The Almighty, in His providential goodness, watches over us, guides, and directs, blessing us constantly with helping hands, loving hearts, and signposts of His ever faithful provision. During his presidency, Abraham Lincoln, more than at any other time in his life, sought the wisdom and counsel of the Almighty, placing his will in the will of His heavenly Father:
"I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day."
"The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party -- and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true -- that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds."
Abraham Lincoln's course was long and arduous. From the most barren of places on a frontier plain, he rose to the highest office of his country, only to see that country torn down because of his rising.
From simple beginnings, he walked with determined step and determined mind to encounter, engage, and extinguish the most vexing questions in our history - questions, which if answered wrongly, would have led the great experiment in American self-government to failure.
The great man is purported to have said of difficulties,
"When great problems arise, I like to pull them up by the roots, and dry them by the fires of my mind."
Hearkening back to his youthful days on the farm, when plants from the garden would be pulled and placed before the hearth and patiently dried until ready, Lincoln gives us a picture of the slow, methodical musings of his mind. Only when the process was fully completed would the product be prepared for consumption.
Many and great are the accomplishments of this good and noble man. In four short, yet never-ending years, he led lady liberty out from among the catacombs, through the labyrinth of civil suffering and sacrifice, until she reached the sun drenched land of her new birth of freedom. This was his greatest accomplishment - to save his nation in such a way that it was worthy of the saving. As he eloquently stated,
"In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just - a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless."
America, the last, best hope of earth, was nobly saved. More than anything else, it was saved because Abraham Lincoln refused to surrender, refused to compromise, refused to ignore the eternal truth embedded in the Declaration of Independence:
"...that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
This eternal, absolute truth, from the nature of God unto human nature, guarantees to ALL men, all people, everywhere and always, inherent blessings and rights that cannot be altered with our stubby pencils and stubborn hearts. They have been etched into every heart and life by the very finger of the Almighty.
Abraham Lincoln believed this and believed that this nation should throw off her sin and her hypocrisy and truly live it, and give it, to all of God's children, not only of this nation, but of every nation, for all future time. Every American, every person, should be forever, profoundly grateful to this singular figure upon the canvas of history - the quintessential champion of human freedom.
At the age of twenty three, Abraham Lincoln said:
"Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be developed."
Lincoln had a recurring dream in which he was sailing upon an indistinct ship through a foggy mist toward an unknown and mysterious shore. Perhaps this vision was an outcropping of his uncertainty regarding whether he was fulfilling his ambition to be esteemed by his fellow man.
One wonders, as he breathed his last and gave up his majestic spirit, if for him, the mist rose and the shore became clear. For his children, it has always been so - they have always seen clearly the life and legacy of Father Abraham and thanked God for a life so lived and a blessing so rich.
In 1908, in a wild and remote area of the North Caucasus, Leo Tolstoy, the greatest writer of the age, was the guest of a tribal chief “living far away from civilized life in the mountains.”
Gathering his family and neighbors, the chief asked Tolstoy to tell stories about the famous men of history. Tolstoy told how he entertained the eager crowd for hours with tales of Alexander, Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon.
When he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock…His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.”
“I looked at them,” Tolstoy recalled, “and saw their faces all aglow, while their eyes were burning. I saw that those rude barbarians were really interested in a man whose name and deeds had already become a legend.” He told them everything he knew about Lincoln’s “home life and youth…his habits, his influence upon the people and his physical strength.” When he finished, they were so grateful for the story that they presented him with “a wonderful Arabian horse.”
The next morning, as Tolstoy prepared to leave, they asked if he could possibly acquire for them a picture of Lincoln. Thinking that he might find one at a friend’s house in the neighboring town, Tolstoy asked one of the riders to accompany him. “I was successful in getting a large photograph from my friend,” recalled Tolstoy. As he handed it to the rider, he noted that the man’s hand trembled as he took it. “He gazed for several minutes silently, like one in a reverent prayer, his eyes filled with tears.”
Tolstoy went on to observe, “This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skilful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.
“Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country — bigger than all the Presidents together.
“We are still too near to his greatness,” Tolstoy concluded, “but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do.The biggest of them all...the quintessential American...the quintessential champion of freedom.
Indeed we do, Mr. Tolstoy...indeed we do...
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