Lincoln. Upon
the back of it were these words: "God bless President Lincoln." The
youth had been sentenced to death for sleeping at his post, but had been
pardoned by the President.

David Dudley Field said he considered Lincoln the greatest man of his
day. Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and others were great, each in one way, but
Lincoln was great in many ways. There seemed to be hidden springs of
greatness in this man that would gush forth in the most unexpected way.
The men about him were at a loss to name the order of his genius. Horace
Greeley was almost as many-sided, but was a wonderful combination of
goodness and weakness, while Lincoln seemed strong in every way. After
Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation he said, "The promise
must now be kept; I shall never recall one word."

Bishop Hamilton, of Salisbury, bears the following testimony to the
influence for good which Gladstone, when a school-fellow at Eton,
exercised upon him. "I was a thoroughly idle boy; but I was saved from
worse things by getting to know Gladstone." At Oxford we are told the
effect of his example was so strong that men who followed him there ten
years later declare "that undergraduates drank less in the forties
because Gladstone had been so courageously abstemious in the thirties."

The Rev. John Newton said, "I see in this world two heaps of human
happiness and misery; now if I can take but the smallest bit from one
heap and add it to the other, I carry a point; if as I go home a child
has dropped a half-penny, and by giving it another I can wipe away its
tears, I feel I have done something."

A holy hermit, who had lived for six years in a cave of the Thebaid,
fasting, praying, and performing severe penances, spending his whole life
in trying to make himself of some account with God, that he might be sure
of a seat in Paradise, prayed to be shown some saint greater than
himself, in order that he might pattern after him to reach still greater
heights of holiness. The same night an angel came to him and said, "If
thou wouldst excel all others in virtue and sanctity, strive to imitate a
certain minstrel who goes begging and singing from door to door." The
hermit, much chagrined, sought the minstrel and asked him how he had
managed to make himself so acceptable to God. The minstrel hung down his
head and replied, "Do not mock me, holy father; I have performed no good
works, and I am not worthy to pray. I only go from doo