Abraham Lincoln's Cardinal Traits; / A Study in Ethics, with an Epilogue Addressed to Theologians

by Clark S. Beardslee

Wonderful as it may seem, this holds as true of enemies as it does of friends. Hosts of people, while Lincoln lived, held him their deadliest foe. Through all those bitter years, while they defamed, he meekly, mightily held his own, subduing malice, disdaining subtlety, despising scorn and arrogance, abhorring sordid greed; pleading humbly, but as a prince instead, for righteousness and charity and man's immortal destiny. And now all men detect that however deep and overmastering those aversions and animosities may have been, there was in his enemies and himself a moral kinship and agreement far more powerful and profound. His humble, hopeful plea that every man be fair and pitiful is winning everywhere today glad witness to its eternal and imperial validity.

And the wonder of this deep partnership with men but deepens, when we consider that the form of this all-appealing, all-prevailing partnership was sacrificial. This leads straight into the innermost interior of the problem of vicarious suffering—one mortal, suffering in another's place and for another's sake. Never in all that era of civic anguish in the civil war did any human mortal suffer keener or more continual sorrow than did he who of all the Nation's multitudes stood most untainted and innocent of the iniquity which that stern civic judgment was to purge away. Guiltless utterly of any part in slavery for his own profit or by his own consent, he partook with all the guilty ones of all the sorrows of its expurgation.

And yet more wonderful is the sequent fact that in precisely this voluntary and conscious unison of innocence and suffering in his outstanding life stood and moved the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud that led this Nation through those sorrows by night and day.

Here again is something wonderful—something again replete with mystery and with certitude. And here again do mystery and certitude stand truly unified and harmonized. Truly they are unified. But in that unison their identity stands clarified. There where Lincoln's manhood shows most humane and universal, a Nation's common symbol, outlining nothing less than a puissant Nation's boundless majesty, there stands defined, as with engraver's finished art, his separate, ever sacred, individual nobility. Even there where his moral being merges most completely into deepest sympathy with the afflictions that descend on sin, there his own integrity and personal jealousy for righteousness are most outstanding and distinct. But be it said again, in Lincoln do that broad humaneness and that erect nobility, that sympathy and that jealousy subsist in unison. In strict verity he is our Nation's surrogate. Surely here again is ample range for ample exposition of many a major problem of theology, and all still held within the open and familiar bounds of a normal moral life.

So Lincoln stood in unison with God and fellowman. Ideally complete in his own identity, he was ideally allied with other lives through all the personal realm. And be it well and truly seen that the elements of this affiance with his God, and the elements of his firm league with brothermen were identically the same. In each and either realm the binding bonds were fealty to charity, to equity, to humility, to purity. These four qualities explain and guarantee completely his allegiance. These and these alone were the constituent elements of all his brotherhood and of all his reverence. And it is within the nature of these four vital qualities, at once so Godlike and so human, and within their ever-living interplay that one must look to find whatever Lincoln's character can contribute to the problems of theology.

What averments tremble here! Our mighty human race does truly live in unison. Within that peopled unison the life of one may have far-ranging partnership. That partnership is closely definable in terms of character. In Lincoln's life as private soul, and as vicar of us all alike, his constancy and kindliness, his purity and lowliness embrace and body forth his total being, with all he bore and wrought. Herein unfolded all his beauty and all his worth, whether as a single citizen or as a Nation's representative.

And our humble human life does also truly share the life in God. Within that heavenly unison the lowliest soul may have exalted fellowship. And so in Lincoln's loyalty and tenderness, his lowliness and thirst for immortality, as man of God, unfolds the heavenly beauty of God's eternal purity and majesty, God's benignity and faithfulness.

So do lives of free and conscious beings most truly flourish and so do they most truly blend. Our fellowship with Lincoln, and Lincoln's fellowship with us; God's fellowship with Lincoln and Lincoln's fellowship with God; this mystic unrestricted partnership of noble souls; unfolding and unrolling sovereign harmonies, even when they antagonize; in vengeance or compassion fulfilling all their mission and dominion through the earth—these are indeed our sovereign realities. In scanning these we may indeed discern deep ways of God and men.

Mighty highways open here—highways that enter every major province of theology. Be these avenues observed.