An intellectual giant may be developed by culture from an inferior brain and body. A great general, like Napoleon, may be in a sense the product of his environment. A great inventor like Edison may be forced to his highest point by application and the study of science applied to natural law. A great philosopher like Socrates may be developed through the channels of observation and the warmth of his heart. A great financier like Gould or Morgan may be educated to supremacy in the school of business, big and little. But a wise lawgiver, like Solomon or Lincoln, is not born of the flesh but of the spirit. Justice, the sense of it even, cannot be put into a man's brain and heart by any process of education, or environment, or experience.

The one attribute of Abraham Lincoln that ruled his being like a central sun was Justice. All other attributes circled around it and were governed by it. You may call it Justice or you may call it love. It matters not, for there is no difference in the quality or quantity of these two words. An earthly being whose motive power is justice will do exactly the same things

under the same circumstances as one whose motive power is love. This statement is capable of proof, from comparison of the two or three figures in the records of the world who have best represented these chief attributes of Deity.

Lincoln the boy was as just as Lincoln the man. He required no precedent on which to found his reasoning. He was as ready as Solomon to give his decision on any vital point and his verdicts were as simple and uncontrovertible. Born and reared on the borderland between states that were divided on a question which had reached no decisive solution, through all the ages, outside of religious philosophy, he never even debated it in his own mind. A union of states meant the union of the individual, and neither was open to secession.

An inharmonious intellect was as much at war with itself, in his high temple of thought, as an inharmonious state, or country, or kingdom. He saw in the Union under the Declaration of Independence, the Union of the individual-the harmonious man, capable of selfgovernment, subject to no man's dictation, as

far as the life, and the freedom to live that life, in the world of justice could be carried: such a thing as human ownership of another human being could not be, in the thought of the child or the man Lincoln. He acknowledged no allegiance to any power on earth. His Creator was his sole and only King. The union of the States was a symbol to him of his union with God.

Study him as you may, by his own words, by the records made of him through his intimates, and by his acts, and you will find no other Lincoln than this. If the times in which he lived brought to light this attribute of justice in all its pure radiance, that does not argue that the times were the cause of it. Not at all. The Union had hundreds of men of far greater educational virtues, far superior culture, far broader experience, and of no less human sympathies-Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Stephen A. Douglas, his great rival; Salmon P. Chase, Edwin A. Stanton, and the great prime minister, William H. Seward; but none of these had lighted in his soul the lamp of justice. Not one of

them could bring himself to love his personal enemy: much less the enemies of his theory of government. Lincoln proved himself to be compounded of Love and Justice, so absolutely so, that he never judged any man. He may have punished because he himself obeyed the law of justice, but he did not cease to love.

We talk of democracy, but the world has known but few democrats-perhaps not more than two. To see every human being as an equal before the law of justice is impossible to any merely educated intelligence.

The eyes that look upon men, as the rain falls, alike on the just and on the unjust, are not subject to the light of libraries. They shine with the light of heaven. No mortal reason can bring a man to this sublime philosophy. Such a state of mind is foolishness to culture. Even religious enthusiasm falls far short of this God-like contemplation of the things of this world. But Abraham Lincoln so saw, so felt, so understood. Black or white, bond or free, friend or enemy, he saw them all in love -"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," speaks out boldly in his every

utterance, beams out benignly from his every

act.

The books that have been written in an endeavor to express their authors' reflection of this man Lincoln, now make a large library. But not one of them, written as they are out of the best heart's love, compares with the man Lincoln, or begins to shine with his illimitable personality. Records of him are material. He himself was a living flame, burning grandly, but steadily, making plain the smallest fibre of any fact to which its rays were directed. Such a man is beyond description. The noblest mind among men can do no more than to appreciate him to its greatest bent, and then it finds itself only in the borderland of his clear thought. What matter if his boots were unblacked, or his coat ill-fitting. There was not a stain upon his heart, nor a wrinkle in his soul. His simplest sentence is a thunderbolt: his fiercest anathema a blessing. He walks the land today, a spirit of colossal proportions by which men, measured by their words and acts, are the merest pigmies.