le country, yet trembling
with the shock, bears witness how terrible the meeting was.

Thus I have tried briefly to trace out the gradual course by which God
brought the character which He designed to be the controlling character
of this new world into distinct collision with the hostile character
which it was to destroy and absorb, and set it in the person of its
type-man in the seat of highest power. The character formed under the
discipline of Freedom and the character formed under the discipline of
Slavery developed all their difference and met in hostile conflict when
this war began. Notice, it was not only in what he did and was towards
the slave, it was in all he did and was everywhere that we accept Mr.
Lincoln's character as the true result of our free life and
institutions. Nowhere else could have come forth that genuine love of
the people, which in him no one could suspect of being either the cheap
flattery of the demagogue or the abstract philanthropy of the
philosopher, which made our President, while he lived, the centre of a
great household land, and when he died so cruelly, made every humblest
household thrill with a sense of personal bereavement which the death of
rulers is not apt to bring. Nowhere else than out of the life of freedom
could have come that personal unselfishness and generosity which made so
gracious a part of this good man's character. How many soldiers feel yet
the pressure of a strong hand that clasped theirs once as they lay sick
and weak in the dreary hospital! How many ears will never lose the
thrill of some kind word he spoke--he who could speak so kindly to
promise a kindness that always matched his word! How often he surprised
the land with a clemency which made even those who questioned his policy
love him the more for what they called his weakness,--seeing how the man
in whom God had most embodied the discipline of Freedom not only could
not be a slave, but could not be a tyrant! In the heartiness of his
mirth and his enjoyment of simple joys; in the directness and shrewdness
of perception which constituted his wit; in the untired, undiscouraged
faith in human nature which he always kept; and perhaps above all in the
plainness and quiet, unostentatious earnestness and independence of his
religious life, in his humble love and trust of God--in all, it was a
character such as only Freedom knows how to make.

Now it was in this character, rather than in any mere political
positi