and often unpolished in speech, unwilling to bend the knee to the Baal of social convention, they are hated and despised of their age. They are the men who hear the voice of God speaking from the flaming heights, aye, from the Sinai of the human heart. They are the men who see God in the wilderness; they speak to Him face to face. They follow Him. They cannot turn back. A long-ranged view of humanity is granted them. They cannot be untrue to the heavenly vision. Right and justice, truth and goodness are the accents they hear with the spiritual organ of an inspired imagination. They cannot if they would, be faithless to the eternal music of the spheres. Grim and grave they are, set of jaw and firm of purpose. They can die, but they cannot and will not lie. When in the silent watches of the night others sleep, they hold communion with the spirit of the universe. When others are occupied building fortunes up to the heavens, only to hide heaven from the view, they are exploring the elemental truths of human existence and pledging their all in defense of them.

"When these men of moral genius have seen from afar the Land of Promise; when God has vouchsafed to them a vision of the City Beautiful; when there flashes upon their inner consciousness a picture of a New Jerusalem; when they dream of the City whose name is righteousness, whose walls are holiness, whose ruler is equity, and whose defense is love; they cannot eat, they cannot sleep, they cannot drink, until they have shared with others that which God has vouchsafed to them. Like lofty mountain peaks, they stand alone. They desire solitude for a time. They speak with God and bring unbreakable tables of right and truth to their fellow men. These men are the salt of the earth. They are the saviours of mankind. Among every race such men are to be found. Wherever God's sun illuminates the earth, there at some time or another, such men have arisen to witness to the light, to be spokesmen for the causes dear to the Heart of God."

So the genealogy of the great Emancipator should begin with Socrates and touch upon every mountain peak of human love and uni

versal brotherhood through all the ages. It is not over-stepping the bonds of conscientiousness, to feel that Abraham Lincoln was the blood-brother of those few universal seers and saviours, who stand in the white light of supreme and unfaltering love upon the Golgothas of glorious martyrdom.

All human records are but broken fragments of man's progress onward from slime and ooze, from cave and cabin, to the present hour, when thought is flashed around the world almost before the lips that utter it rest after the effort. Those who have been most painstaking to keep complete from root to topmost bough the family tree, must generally be satisfied with the effort itself. The world seldom has cause to search such records for the genealogy of a pronounced character. Nature seems to delight in playing tricks with pride in personality. Perhaps the All-Father would teach His children, in this way, their utter dependence upon Him, and grind it into human consciousness that man has but one Father, even God.

Abraham Lincoln is so selected and distinguished. His progenitors were a rugged and

honest race, as the book of his genealogy proves; this plain, simple man of the people might have traced his ancestry back to the best blood of England. The table of his genealogy shows this surprising fact, that the Lincoln stock, the branch at least which produced Abraham Lincoln, by some indefinable law, which we must ascribe to Divine Providence (for it is too clear and direct to be the result of chance), kept itself pure to its ancestral stock. Even the same family names recur again and again, generation after generation, Biblical names for the most part, with always an Abraham, as though, like the Children of Israel, they were awaiting the birth of the divinely commissioned to lift humanity one. step higher in the understanding of itself, and make one ray clearer, what are the just and happy relations of men, the one with another. "The color of the ground was in him, the red earth: The tang and odor of the primal things—

The rectitude and patience of the rocks;

The gladness of the wind that shakes the corn;
of the bird that dares the sea;

The
courage
The justice of the rain that loves all leaves;
The pity of snow that hides all scars;

The loving kindness of the wayside well;
The tolerance and equity of light

That gives as freely to the shrinking weed
As to the great oak flaring to the wind-
To the grave's low hill as the Matterhorn
That shoulders out the sky."

As an epoch of human history becomes remote, there is visible, to the eyes of those who see, the figure of some man who is recognized as its great embodiment. The golden age of Greece is summed up in Pericles. Julius Cæsar was the supreme expression of an age of power and law. The great Cromwell interpreted the English protest against every form of despotism. At this distance from the sixties, and that great, sad struggle, it is apparent that the colossal form rising above all others, is the weird figure of Abraham Lincoln.

The story of that boy as he grew to manhood is now a household legend, cherished in every American home: a chore boy at seventeen, six feet four in his stockings-when he had any; a rail splitter; a farm hand; a clerk in the country store of Denton-Offut & Company, at New Salem; so honest that when one day he took six cents over much from a cus