“You speak of Lincoln as a man ‘with charity for all and enmity toward none.’ But Lincoln was much more than that. This alone would not have made him great and splendid. What did?”
Henry said: “He was a man of determination,” and, before I could answer, Alfred went on: “He was a man of large sympathies.”
“Yes,” I said, “it is the combination of the two; it is more than both. I mean that the great and good man is the man whose final far-off aim is the unity and completeness of man, who shapes his life and his work toward that aim, who works for it, lives for it, sacrifices himself and all things to it; and such a man was Lincoln. He made mistakes—he used them for his cause. His morality, his law, was the union—that symbol of the larger union—and for this immense self-fulfilment he worked with his might, and died for it.”
“Yes,” said Henry, “and the great man must make mistakes, and go beyond them. Roosevelt, for instance, is always making mistakes, and then acknowledging them, and going forward once more.”
“Surely. And so Lincoln worked for the union, in sympathy with all men.”
“In one speech,” said Henry, “he asked Davis, his opponent in the House, to ‘help him save the union.’”
“Now, Henry,” I said, “there is another thing in your paper—if you don’t mind my saying it?”
“Not at all.”
“I mean that when you quoted Hillel you should have finished the quotation: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me?’ and ‘but if I am for myself alone, what am I then?’ You did not bring out the idea of the large and small self, of sacrificing the small self to the large, because you love the large self above all else, not because you like it better. This morning I heard a lecture by Professor Royce, of Harvard, and it is curious that he used exactly the same words we used in speaking of self-sacrifice. He said we sacrifice the small to the large self.”
At this point Ruth came in, and brought Marian’s paper. I read it at once: