a hundred circling camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps;
His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on."

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment seat:
Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

TRAINING FOR GREATNESS

GLIMPSES OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S BOYHOOD

In pronouncing a eulogy on Henry Clay, Lincoln said: "His example
teaches us that one can scarcely be so poor but that, if he will, he
can acquire sufficient education to get through the world respectably."

Endowed as he was with all the qualities that make a man truly great,
Lincoln's own life teaches above all other things the lesson he drew
from that of Henry Clay. Is there in all the length and breadth of the
United States to-day a boy so poor as to envy Abraham Lincoln the
chances of his boyhood? The story of his life has been told so often
that nothing new can be said about him. Yet every fresh reading of the
story fills the reader anew with wonder and admiration at what was
accomplished by the poor backwoods boy.

Let your mind separate itself from all the marvels of the twentieth
century. Think of a time when railroads and telegraph wires,
telephones, great ocean steamers, lighting by gas and electricity,
daily newspapers (except in a few centers), great circulating
libraries, and the hundreds of conveniences which are necessities to
the people of to-day, were unknown. Even the very rich at the beginning
of the nineteenth century could not buy the advantages that are free to
the poorest boy at the beginning of the twentieth century. When Lincoln
was a boy, thorns were used for pins; cork covered with cloth or bits
of bone served as buttons; crusts of rye bread were used by the poor as
substitutes for coffee, and dried leaves of certain herbs for tea.