III. OUT OF THE WILDERNESS PATHS INTO THE GREAT HIGHWAY
The Great Teacher in his “Sermon on the Mount,” said, “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” If that destitute boy had not hungered and thirsted after right knowledge, the whole history of America, after his time, would have been different. But what boy would read, or what other boy ever did read such a book as the “Revised Statutes of Indiana?” To be sure, not the boy who is most interested in getting merely the most pleasure out of life, but the one who has a great desire to be useful and worthwhile in the world.
The next book that deeply impressed his career and probably had most to do with developing him to influence profoundly the history of our country was that beginning of every lawyer’s life, “Blackstone’s Commentaries.”
This is the way Lincoln tells it himself: “One day a man, who was migrating to the West, drove up in front of my store with a wagon which contained his family and household plunder. He asked me if I would buy an old barrel, for which he had no room in his wagon, which he said contained nothing of value. I did not want it, but, to oblige him, I bought it, and paid him, I think, a half-dollar. Without further examination I put it away in the store, and forgot all about it. Some time after, in overhauling things, I came upon the barrel, and, emptying it upon the floor to see what it contained, I found at the bottom of the rubbish a complete edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries. I began reading those famous works and the more I read the more intensely interested I became. Never in my whole life was my mind so thoroughly absorbed.”
First Inauguration of Lincoln as President.
It was that interest which made the man and the great historical character of Lincoln. One lives according to his interest in life, and the meaning realized in him as humanity.
In 1834 Lincoln again tried for the legislature, and this time was elected. This gave him his long desired opportunity to study law. He borrowed books and read them incessantly until he mastered them. He never studied law with any one, as was the custom in those days. He did not require a teacher to lay out or explain his mental tasks.
To a young man who asked him, twenty years later, how to become a successful lawyer, he said, “Get books. Read and study them carefully. Work, work, work is the main thing.”