KIND OF RELIGION.
A while before his assassination, two Tennessee ladies called on the president, asking for the release of their husbands, who were prisoners of war at Johnson's Island. One of the ladies urged upon the president as a cause for her husband's release, that he was a religious man. He finally released them, but said:
"You say your husband is a religious man: tell him when you meet him that I say I am not much of a judge of religion, but that in my opinion, the religion that sets men to rebel and fight against their government, because, as they think, that government does not sufficiently help some men to eat their bread by the sweat of other men's faces, is not the sort of religion upon which people can get to Heaven."
MR. LINCOLN'S FIRST DOLLAR.
In the president's chamber some men were conversing one evening, and the conversation running on that line Mr. Lincoln said: "Seward, you never heard, did you, how I earned my first dollar? I was about eighteen years old and we were quite poor. We had raised some produce and I got mother's consent to take it down the river on a flat boat and sell it. There were then no wharves on the river. I was down at the bank looking over my flat boat to see that it was all right before I started out. Two men came along and wanted to get out to a steamer in the river and asked me if I would take them and their trunks out. I said, 'Certainly.' So they got on the flat boat and I pulled them out to the steamer and they got aboard and I lifted on the trunks. The steamer was about to go and the men had forgotten to pay me, so I shouted to them and each of them threw a silver half dollar on the floor of my boat. I could scarcely believe my eyes when I saw the amount of the money. It may seem a small sum to you gentlemen, but it seemed an immense sum to me. To think that I, a poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day and by honest work, was almost too good to be true. But there it was and the world did not not seem such an awful big and terrible place after all, and I thought perhaps I could do great things yet, even if I was such a poor and helpless chap."
MR. LINCOLN AT SUNDAY SCHOOL.
Five Points in New York for many years was considered about the most wicked place in the city. They started missions there and made it better. One Sunday morning when Sunday School commenced, a tall, strange looking man entered and sat down. He listened with close attention to the exercises and when the lesson was over, the superintendent asked him if he would say something to the children. He said he would gladly; and going forward he talked in a plain, simple, earnest way and fascinated the children so that they all became very quiet and listened to all he had to say very eagerly. The faces of the children would brighten as he told some beautiful lesson or break into laughter as he quaintly told a humorous incident and then they would look serious as he warned them of sin and wrong and what would follow. Once or twice he tried to stop, but the little folks shouted, "Go on, Oh, do go on!" The superintendent wondered who this unusually interesting man was and when he was leaving, asked his name. The reply was, "I am Abraham Lincoln."