The next sign of genius is the picture-making faculty. Men of talent evolve arguments, men of genius create emblems, parables and pictures. Minds oftentimes called profound use long abstractions, and are called deep thinkers, because nobody can understand them. But along comes a man of genius, and he squeezes the juice out of the abstract argument, and flings the rind away, and tells you what it is like.
Measured in terms of genius, the parables of Jesus are the greatest literary achievements in history. Æsop's fables teach by pictures. "Pilgrim's Progress" is pictorial.
Lincoln was exceedingly fortunate in his generation in that the three great books of pictures were in his hands during the imaginative epoch. Of course he was born with the talent for parable, because genius is one-half nature and the other half nurture. It was this natural gift and the training that taught him how when he had completed an argument and mastered the principle, to say, Now what is this great principle like, and how can I condense it into a picture and put it in a happy phrase that will sing itself across the land? This picture-making gift inspired him to quote the keen wisdom of that expression of Jesus, "The house divided against itself cannot stand." This skill in parables gave him the expression, "Better not swap horses in the middle of the stream," that gave him his second election. This vision power gave him that sentence equal to anything in Shakespeare, when Vicksburg fell, "Once more the Father of Waters goes unvexed to the sea." This faculty enabled him to sweep into one illustration a thousand arguments, so that the people could never forget the mother principle that explained the facts.
Nor may we forget what the great cause did for him. The era of the war was a great era, because God heaved society as the winds heave the waves, and men were swept forward with irresistible power upon the great movement of liberty. Great movements make great epochs and great men. A great ideal of God and righteousness and liberty lifts Savonarola and Florence to new levels; a great cathedral inspires Michael Angelo's great dome; a Divine Saviour and His transfiguration exalt Raphael; Paradise explains Dante; listening to the sevenfold Hallelujah chorus of God arouses the sweep and majesty of Milton's epic; the woes of three million slaves made eloquence possible for Phillips and Beecher. The saving of a Union, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal, represented a cause into which Lincoln could fling himself. The thought of meanly losing or nobly saving the last, best hope of earth, exalted, transformed, and armed the men, making feeblings strong, and strong men to be giants.
Eloquence and heroism wane during the commercial era. No man can be eloquent upon the duty on hides, or salt, or the digging of mud out of a river. But dumb lips will break into glorious speech at the thought of freeing millions of slaves, and saving free institutions, and handing liberty forward to other lands, and to generations yet unborn. The era of Fort Sumter and Gettysburg, when liberty and slavery were in their death grapple, was an era so great that the ordinary issues of avarice, self-interest, fame, luxury, became contemptible, and men were exalted to the point where they spake, and suffered, and marched, and died, more like gods than men. The great battles to be fought, the great armies to be moved, the great navies to be directed, the great orators and editors with whom he counselled, the many slaves for whom he became a voice, the great days on which he felt that he was making history, the great future into which he hoped to send the great liberties unimpaired and purified, the great God over all,—lent greatness to Abraham Lincoln, clothed him with pathos, with sorrow, with dignity and majesty, as with garments.
Like every giant, he was gentle. The truly great are always sensitive and sympathetic. In proportion as the mountain goes upward in size does it gain in power to return the strong man's shout, or the sigh of the lost child, echoing and reëchoing the cry of need. Sympathy is the soul journeying abroad, to bind up the wounds of him who has fallen among thieves. Sympathy cannot feast in a palace while the poor famish. Selfishness can stop its ears with wax lest it hear the groan of the poor, but sympathy is knitted in with its kind. Lincoln worked as hard to help men as slave masters did to recover a fugitive to bondage. It has been beautifully said that he did kind deeds stealthily, as if he were afraid of being found out. He became a shield above the fallen; he stood between the soldier, condemned for the sleep of exhaustion, and the hangman's noose. He refused to attend a cabinet meeting because he was trying to find a reason for reprieving a soldier. "It is butchery day," he said one Friday morning, and he denied himself to a committee because he did not think that hanging would help the boy who was condemned to die. "They said he was homely," said a poor woman, going away from the White House with a reprieve for her son; "he is the handsomest man I ever saw." It is this sympathy that runs through his letter to that mother, whose five sons had died gloriously on the field of battle. For he squeezed the purple clusters of the heart, and let the crimson tide flow down upon the page, as he prayed that the mother might carry through the years "only the cherished memory of the loved and the lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom."
More striking still, Lincoln's trust in God and His overruling providence. Mr. Herndon in his biography and Dr. Abbott in an editorial and an oration at Cooper Institute emphasize the agnosticism of Lincoln. The one says that in his youth he wrote an article against Christianity, and the other that he was not a technical Christian. Dr. Abbott thinks all this so important that he places the agnosticism of Lincoln at the forefront. But too much has been made of the schoolboy article of Lincoln on doubt and infidelity. In his youth Gladstone was a Tory, but he outgrew it. In the outset Paul was against Christianity. Tennyson and Wordsworth in their teens wrote puerile verse, just as Lincoln in his teens wrote a foolish paper. But it is cruelly unfair not to allow Abraham Lincoln the full benefit of what he came to be, and not to take the man at his best. It is unfair to say that a man is what he is at his worst and lowest point; a man is what he is at his best and highest point. Stephen A. Douglas said Lincoln was the most honest man he ever knew. Well, if Lincoln was an honest man in his character, he must have been honest in talking about his religion and his faith in God. Was Abraham Lincoln an agnostic in that hour when he spoke his farewell words to his neighbours in Springfield, about starting on the memorable journey to his inauguration? He said: "I feel that I cannot succeed without the same divine aid that sustained Washington, and on the same Almighty Being I place my reliance for support; and I hope you, my friends, will all pray that I may receive that divine assistance without which I cannot succeed, but with which success is certain." Was Abraham Lincoln without faith, and did he play to the gallery, when he set apart a day of fasting and prayer after the defeat at Bull Run? Having said that Abraham Lincoln was an honest man, why not remember it, when these critics read his First Inaugural, in which he declares that "intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favoured land, are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty." When Abraham Lincoln wrote the mother, Mrs. Bixby, "I pray that the heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement," he meant that he believed in God, in a God who answered prayer, in a God who cared for the mother living, and the five brave boys dead. "The Almighty has His own purposes," said Lincoln, in the Second Inaugural, an address that is steeped in religion, that exhales trust in God. Take God out of that Second Inaugural, and it would be like taking health out of the body, wisdom out of the book, sweetness out of the song, culture out of the intellect, life out of the body. You cannot in one breath say that Lincoln was an agnostic, and then in the next one say that Lincoln was an honest man. I care not one whit what Mr. Herndon says. I care everything about what Abraham Lincoln says about himself in his greatest speeches, in his noblest hours, when he gave his countrymen his latest, deepest, profoundest thoughts.
In trying to explain the character of Lincoln we therefore make our final appeal unto God, for God alone is equal to the making of this great man. When long time has passed, the name of Lincoln will probably be mentioned with Moses, Julius Cæsar, Paul, Shakespeare. Men will read a few of his paragraphs as a kind of Bible of Patriotism. Washington's name will not be less, but Lincoln's will certainly be more and more, and then still more. God and Sorrow made the man great.
And this is his life story. In the darkest hour of the Republic, when liberty and slavery were struggling to see which should rule the old homestead, it became evident that slavery would turn the garden into a desert, and the house into a ruin. And seeking a deliverer and a saviour, the great God, in His own purpose, passed by the palace with its silken delights. He took a little babe in His arms, and called to His side His favourite angel, the angel of Sorrow. Stooping, he whispered, "Oh, Sorrow, thou well-beloved teacher, take thou this little child of Mine and make him great. Take him to yonder cabin in the wilderness; make his home a poor man's house; plant his narrow path thick with thorns, cut his little feet with sharp and cruel rocks; as he climbs the hills of difficulty, make each footprint red with his own life-blood; load his little back with burdens; give to him days of toil and nights of study and sleeplessness; wrest from his arms whatever he loves; make his heart, through sorrow, as sensitive to the sigh of a slave as a thread of silk in a window is sensitive to the slightest wind that blows; and when you have digged lines of pain in his cheeks, and made his face more marred than the face of any man of his time, bring him back to me, and with him I will free three million slaves." That is how God made Abraham Lincoln great.
And then,—we slew him. For that is the way our ignorant, sinful earth has always rewarded its greatest souls. Ours is a world where we crucify the Saviour in Jerusalem, where we poison Socrates in Athens, where we exile Dante in Italy, and burn Savonarola in Florence, and starve Cervantes in Madrid, and jail Bunyan in Bedford,—for the greatest manhood is always rewarded with martyrdom. And what better thing for Abraham Lincoln than assassination, because he has emancipated three million slaves and saved the Union, as the last, best hope of earth?