolate.
Quite as clear is his humility. The war, as Lincoln viewed it, was a humbling visitation upon the Nation of the Nation's sins, a mighty rebuke upon all human scorn and pride. In all that sin and scorn and pride—the crime and guilt of slavery—Lincoln had no slightest, conscious,personal share. But the shame and woe of that rebuke, as it fell from the hand of God upon the Nation as a whole, he bore with quiet, meek humility. And to whatever further judgment the Almighty might allot he humbly bowed his head, confessing openly that, in his own heart and thought, God's ways had been proudly misunderstood. Here is reverent humility, and here is humble reverence, undeniable and undisguised.
And just as clear is his supreme esteem for values that are permanent and pure. Above all changing accidents Lincoln honored the Godlike human soul. In harmony herewith his thoughts and arguments were prone to handle centuries. And in rating worth his standard was a man's humanity. Thus he shaped the records and the prospects of our history into a philosophy. Thus he interpreted the war. It was God's vindication of the immortal value of the humblest man. Carnal pleasures and worldly gains, wrung from human lives at the cost of the degradation and debasement of the human soul, and in defiance of God's eternal and indefeasible laws, Lincoln saw to be of all things the most foolhardy and crude. So spiritual and pure was his conception of God and man, and his active understanding of the meaning of historic efforts and events. Ideals, endeavors, and enjoyments, even though normal and worthy, if they dealt with values that were decaying and gross, were cheaply rated by him; while the Nation's perpetuity, each man's spiritual quality, and God's eternal purity held eminence unfailingly in his affection and esteem. Here is spirituality, pure within, and by the inwardly pure plain to see.
As in the shapely quadrilateral of the Parthenon, this fourfoldness in the character of Lincoln is cardinal. Each quality is an element, each conforming with an elemental factor in the nature of every man. This involves that inits essential substance each trait, so far considered, is incapable of analysis. And each refuses to be resolved into something else. Each one is a simple and a constant co-efficient in Lincoln's moral being. Each one exists within his life in a complete integrity, indivisible, self-contained.
His humility, thus, is integral and unmixed. When Lincoln bows, as he does in this inaugural, before his God, and therein offers his life in a bending ministry to all his fellowmen, that reverence and that ministry are, as ministry and as reverence, pure lowliness. The phases of that lowliness may pass through continual transformation. And those changing forms may have changing designations. It may be submission before God's sovereignty, reverence before his majesty, awe before his mystery, obedience before his authority, trust beneath his Providence, confession under his rebukes; but common, essential, and unchanged within them all is simple, pure humility.
So with the fashion of his humble ways among his fellowmen. It also wears a varying guise. It may be modest reticence, abhorrence of parade, companionship with need, submission to abuse, co-partnership with a brother's shame, preferring another's gain, honoring other's worth, seeking ways to serve. But common, essential and unchanged within all these as well, is simple, pure humility. It is a solid moral trait, substantial and irreducible. As illustrated in Lincoln's life, it is entirely dignified and beautiful, essential and inseparable. As shown in his behavior, it corresponds with a relationship, as inherent and inwrought in his very being as his very breath. As a trait of Lincoln's character, his humility has a root, as firm and durable as is the transcendence of God, and asare the opportunity and obligation of every man among his brothermen to bear, forbear, and serve.
It is just the same with his fidelity. It too, is an uncompounded and imperative moral trait. It is a living, facile grace, easily capable of many kinds of affirmation. It may identify itself with truth, in reasoned or implicit faith; with promise, pledge, or oath, in loyalty; with proof by testing fires, as fidelity, steadfastness, or reliability; with unvarying, free adhesion to eternal principles, as consistency; with clear conviction of sure reality, as verity; with ethical straightforwardness, as rectitude, sincerity, or honesty; with even, balanced justice, as equity; with the innermost and final norm of truth in any personal life, as self-assertion, or self-respect. But common within them all, unaltered and unalterable amid all those varied and varying forms, is simple, unmixed constancy. In any analysis of Lincoln's moral life this moral trait will forever demand distinct and distinctive recognition and name. It is based and centered in his estimate and estimation of himself, the eye of his very honor, the core of his nobility, the very sense within his living soul of the life of his integrity. It is the inward attitude of his moral worth, as invincible, insistent, and elemental as any purest action of his self-consciousness.
The same holds true of Lincoln's kindliness. In the balanced harmony of his character the note of human friendliness is a persistent and indispensable strain. Without that melody his moral consonance would be painfully and irretrievably impaired. Like every other fundamental trait, this too may be voiced with every sort of easy, fluent variation. It may spring spontaneously from deep within the heart, as benign and all-embracing benevolence. It may overflow with benefits, in active, bounteous generosity. It may bind together an ideal home in parental,filial, fraternal affection. It may kindle at the altars of one's native land, and influence the heart of the patriotic devotee. It may break through all the accidents of birth and race into universal brotherhood. It may befriend the hurt, and needy, and bereft, as sympathy. It may so prevail as to bear up beneath the cruel sin of alien hearts in the sorrow of vicarious love, to the end that guilty men may be redeemed and reconciled. In myriad ways this human kindliness may speak its gentle words of mercy, grace, and peace. But every word is keyed to kindly fellowship. Through all those variations this note is prevalent. And it is keyed to a relationship as universal and as unavoidable as are the bonds of human brotherhood. This wanting in any moral character in fact or in idea, that moral character is unbalanced and incomplete. Its mighty influence and its constant evidence in Lincoln's active life supply an elemental requisite to that life's harmony. It is his full-voiced answer to the world-wide plea for human friendliness.
And just such affirmations must be made concerning Lincoln's pureness. Like each of the other three, this quality, too, holds a place and eminence distinctly and uniquely its own. No other trait can do its part or take its place. Its function and its office permit no substitute. Nor can its ministry be divided. Its claim is regal. And in any rating and apportionment among the other three this trait must be granted equal primacy. Its presence and its purport in Lincoln's total life are clear and fair and absolutely radical. Its aspect varies like the aspect of the sky. But deep within those variations gleams the pure and shining blue. It may win triumph over greed of appetite in temperance; or over fleshly passion in continence. It may fix supreme desire, not on decaying things, but on undying life; not on things that changeand disappoint, but on values that abide and hold their own. It may search far beyond things visible for things unseen; and look within all symbols, discerning what they mean. It may detect within down-trodden, untutored men souls kindred to their Maker. It may transcend all idol forms, and make all worship spiritual. It may see how ends outvalue means; and how bottles should not outvalue wine. In the midst of our universal lot of accident, disease and death it may hold fast, for all the pure in heart, to the hope of a happy immortality. But enduring and undying, common and unchanged within them all is simple, spiritual purity. The soul asserts supremacy. Things that fluctuate and finally dissolve, however befitting and beautiful while they thrive, are admired and valued far beneath the immortal and unchanging worth of God and Godlike souls of men. This clear vision and high evaluation of spiritual things in the thought and life of Lincoln can never be omitted nor excluded in any final analysis of his moral life. It ranks among the elements of his character, as each or any one of its facades holds rank about the Parthenon.
Thus in the composition of Lincoln's moral being there are four solid, permanent, radical integers—his kindliness, his loyalty, his pureness, and his humility. And these four elements of his character face the four cardinal points in the compass of his life—his brother man, his conscious self, his flesh-bound soul, and his sovereign Lord. So inherent in his very structure, so inwrought in his conscious character, so deeply based, so cardinal, and so enduring and irreducible is this fourfoldness in Lincoln's inward life.