be sure that he did not hear cheerful voices from above? For had he not read in an old book that He who sitteth in the Heavens sometimes looks down with laughter and derision upon the impotent plans of men to turn aside the everlasting purposes of God? It took his countrymen the full four years to find out Abraham Lincoln. By the light of the camp fires of victorious armies they learned to see the outline of his gigantic figure, to comprehend in part at least the dignity of his character, and to assess at its full value the integrity of his conscience; and when at length they followed his body back to Springfield and looked for the last time upon his worn and wrinkled face, through their tears they saw him exalted above all thrones in the gratitude and the affection of the world. We have been accustomed to think of the civil war in the United States as an affair of armies, for we come of a fighting race, and our military instinct needs very little encouragement-some think none at all-but it requires no very deep insight into the hidden things of history, to see that this conflict was not waged altogether on fields of battle nor under the walls of besieged cities; and that fact makes Abraham Lincoln greater than all his generals, greater than all his admirals, greater than all the armies and all the navies that responded to his proclamation. He stands apart because he bore the ark of the covenant of our institutions. He was not making his own fight, nor even the fight of his own country or of the passing generation. The stars in their courses had enlisted with him. He had a treaty never submitted to the Senate, which made him the ally of the Lord of Hosts, with infinite reinforcements at his call; and so the battle he was in' was not in the woods around the old church at Shiloh nor in the wilderness of Virginia. He was hand in hand with an insurrection older than the slave power in America, a rebellion old as human voracity and human greed, that age after age had filled this earth with oppression and wrong, denied the rights of man and made the history of the world, in the language of the historian Gibbon, a dull recital of the crimes and follies and misfortunes of the human race. And so he was caught up like Hezekiah, prophet of Israel, and brought to the east gate of the Lord's house, and when he heard it said unto him, "Son of man, these are the men who devise mischief," he understood what the vision meant, for he had touched human life in such lowly fashion, living a humbler life than any man ever lived in this world, except our incarnate Lord who had not even where to lay his head, he had lived such a life that he knew instinctively what this great, endless struggle of our poor, fallen humanity is and how far the nation had fallen away from its duty and its opportunity. All his life there had dwelt in his recollection a little sentence from an historic document which had been carelessly passed along from one Fourth of July celebration to another, for nearly eighty years, "All men are created equal." To Abraham Lincoln that sounded strangely like an answer to a question propounded by the oldest of the Hebrew sages, "If I despise the cause of my man servant or my maid servant when he contendeth with me, what shall I do when God riseth up? Did not He that made me make him?" A strategic question that had to be answered aright before democracy or any other form of civil liberty could make any headway in the world. He knew that that sentence had not been inspired on the front porch of a slave plantation in Virginia. He understood that when brave men take their lives in their hands they forget time and place and are likely, when they are laying the foundation of their nations, to tell the truth lest the heavens fall. With a sublime faith, shared within the limits of their light by millions, he believed that sentence. He had tested the depth of it till his plummet touched the foundation of the earth. From his youth that simple saying had been ringing in his ears: "All men are created equal." It was the answer of the eighteenth century of Christ to all the dim milleniums that were before Him; yet he had heard it ridiculed, narrowed down to nothing and explained away. And with those millions sharing his faith within the limits of their light, he understood that sentence and came to its defense. With one stroke he brushed away all the wretched sophistry of partisan expediency in American politics and rescued the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson from obloquy and neglect. "I think," he said, "that the authors of that notable instrument intended to include all men. But they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say that all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They defined, with tolerable distinctness, in which respects they did consider all men created equal equal with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This they said and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all men were then actually enjoying that equality, nor that they were about to confer it immediately upon them, because they knew that they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it should follow as fast as circumstances would permit. |