of the arguments proclaimed by the sturdy interpreter of the Declaration of Independence and of the purposes of the nation's founders, who seized the opportunity to speak through the state to the nation and to the world upon the burning moral issue of the period. Thousands of orators and innumerable rhetoricians, ranging in utterance all the way from the crudeness of John Brown, the impetuosity of Elijah Lovejoy, the ruggedness of Horace Greeley, the bluntness of Lyman Beecher, the pathos of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the imploration of Frederick Douglass, and the vehemence of William Lloyd Garrison up to the polished ponderosity of Daniel Webster, casuistry of Henry Clay, accusations of Henry Ward Beecher, sedateness of William H. Seward, sarcasms of Wendell Phillips, and ironies of Charles Sumner had for three decades been holding in the limelight every conceivable aspect of the subject, yet it remained for this self-tutored offspring of Kentucky's "poor white trash" not only to build arguments, but to sound the death knell of human slavery in a republic founded for the sole purpose of attesting that "all men" were created with certain inalienable rights, among which was certainly “the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which their own hand earns," by transmuting in the alembic of his practical mind the glittering generality of Seward's "irrepressible conflict" into the bedrock philosophy of the Son of God: "A house divided against itself cannot stand." This is the man who, proclaimed a boor by his foes, apologized for as a lucky illiterate by many of his friends, and even today reckoned by many as sadly deficient in culture, in less than three years from that farewell to his neighbors, by a few hours' labor and by three minutes' utterance gave to the world that Gettysburg Dedication which Emerson, Lowell, and Victor Hugo unite in declaring to be one of the three masterpieces of human speech in the history of the race. This is the man who, coming with the last shots of the Confederacy and the confident shouts of his conquering armies ringing in his ears, and with the momentous problem of reconstruction looming as awesome before him as had the certainty of civil war four years before, cast all the traditions of the occasion to the winds that, with the majesty of an Old Testament prophet and the grandeur

of Paul on Mars Hill, he might from that loftiest tribune in the world proclaim the sublimities and austerities of the providential relations to human affairs of that sovereign God before whom he bowed. That address-in his own judgment outranking all his other productions-stands unparalleled among the sayings of the rulers of the earth during six thousand years. Gladstone declared that its ideas were loftier than had ever been uttered from a throne in all the annals of time, and certainly the character that backed them and gave them force has never been equaled by any other occupant of a sovereign position.

But it is with the words, the ideas of this man, the thoughts so marvelously expressed, that we have here most to do. They raise the question concerning him that was raised of another eighteen centuries previous: "Whence hath this man learning?" How comes it that this man who learned his alphabet in his teens, who split his infinitives in company with the rails that piled before his axe, who had not read a total of five books when he was twenty, and that not because papers crowded them out as today but in an age when papers of any sort were rarer and smaller than decent ones are now, who was never a wide reader of literature in any period of his life, how comes it that this man has at command a vocabulary and a style that never fail him in expressing in the most practical, precise, and concise way, a way even though the subject matter is so abstract that from all other tongues it issues in a mist and leaves one in a haze? He had this learning, he had this vocabulary, he had this style because he made himself master of the Book his dying mother committed to him. Multitudinous are the testimonies of men of letters to the influence of that Book upon their literary output, but in Abraham Lincoln that Book stood upon the legs of a man fit to take his place among those who were inspired for its promulgation. Almost wholly trained intellectually by its pages, copying its precision in his own thinking and its accuracy in his own statements, his whole mental stock and product were so permeated with its very ideas that, whether he indulged in the genial wit that made his presence the sun in which many a troubled mind lost its gloom or stood among those graves at Gettysburg to utter what Bishop Warren lists as the

most "apt and telling speech of all time," it was Bible history, imagery, economy, philosophy, or theology that burst spontaneous from his lips. It was no "happen so" that the four greatest products of his mind and heart-the "Lost Speech," the "House Divided" utterance, the Gettysburg Dedication, and the Second Inaugural-were in conception and finish so marvelously scriptural; it was the inevitable outcome of his intimate acquaintance with the Bible. The "Lost Speech" burns with the passion of Elijah on Mount Carmel and is stamped all over with the superscription of the sacred pages; the "House Divided" utterance was literally a nail fastened by a master of assemblies because it was so unmistakable an application of the very words of the Son of God to the problem of the period; the Gettysburg Dedication, as we will show later on, is couched in language not only thoroughly scriptural but marvelously illustrative of the more intimate personal relations which had during that year developed between the ruler of these United States and that Supreme Ruler of all men and nations whose humble instrument he acknowledged himself to be; the Second Inaugural had no other purpose than to utilize the undivided attention of the world, given him in that hour, to interpret the mysteries of divine Providence to a people just emerging from a hell of evil passions, to unite in brotherly love and political amity men and states that had during four years destroyed five hundred thousand human beings and fully seven billions of each other's treasure. Is it any wonder that coming to that utterance he found nothing upon his lips but the words of his God and a sane interpretation of their meaning? What is the mightiest miracle of modern if not of all times, a miracle before which the physical wonders that made men stare and women gape in Judea and Galilee nineteen hundred years ago pale and fade as do those very "works" before the life of Him who wrought them? It is the unearthly swiftness with which all the passions and enmities engendered by sixty years of rancorous debate and four years of unparalleled warfare ran out of the blood of both combatants, the rapidity with which old feuds were buried and new issues fraternally faced and mastered. That reknitting of the old ties, that reblending of sundered peoples went on with such unconscious

celerity, with such subtle persuasiveness and thoroughness that not until the barely concealed theft of the Presidency in 1876 put it to the test were the home people and the world really aware of the marvelous rapprochement which had been wrought. Where and when in the world's history has the like been manifested? Neither ancient nor modern times present a parallel. And to whom and to what shall you ascribe it? Surely only to that God who, according to Lincoln's conviction, wrought through men the infinite purposes of his own will; and chief among the means used of God to achieve this beneficent result was the sublime interpretation of that will so marvelously announced in the Second Inaugural and so speedily sealed with the blood of him who uttered it. Lincoln's task was God's task; he was fitted for it by being most mysteriously hedged about from all literature but God's book, and it is no wonder that in every supreme moment of his life its ideas and its phraseology sprang from his lips. A brief survey of some of his sayings, those notable and those less known, will show how spontaneously he thought and spoke in Bible language, and ought to spur many another who would speak to men for their betterment, to drink more copiously at this source of truth and grace.

In his first reported speech, that to the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, January 27, 1837, in his twenty-eighth year, I count at least ten sentences surely fashioned by his knowledge of Bible phraseology. His method of handling his theme on this occasion did not lend itself readily to biblical reference, but when he had in conclusion enumerated the materials for the future support and defense of the republic he finished with the words and the quotation: "Upon these let the proud fabric of freedom rest as the rock of its basis, and, as truly as has been said of the only greater institution, 'the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.'” In that great Temperance Address of Washington's Birthday, 1842, he hailed a cause going forth "conquering and to conquer"; spoke of the reformed drunkard as one "clothed and in his right mind," and silenced the respectable teetotaler who objected to joining a society of reformed drunkards with the argument: "Surely no Christian will adhere to this objection. If they

believe, as they profess, that Omnipotence condescended to take on himself the form of sinful man, and as such to die an ignominious death for their sakes, surely they will not refuse submission to the infinitely lesser condescension for the temporal, and perhaps eternal, salvation of a large, erring, and unfortunate class of their fellow creatures." Drawing to his close he pictured the demon of intemperance as having "gone forth like the Egyptian angel of death, commissioned to slay, if not the first, the fairest born of every family," and asked: "Shall he now be arrested in his desolating career? . . . Who shall be excused that can and will not help? Far around as human breath has ever blown he keeps our fathers, our brothers, our sons, and our friends prostrate in the chains of moral death. To all the living everywhere we cry, 'Come, sound the moral trump, that these may rise and stand up an exceeding great army.' 'Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.' If the relative grandeur of revolutions shall be estimated by the great amount of human misery they alleviate and the small amount they inflict, then, indeed, will this be the grandest the world shall ever have seen." Four months later he is writing to his bosom friend, Joshua F. Speed. It is during that terrible period when his constitutional melancholy was preying most horribly upon him. It is not true, as some of his biographers have stated, that he failed to appear on the day when his marriage to Mary Todd was to have been consummated, but it is true that after their betrothal their relations became severely strained owing to Lincoln's morbid compunctions as to the honorableness of a man of so little standing and prospects as himself taking to wife a woman of the culture and of the social rank of his affianced; offering to one who had been long accustomed to the luxuries of life only the hazardous fortune of a country politician. Speed had gone through a very similar struggle and had been set right by Lincoln himself, who in this letter avows that he believed God had used him as an instrument in bringing Speed and his wife together in their happy union. Of himself, relative to his love affair, he wrote: "Stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord' is my text just now." This is not irreverence, not jocularity. He is in a most serious,