Lincoln would not have dared not to be a great man, an all-people man with a whole mighty nation, with all those millions of watchful, believing people laying their lives softly, silently, their very sons' lives in his hands. He did not have the smallest possible chance from the day he was named for President, to be a second-rate man or to betray a nation, or to back down out of being himself. He had been filled night and day with the vision of a great nation struggling, with the grim glory of it. He was free to make mistakes for it, but there was no way he could have kept from being a true, mighty, single-hearted man for it, if he had tried. We had clinched Lincoln in 1862. He was caught fast in the vise of our hopes.
Perhaps it is because, at certain times in history, nations seem to be siding with the worst in their public men and expecting the worst in them that they get them.
If a crowd wants to be represented, wants to touch to the quick and kindle the man in it, the man filled with vision, the man who is born again into its desire, the crowd-man, they have but to surround him and overshadow him. They will create him, in scorn and joy will they conceive him, and before he knows who he is, they will bring him forth.
It would not be hard, I imagine, to be a great man, with a true, steadied, colossal, single-heartedness, if one were caught fast in the vision, the expectation of a great nation.
To be born again is simple with ninety million people to help. We have all been born again in little things with a few people to help. We have been swung over from little short motives to big, long-levered controlling ones. We have known in a small way what Conversion is. We have seen how naturally it works out in little things.
There is nothing new about it. There is not a man who does not know what it is to get over a small motive. We have seen, when we looked back, what it was that happened.
The way to get over a small motive is to let it get lost in a big one.
A man does not stop to pick up a penny or a million dollars when he is running to save his life.
A man does not stop to pick up two pennies, or two thousand dollars, or two million dollars when he is running to save ten thousand lives or running to save ninety million lives, when he is running to save a city or a nation.
This is Conversion—entering into the World's Womb, the world's vision or expectation and being born again.