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 reechoing 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