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LINCOLN
COLLECTION

THE TWO PAGEANTS.

A DISCOURSE

DELIVERED IN THE

first g ugt J ton. SuMjotu ©jnrctjy,

PITTSBURGH, PA.

THURSDAY, JUNE 1st, 1865.

CHARLES P. KRAUTH, D. D.

'He •will swallow vip cLeatli in -victory.'

PITTSBURGH:
PRINTED BY W. S. HAVEN, CORNER OF WOOD AND THIRD STREETS.
1865.

Pittsburgh, June 2, 1865.
Rev. C. P. Krauth, D. D. Dear Sir — The Discourse pronounced by
you in our Church, upon the occasion of the National Past appointed
in consequence of the sad calamity which bereft our country of so good
a Ruler, seemed to those who heard it a most suitable memorial of
the departed. We express to you but a common impulse in soliciting a copy of
it for publication. Very truly, Yours,
A. LANGE, M. D., J. S. NEWMYER,
WM. P. WEYMAN, C. YEAGER,
GEO. BLACK, GEO. J. DUFP,
ED. RAHlf, C. L. GRAPP,
J. D. CARLISLE, A. H. LANE,
WM. P. LANG, C. MEYRAN,
WM. N. OGDEN, SAML. A. LONG,
ANDREW GETTY, THOS. H. LANE,
D. ARMOR, GEO. HUBLEY.

Philadelphia, June 6th, 1865.
A. Lanoe, M. D., and others, Gentlemen — I give into your hands the
Discourse you so kindly request.
Believe me very truly and gratefully,
Yours, CHARLES P. KRAUTH.

DISCOURSE

In that historic and beautiful city of our State, in which
our National Independence spoke, in her first perfect articu
lation, to listening nations, the form of him to whose memory
we hallow this day of mourning was surrounded with the
pageant of two great occasions. On both those days, thou
sands thronged the streets ; on both, the strains of music
floated on the air ; on both, the measured step of soldier and
sailor fell like an audible pulse upon the ear ; on both, the
flag of our country was lifted above men ; on both, the centre
toward which every eye and every heart turned was the same.
Yet how different were the days ! On the first, February
21st, 1861, darkness was on the heart of the nation : our flag
had been dishonored — a wild, but as yet undefined fear, had
risen in the midst of national prosperity and of happiness,
which had been too rapturous and intoxicating to endure, and
a long, low growl, as of some couching beast of blood, was
making the hearts of men grow cold. Yet on that first day
the exultant shouts rang out ; the time of quickening music was
marked by the throbs it stirred in the bosoms of freemen ;
quick was the pace, bright were the countenances of men ;
the sunlight of hope seemed to break through the cloud and

to brighten around the forehead just bending itself to the
burden ; and over all, as if it felt with those who loved it,
the flag of freedom floated unconfined. Tt was a day of joy,
when there seemed so much to make us sad.
And the second day, April 22, 1865— where stood the
nation then? The awful cloud had been rifted and rolled
back upon itself. The doubts and anguish of four dreary
years had been dispelled — the right arm of conspiracy had
been broken — the tiger that couched was crouching ; visions
of peace, bliss, purity, freedom, unity, such as we had never
enjoyed, were before us. The Red Sea whose waves of blood
had lain full in our path, had opened — the nation had passed
through, and looked back upon the wrecks of guilty ambition,
floated up on the shores, or still whirling among the meeting
waves. But the voice of praise was mute. The soft, low
murmurs of sadness stirred like the whispering winds in the
tops of the dark pines ; the tears of strong men fell with the
sad wail of music ; the heavy pace told of the heavy heart ;
and the flag of the free drooped in its bond of black. It was a
day of sadness, when there seemed so much to make us glad.
A horror of great darkness had fallen upon an exultant
land. Triumph walked in the train of mourners, with ashes
on her head ; and Peace, with Sadness by her side, wept such
tears as war had never wrung from her. Over the pale form
of the great Departed, Freedom and Unity had fallen, fainting
in each others arms in the hour of victory. A whole nation,
in the first anguish of an unspeakable loss, felt as if all that
had been won, had been won at too dear a price, in the forfeit
of that one precious life.
And yet it has needed but these few weeks to make that
nation feel that the sickness of that awful hour was the un-

conscious injustice which impulse does to principle. What !
shall we dishonor the memory of our glorious leader by
dreaming that his work was so poorly done, that it lay at
the mercy of an ounce of lead, a few grains of powder?
Nay, more : shall we dishonor God by imagining that so
sublime and rare a work of His hand as our murdered Presi
dent was, could really come under the will and thrall of a
diabolical malignity so aspiring, yet so crawling — that God
would mould such a heart, will and energy as distinguished
him, and then permit so feeble a conclusion to them all: and
that the destiny of millions of bondmen, and of millions of
freemen — the future of America and the future of mankind,
hung not upon the Omnipotent Arm, to be shaped by its in
struments, but hung upon the arm of the Devil, to be shaped
by the finger of the assassin ? Oh ! the first pang of our
hopelessness was the reaction of an unconscious atheism
against an unconscious idolatry. The nation had risen to
such an enthusiasm, so fond, deep, tender, for the gentle,
noble, self-sacrificing and unshakable spirit who had led
them out of the abyss of war to the heaven of opening peace
and of the hopeful future, that we needed to have our eyes
lifted. The person of great leaders is often the peril of their
principles — the human race are all in instinct idolaters. The
idol-breaker himself becomes the idol : the brazen serpent,
which is but the symbol of divine mercy, becomes the object
of worship — though made to lead men to God, it leads them
away ; and the hammer with which the brazen serpent is
broken up is sure to absorb the worship of the thing it broke,
if men are trusted with it. The people of the living God, of
old, could not be trusted with the body of him who shaped
them, in the faith of the one Eternal Spirit. His body must

be placed where no human eyes shall behold it — lest Moses
shall undo the work of Moses, and the shrine of his ashes
be the centre of the idolatry he abhorred.
How came it that this intense national affection gathered
around this man ? for it was all grown between the pageants.
No man ever took the Presidential chair with less personal
devotion, less enthusiasm, clustering around him. No man
was ever chosen President of the United States so coldly on
mere principle. He went into power not on the wave of
popular enthusiasm, as did Jackson and Taylor ; not on the
simple uplifting prompted by gratitude for great services, as
did "Washington; not by the well-defined, compacted party
organization by which most of our Presidents have gone in.'
He was little known to the nation, little known to the masses
of his own party — and beyond one or two great moral postu
lates, his party hardly knew its own landmarks. He was
chosen neither because the nation knew him, nor because he
knew himself, but because God knew him. The majority of
the people were opposed to his election. As every one now
sees that the providence of God was the cause of his election,
so all have long seen that the political enemies of Abraham
Lincoln were the occasion of it. And this is a noticeable
element in the providence of this man of Providence, that
as in the case of no other President, his enemies did for him
what he could not do for himself, and what his friends could
never have done. His enemies elected him by dividing their
own strength — but when elected, he was helpless. A majority
of the people was against him ; a majority of the House of
Representatives was against him ; a majority of the Senate
was against him ; a majority was against him in the Supreme
Court; a majority of the officers in the army and navy was

9

against him. Many who were destined by their genius and
patriotism to shed lustre upon his administration, in the field
and in the cabinet, were among his most earnest opponents.
For all he could do, and his friends could do, he would
have been forced to be a puppet of state, to go through four
absurd years with the mere motions of rule — hardly with its
motions. Who gave his administration its- commanding
position, and enabled it to do in four years what the sanguine
had supposed would require centuries, what the doubting had
believed never could be done ? The reply is, that the work
was begun by his enemies, our country's enemies, the enemies
of freedom. They in their malice so cunning, yet so narrow,
wrought his glory, in seeking his shame; wrought redemption
to the land they wished to destroy. They broke his fetters,
in trying to strengthen the fetters of the slave ; and in at
tempting the murder of their country, committed suicide with
the weapons they had prepared for parricide.
But a great man can be made neither by enemies nor by
friends : his enemies may open the occasion, his friends may
give the opportunity, but God helping him, his greatness
must be wrought out by himself. Between the untried Abra
ham Lincoln of the first pageant, and the well-tried and nobly
vindicated Abraham Lincoln whose ashes were borne in the
second, there seems to be a wonderful chasm. In the brief
time between them, a man of the West was to be made the
man of a continent — nay, a man to fix and justify the gaze
of the world; a lawyer was to be elevated into an investiga
tor, interpreter and defender of the Constitution ; a politician,
honest, wise and good, yet dwarfed and narrowed of necessity
in the limitations of his sphere, was to be shaped into a
statesman; and a man pre-eminent even in times of peace in

10

the spirit of peace was to be fitted for judgment and action
in the vastest combinations in the whole history of human
warfare. Simple, homely, rugged, self-depreciating, he was
to play the first part in the greatest drama of modern history.
He so performed that part that before his decisions the destiny
of the race seemed to pause ; before the conflict, in which he
was the very embodiment and representative of truth, freedom,
right, and the great future of men, Czar, Emperor and Kings
stood in suspense. Selfishness, appalled, dared not do the
thing it would, and crawled in furtiveness to ignominy. The
nations moved cautiously, as if oppressed with the feeling that
their future was bound up in ours. And they wisely judged.
Ours has been a great turning point of time — our land the
Thermopylre for this battle of mankind. Not to have been
utterly disgraced as leader of the race, in such a crisis, would
be no common glory ; but Mr. Lincoln rose out of all mere
negation into the positive grandeur of a great nature, fitting
, a great time. The whole world that wondered, now admires ;
and from across the wide Atlantic, with the sympathetic tears
. of the nations comes this confession, that our crisis has been
theirs, that the race is born again to hope of free life, and
that humanity, broad as all continents, and all islands, and
enduring as all time, owes more to Abraham Lincoln than to
any other man of his generation.
We do not forget how much Mr. Lincoln owed, and how
much the world owes, to the true heart of the people, which,
when the veil was taken away, hoped, trusted, and was firm
with his. Yet the many always hang upon the few. It is by
the true reformer, confessor, general, teacher, statesman, that
the world moves. Do we not know that it was easier to find
hundreds of thousands of noble soldiers, than to find one

11

general — and without a general, whither would the magnifi
cent resources of our country, and her wonderful armies,
have taken us? Only to an all-engulfing ruin. And with
our great cause, and our great people, whither would we have
drifted in this war, without a civil leader? Whither had we
drifted when men considered among the truest of the true
were ready to give up all in despair ? Whither, but for a
true leader — and of all men thought of for leaders, who would
have been to us what Abraham Lincoln has been ?
The nation, aroused, regenerated and saved, gave its grate
ful response to this question. With the first term of Mr.
Lincoln's administration had been connected fearful sacrifices,
enormous expenditure of treasure and of life ; there was
hardly a hearth through the land to which sorrow had not
come ; and yet, when the second canvas came, the cold acqui
escence of the first, in which the principle at stake barely
held up the man — and with the large part of the people did
not hold him up — had yielded to an intense enthusiasm of the
whole nation, had given way to a popularity in which the man
upheld and glorified the principle. In the first canvas, Mr.
Lincoln recieved 1,857,610 votes, and 2,804,560 were cast
against him. In the second canvas, 1,811,754 votes were
cast against him, and 2,223,035 were cast for him. The
vote for him in the first, and against him in the last, in round
numbers was about the same. The numbers had changed from
a minority to a majority; a majority of nearly half a million.
The reasons of this vast change are manifold, but among
the mightiest of them are to be put the character which Mr.
Lincoln had revealed as a man and a ruler, and the great
services he had done. He had shown himself one of the
people. He understood them, and they understood him. He

12
had shown that he had a heart, and that it was with the many ;
and the many gave him back love for love. The integrity,
simplicity, openness, which had marked him as a private
citizen, did not forsake him in his august position. Clear in
his conviction of principle, he was a model of firmness when
his decision was made, as he was of unaffected deference and
modesty in the use of good counselors ; and what he saw
should be done, he did with an ability so calm, even and un
demonstrative, that men found it almost impossible to appre
ciate it. "One thunderstorm makes more noise in the world
than is made by the sunshine of ages." The exquisite direct
ness and simplicity which spring only from true profundity,
prevented men from seeing his depth. The slightest dash of
the charlatan, the faintest concession to the spirit which
wishes to have the kingdom of heaven come with at least a
little observation, would have helped many a man earlier to
see how wise and great a man God had given us for this
perilous time. A little of Cicero's self-consciousness and
self-assertion would have made the less thoughtful sooner
acquainted with Mr. Lincoln's grandeur of character. But
his noble earnestness was too hearty for display. He con
fessed his mistakes with a charming frankness, but had
nothing to say of his successes. He was not a man who
walked invisibly, and dwelt in labyrinths, and loved silence
for its own sake ; and yet he was a man whose language
carried more weight than ancient oracles. He comprehended
not his own depth. It Avas great in him that he never imagined
himself great. The cause of the negro, and the common cause
of the poor white, made the negro and the poor man greater
in their cause, in his eyes, than he seemed to himself in the
chair of chief ruler of a great people. He was firm, not

13

because of that imposing self-reliance, that grand egotism
which has made some great men firm. He was not the man
to say, Ca>sarem vehis. He had no star of destiny. He was
like Luther, sure because his cause was of God : outside of
his cause he looked upon himself as nothing, and was firm
simply because of his clear moral perception, and his in
vincible loyalty to right and truth.
In the true sense, Abraham Lincoln was gloriously a man
of one idea. The man who has more than one idea, has false
ideas, or holds the truth in unrighteousness. The man who
lives for more than one idea, lives in vain. Abraham Lincoln
had but one fundamental principle — one grand idea, in
statesmanship. This was the thread of his life. That princi
ple is, The absolute right of the right. He asked only, What
is right? and that question answered, he knew no second
one ; and planted on this principle he could not give up.
Disaster changes policy, but it cannot change right. The
issue of the whole contest between the Rebellion and the
Constitution, hung from the beginning upon the question,
Who is the more in earnest ? and the solution of that
question lay already in the heart of Abraham Lincoln ; for
however fell and fixed was the purpose of bad men to destroy
this Union, the purpose of Abraham Lincoln was more fixed
that they should not do it: and the reason, supreme and
beyond all debate, which fixed his resolve, was not that it
was impolitic, or humiliating, or painful, that the rebellion
should succeed, but that it was wrong ; it was not that the
maintenance of the Constitution was something politic and
glorious, but that it was right. Therefore was he
" Constant as the Northern star,
That unassailable holds on his rank
Unshak'd of motion."

14
He rose out of the narrowness even of that selfish and
criminal nationalism which arrogates to itself the name of
patriotism. He had something sublimer than the motto, "My
country, right or wrong." That motto suited the rebellion,
with the definition it put upon it. It was the motto of Stone
wall Jackson and of Lee, who waived the question of right,
and in the name of what they called their country, fought
against their country — for the wrong against the right. That
motto did not suit Abraham Lincoln. His motto was : My
country, because she is right ; freedom, because it is right ;
the Union, the Constitution, the laws, because they are right.
With his conviction of the right went that hopefulness which
is the necessary result of a genuine conviction of the right,
grounded in a true perception of its nature. No man sees
the right in its own essence, without feeling that it is un
conquerable — that men have only to be true to it, and it will
vindicate, by ultimate victory, their faith and fidelity. As
if his name had gone before by prophecy, this Abraham
proved himself, like the first, a faithful father of faithful
sons, and "against hope believed in hope." For in the
historical life of men, as in the religious, faith justifies. There
is nothing which has such wear in it as a sublime trust in a
good cause because it is good. Abraham Lincoln had faith
in God, faith in freedom, faith in truth, faith in his country;
and the victory which overcame all the deadly opposition to
God, freedom, truth, and our land, was pre-eminently the
victory of his faith. As there are hours of storm upon
rock-bound coasts, when the arm of the sailor and the strength
of the ship are nothing, and the long radiance which streams
from the lighthouse is everything, so there were hours when
his lone faith was more to us than all our armies.

15

In the immortal fellowship of the history of the world's
best and greatest sons, Abraham Lincoln will come, in an
extraordinary degree, into manifold comparisons and close re
lations. With some of the greatest, he will come into com
parison with reference to his personal traits; with some, by
his wonderful rise from obscurity into the earnest and ad
miring notice of mankind ; with some, by the greatness of the
services he has rendered ; with some, by his dearness to the
heart of his nation, and of the race ; and with some, by his
tragic end. In his personal traits, men will think of him
with Luther in his playful unbendings amid the loved ones of
the home. In the magnitude of his services in the Chair,
posterity will place him by the side of Washington. As a
Defender of the Constitution, his name connects itself with
the names of Hamilton and Madison, of Story and Webster,
and of all its illustrious framers and expounders. As the
orator whose every breath was consecrated to freedom and
the land of the free, men will think of him with Patrick
Henry and Clay ; and in his noble frankness and firmness,
with Jackson. In his relations to an oppressed race, and in
his efforts at emancipation by the power of a purified public
sentiment, he will be conjoined with Wilberforce and the
second Adams. His tragic end, by the assassin's hand, as
the defender of his native land against fraud, force and con
spiracy, associates him with William of Nassau ; and as one
who bore himself nobly in times of fraternal strife, and gave
to law and right, victory in the cruel ordeal of civil war, and
who, falling in the hour of triumph, dying, made his work
deathless, he will be remembered with Gustavus Adolphus,
the hero of our Protestant faith.
And not by sufferance nor by mere suggestion, does he

16
take, in some low place, his position among immortal men.
Among the great of humble origin, who was more thoroughly
self-made than he, and yet so absolute in all the grand
elements of a rounded, self-poised well-making? Who among
them all had a judgment more clear ? Who was more thorough
ly grounded than he, in the right? Who among them all was
more distinguished by moderation, by that happy union
of flexibility and firmness which makes a man yielding of
preferences to secure principle, and heroically intolerant for
principle over against all preferences, whether of his own
or other men's, and over against all policy which assumes
that it may be wise to do wrong ? Who among them all met
a vast responsibility with a sublimer purpose, and a more
steadily growing adaptation to it than his, until he did not so
much seem to represent our people as to embody and epito
mize them? They made him their head, he made himself
their heart; and the absolute unity of freedom surpassed the
absoluteness of despotism. The world looked on astonish
ed to see a vast country as compact as a little state, and the
freest government ever established on earth, presenting that
firmness, force and promptness, which freedom's friends them
selves had once considered as only possible in monarchies.
It was the wonderful combination of excellencies in Abraham
Lincoln which made it possible, and put the forces of free
dom more completely under the control of one great policy,
than all the art and all the severity of the leaders of rebellion
were able to secure for them over their instruments and
victims. The deep of wicked cunning was too shallow for
the simple-hearted, open earnestness of principle.
That this man was good, is conceded ; but we, who belong
to early posterity, anticipate and pronounce the verdict of its

17

latest generation, when we say he was great. In the grand'
assembly of good men which gives voice to the eternal Te
Deum in the inmost court of the Great Temple, how freely
may he move, acknowledged as a Prince of God among them
all. He may take his place with the goodly fellowship of the
prophets of freedom whose early voices anticipated its future:
or with the glorious company of its apostles, who, through
weariness and pain, proclaimed its evangel of deliverance to
the captive, and announced the acceptable year of the Lord :
among the noble army who joyously sealed with their blood
the witness of their lives, he shall lift that brow on which
the pang of death has left no trace, no charactery but that
of the blood-red jewel of martyrdom, set amid gems of softer
light. But the greatness of Abraham Lincoln was not an in
spiration — it was a development. Nothing great is made in
the height of its greatness, yet that which becomes great
must have the capacity of development. An oak is not made
an oak ; it must grow : but you can only grow it from an
acorn, and its growth cannot be carried on far in a flower-pot.
The ocean, and great mountains, and Niagara, great pictures,
great books, and great eras, alone make men capacious of
themselves. You can stretch the human soul to the oceanic
on the ocean alone ; and little souls, thin in the warp and woof,
are torn in the stretching. Mr. Lincoln was undeveloped
when the first roar of the surf of the wild and storm-tossed
ocean of civil strife struck upon his ear, but he grew to the
position, till his soul not alone swelled to the measure of the
great deep, but passed beyond it, and apprehended that of
which it had been apprehended. The happy years of peace
could not fit a man for the struggles of this unexampled war.

18

But he came with the capacity of development — his great soul
did not break in the tension. His views became larger, his
grasp broader and more tenacious; his style assumed weight
and solemnity; the sublimest elements of religion seemed to
penetrate it more and more, till his latest words breathed the
purest spirit of a higher world. His very appearance changed,
his face bore the traces of the sublime struggle and great
victories of his time ; and posterity, when they gaze upon the
mild, thoughtful, earnest, sad lineaments presented in the
latest and best pictures of him, will be at a loss to account for
the allusions so often made, sometimes in malice, sometimes
in playfulness, by friend and foe, to the homeliness of his
visage. He was a true type, even in this change, of the land
he loved — great, strong, and careless of beauty, yet growing
toward it in the refinings of trial. What he did was in keep
ing with what he was. Every faculty and grace of his ripest
nature was brought in play, taxed, and tested, in his work,
a work wholly unique in its grandeur and difficulty. Four
words tell the issue : That work was done. He was
" Our chief of men, who through a cloud
Not of war only, but detraction rude,
Guided by faith and matchless fortitude,
To peace and truth his glorious way had ploughed."

We have tried to embody our impressions of what this noble
man was to his friends ; but it is due to his memory that we
should say what he was to his enemies. His self-control and
patience were wonderful. Never was a man more sorely test
ed, not only by open warfare, pursued with every aggravation
of malignity and baseness, but by the no less unscrupulous
warfare of falsehood and partisanship. But not only was no

19

act of policy dictated or changed by personal feeling, but not
a word was wrung from him breathing defiance or hatred. To
his foes as to his friends, his course was dictated by the sacred
claims of right. He made more sacrifices to do justice to his
enemies than most men would make to secure it for their
friends. He steadily discriminated in his judgment and acts
between those who led the rebellion, and those who were
seduced or forced into it ; and his pleadings with both were
full of a noble pathos. He held himself in check by the
Constitution toward the very men who were striving to over
throw it. The blow which the world would have justified, and
at length grew impatient for, he long withheld, because his
heart shrunk from striking even the bad. His was a nature
so remote from the sanguinary, that the blows he gave were
prompted not so much by hatred of the bad, as by intense
love of the good.
His heart was as tender as a woman's ; and his patience
was a soul of peace within him, while warfare raged around
him. Human in every fibre, and humane in every pulse, he
yet, in the sacred absorption of duty, seemed to be passionless.
The winds and waves of rage which swept over him and the
Ship of State, seemed to move him to passion no more than
winds and waves move the pilot. So far as resentment was
concerned, he treated men as irresponsible things. Only so
that the Ship of State might be carried through her struggles,
he not only cared not on what shores those wild waves might
spend their fury, or in what forest those fierce winds might
roar, but he cared not how they might break in deluge or
tornado over himself. He was no Jonah, to murmur at for
giveness to repentant Nineveh ; he required not the question,
Doest thou well to be angry ? He breathed the spirit of the

20

first Abraham, and in the noble faith that a few redeeming
righteous ones might be found in the midst of corruption,
pleaded against the impending vengeance.
Linked with his geniality to friends, his kindliness to foes,
there was one trait of Mr. Lincoln, which has been made the
object of coarse assault by his enemies, and which has often
been defended by his friends rather by way of mild depreca
tion than of approval— we mean his abounding wit, humor
and anecdote. Nothing could display a more complete igno
rance of character, than to imagine that these gifts are evi
dences of a want of seriousness of nature. There is a humor
which is the saddest thing in the world, and a mournful irony
often touches what lies too deep for tears. They are often the
shield of the sensitive, and the interpretation by which the
benevolent render into the laughable what was meant to be
malicious. Luther used them in his conflict with Papal cor
ruption ; Pascal employed them against the Jesuits ; with
them Addison, and Swift, and Sydney Smith, attacked moral,
social and political abuses'; with them the greatest novelists
of our era have opened the hearts of men to humanity ; the
sacred writers themselves are not destitute of them. They
are of God; as really divine in their nature, and as capable
of sanctified use, as eloquence, poetry, or the arts. All
thorough men of the people are men of anecdote. Mr. Lin
coln tried to be cheerful to keep the nation in heart; tried to
find some little element of the ludicrous in the conduct of his
enemies, because his kind heart shrunk from looking at it
¦without something to break the horror of its unrelieved
wickedness. And how wise was his wit and his story ! He
hid sometimes an overwhelming body of truth in some ambush
of sportiveness, and took by the strategy of an anecdote what

21

would have held out against the regular approach of logic.
There were times when he was the saddest of all innocent
men in the world, but even then he could shake oft' for a
moment the burden in some pleasant apologue, or find relief
for his uncorrupted simplicity of heart in the rich and quaint
store of anecdote gathered and first enjoyed when he was
not great, but very happy. In these things, and in all his
kindly unreserve, he was, as in all else, ever his own true self,
without evasion, affectation or pretence.
Such he was — so great in his nature, so great in his work ;
so firm, yet so forgiving ; so true to his land, yet so gentle to
its foes ; so unconscious, so genial, so childlike. When we
think of him in the grandeur of his mission and of his destiny,
we feel as if some great orb of the heavens had been quench
ed. When we think of him in his tenderer traits, our eyes grow
dim, as if some loved one, the "frolic and the gentle," had
vanished from our own hearth, and left it all cold and bare.
Never did a national loss assume more thoroughly the charac
ter of a private sorrow; in the hearts of a great people
there was mourning as if death were in their own homes. He
had won the profoundest respect and most devoted love of his
whole land. What was there, when the full hour of the con
summation of such a man had come, for God to do to crown
His own work in him ? There was but one thing possible
which could move more deeply the enthusiasm of love for such
a man. He had reached the very height of all that he could do,
or that could be done, for his country. Out of the chaos of dis
union and civil war wrought by slavery, he had brought us
peace, unity and universal freedom. What could he do but
simply touch in detail the master-piece? Our fathers had
completed but the bust of the statue of Liberty. Abraham

22

Lincoln left it a full length. The work of the chisel was
done, and it only remained to smooth and polish it. He had
reached the summit of his toil and of his glory, and what
was left him but to stand still, or to begin to descend ? To
restrain a national pride already reacting against our sore
chastenings — to preserve the uniqueness of the divine con
ception of this wonderful history of a child of Providence —
to hallow by his blood the principle for which he had lived,
and to fix it forever in the heart of the people — to open
the eyes of the most deluded to the true character of the
demon power against which he had struggled — to melt the
hatred of the prostrate yet chafing rebellion, and of its allies
throughout the world — these may have been in the mind of
God. A dark cloud closed for a moment around the object
of the fondest gaze of millions ; the flash as of a sparkle
struck from some wheel of fire, burned for a moment in the
eyes of the nation : cloud and sparkle vanished, and on the
cold earth there lay only the mantle. He — was gone ; but one
convulsive sob of a whole land, stricken, astounded, heart-sick,
in a loss too great, a grief too deep for comprehension, fol
lowed him in the cry: "My father, my father, the chariot of
Israel, and the horsemen thereof."
Gone, but not dead. Gone, but not lost. He lives in the
life of that for which he lived, and is immortal in the love of
those for whom he died ; for life cannot die, and love is the
life of the heart, most deathless of all deathless things. A
living man was the honored one in the first pageant: an im
mortal man hallowed the second. He is not dead, but is more
surely living, lifted by death beyond death's dominion ; he is
not silent, but is forever articulate ; he is not cast down, but
through all time from his throne among regal men glorified,

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he will sway thought, feeling and action, not alone in the land
of his birth, but in all free lands, and in all lands yearning to
be free. His spirit has not vanished, his life has not passed
away, as the trace of a cloud. The violent death which bowed
that anxious head, has but the sooner crowned it ; he is only
the mightier because he lies low. His grave is at this hour
the centre of more moral life, of more solemn resolve, of more
assured hope, than moves around all the thrones of earth.
No living man is doing or can do, for our land, or for our
race, what this proto-martyr of America's full redemption,
and perfect unity and abiding peace, has sealed in dying, and
continues to do in death. Be then our sorrow buried in his
grave. His life has lifted that of his people and of his time ;
his life perpetuates a nobler, better and happier life in his
kind ; his life throbs in the heart of a regenerate nation, and
shall throb as long as that nation has a heart to beat. If the
day shall come when it may be truly said that the life of
Abraham Lincoln has vanished from earth, then shall the
pulse of Freedom herself lie still and cold beneath the eager
fingers which grope, but grope in vain, to find it.

YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

Gift of
STUART W. JACKSON
Yale 1898