973.7L63 Bradley, Preston. 
 
 B3B72a 
 
 Abraham Lincoln, a study 
 
 in genius. 
 
LINCOLN ROOM 
 
 .UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
 ' LIBRARY 
 
J> 
 
 A 
 
 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 
 A Study in Genius 
 
 By 
 DR. PRESTON BRADLEY 
 
 We 
 
 The 
 Peoples Church of Chicago 
 
 NEW PANTHEON THEATRE 
 
 4650 SHERIDAN ROAD 
 
 February Eleventh, Nineteen twenty-three 
 
 Subscription rates, $5.00 per year, in advance. Mailed every 
 week during the church year, to any address in the U. S. or Canada. 
 
 Copies, 15 cents each 
 
 When Mailed 25c each 
 
 Address all communications to 
 
 MRS. PHILIP E. GOOLD, Secretary 
 
 919 Sheridan Road, Chicago 
 
 Dr. Bradley speaks extemporaneously. The addresses 
 stenographically reported by Mr. Edwin L. Cobb 
 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN— A STUDY IN GENIUS 
 
 I am afraid my address this morning will be interpreted 
 by many of you very much as two Irishmen interpreted a 
 speech which Mr. Bryan made shortly after his return from 
 Europe. Two Irishmen went to hear Mr. Bryan speak. After 
 the address one turned to the other and said: "Well, how 
 did you like it?" He said, "It struck me that Mr. Bryan 
 aint as good as he used to be." The other said, "No, and 
 he never was, either!" 
 
 I found this week somewhere between sixteen miles from 
 Alberta in northern Minnesota, 22° below zero, and the 
 lecture room in Lansing, Michigan, Friday evening with 
 over six hundred men, packed so tight you could not breathe 
 — I mean the air — somewhere between Alberta and Lansing 
 I found this hard cold which is the matter with me this 
 morning. And it is not a bit of fun. Last night was the 
 second night since Sunday that I have been in a bed, that is, 
 in a real bed. No one ever called a Pullman berth a bed. 
 I was told to go to bed when I arrived in Chicago yesterday 
 and stay there until I was all right. And if I had to do that 
 I would be there the rest of my life. Folks that have to go 
 to bed until they are all right have to stay there the rest of 
 their lives. At least, I would. So I said, No, I am going to 
 Church this morning; I am going to talk a little while on 
 Abraham Lincoln. I don 't suppose I can talk very long, 
 because I really am suffering. But I believe in the Law of 
 Compensation in this world, that no one ought to suffer for 
 doing good and I don't believe any one suffers from doing 
 good, and perhaps a good way for me to get well is for me 
 to go over to the Church and preach. And against the reason 
 of most folks that knew the situation, I said, "I am going," 
 and here I am, and the longer I am here the better I feel. 
 I am not half as much worried as a lot of folks I know. 
 I sort of feel that the things that are not good God doesn't 
 send, and if God doesn't send them they are not vital to us. 
 So get rid of them. And if you have to listen to a sermon 
 to get rid of them, all right; and if you have to preach one, 
 all right; but, whatever you do, get rid of them. I don't 
 know what there is about colds and aches and fevers and 
 
 sore throats that is causing so much trouble in America just 
 
 s 
 

 now. I don 't know what it is, probably because it is popular, 
 and anybody that has not a cold now isn 't in it, and I suppose 
 the most of us want to be popular about some things, even that. 
 
 There isn't any theme in the world that I know of that 
 is so inspiring to submerge self and all its laws and all its 
 attachments to earth and soar into the heights which are 
 touched by the spirit of God and of Truth like the theme of 
 Abraham Lincoln, because Abraham Lincoln was so tall in the 
 really worth-while things of life that he himself parted the 
 stars, and his outstanding genius was so lofty that one cannot 
 help when they stand upon this plane of earth and cast their 
 eyes star-ward and skyward to see the outstanding beauty 
 and power of his life, and if there ever was a problem which 
 the speaker or the historian or biographer had to overcome, 
 it is the problem of so vitalizing the personality that they are 
 discussing that they shall lose much of that which they have, 
 which the world has brought to them by the theory or by the 
 system of speculation, and they shall become outstanding 
 in their realism and in their sense of humanity. 
 
 We have heard so much about the almost spectacular 
 Lincoln; the Lincoln who was almost a great dramatist; the 
 Lincoln who had surrounded himself with so much that was 
 purely the dramaturgic in life ; we have heard so much of the 
 Lincoln of Gettysburg ; we have heard so much of the Lincoln 
 of the White House; we have heard so much of the Lincoln 
 in Ford's Theater on the tragic night in April, 1865. We 
 have associated with the character and personality of Lincoln 
 something which takes him away from the great humanity in 
 which most of us move and live. We almost forget the human 
 Lincoln, the Lincoln of flesh and blood, the Lincoln who had 
 his problems and heart-aches, the Lincoln who had his tears 
 and his sorrows, the Lincoln who was intensely human and 
 through a rarefication of the impulses of that humanity was 
 able to achieve in the estimation of the world of genius that 
 is rarely achieved since the foundation of time. For I main- 
 tain that there is nothing supernatural about the life and 
 personality of Abraham Lincoln in the sense of his genius 
 being of an extraneous origin. I think on the part of the 
 world there is altogether too much stress and too much shal- 
 lowness in the thought that great men are born; that the 
 genius is born; the great outstanding genius is the product 
 of some great background of evolution. Obviously, there is 
 a certain element of truth in this philosophy, for we are 
 utterly unable to account for some of the great personalities 
 of human history through any law of heredity or environment. 
 
It is quite true that there is some great development in 
 life that attaches itself to some personalities that defies all 
 the laws upon which men usually build the thing that we call 
 genius. But if I have correctly studied the life and times 
 of Abraham Lincoln, as I have tried to do since early youth, 
 I cannot detect that there is about Abraham Lincoln anything 
 that will add to the theory of the biologist or anthropologist 
 or psychologist or psychoanalyst or Freudianist, in their 
 philosophy of what constitutes genius. 
 
 There are so many of us who think that genius just 
 happens, and then with the happening of that genius we run 
 into all sorts of excursions, into the realm of insanity and 
 into the realm of various influences of the emotional life, into 
 its reactions upon the man of genius. And immediately we 
 have a school that says no man can be a genius without an 
 element of insanity involved in it, and there is always the 
 serious element to associate with genius something of an ab- 
 normal development, where you have extensive development 
 on one plane there is something exceedingly defective some- 
 where else. And it is true, if we analyze the capacity of the 
 great and outstanding men of genius, due to the fact that 
 he does possess in some particular emphasis some great out- 
 standing power or creativeness there may be in the symmetry 
 of his life a slight disturbance so there is not an exactly 
 normal relationship existing throughout his entire life. But 
 to the extent to which some of our Freudians and psycholo- 
 gists go, it seems to me, is utterly ridiculous. For when we 
 come to the character of Abraham Lincoln no man can deny 
 his genius. You can go over his life with the finest of analyti- 
 cal power, and when you are all through, carefully investigat- 
 ing and carefully building your deductions from your in- 
 vestigations of his career and his life — there he stands, that 
 unimpeachable outstanding genius; although be it a human 
 being, a man who could tell stories that had more latitude 
 than longitude, a man that gave every evidence of under- 
 standing the heart-throb of the world, and, yet, a man that 
 had achieved and developed to the rank of genius of the first- 
 water type; not a genius whose personal life was seared by 
 immoralities, such as some of the genius of literature and art ; 
 not a genius who rose over the crushed and broken bodies of 
 bleeding men and women and little children, like Napoleon of 
 France ; not a genius who could stand upon the borderland of 
 the Unknowable in the world of theological and psychological 
 interpretations and become the medium through which some 
 great fundamental principle of philosophy or of immortality 
 
should be born, for Lincoln had very little to say about either ; 
 but, a genius who possessed the fine symmetry of normality. 
 For it is not necessary for genius to be insane, nor is it 
 necessa^ for genius to give evidence of the immoralities of 
 the human plane. 
 
 And so when we come to this character of Abraham 
 Lincoln we are face to face with an entirely new conception 
 and interpretation of the law of genius. It is quite true that 
 we cannot explain Lincoln by his nativity, and yet those who 
 intimate that Lincoln's blood was not pure blood are those 
 who are not informed with the life of Lincoln. Abraham 
 Lincoln 's father was of a very fine family of very high order. 
 The Lincolns that came out of the East into Kentucky were 
 poor, but there were branches of their family in the East 
 that were people of superior quality. The father of Abraham 
 Lincoln was a poor man, with all the poverty of those years ; 
 and to be poor those years meant a great deal more than to 
 be poor at this time. But Abraham Lincoln's blood was good 
 blood and it was pure blood. And that genius of motherhood 
 which his mother possessed, his own mother who left him so 
 early in life, and then the fortunate circumstance of being- 
 blessed with a foster-mother who loved him like his own 
 mother, Nancy Hanks, who carried the father of Abraham 
 Lincoln when Lincoln was still a boy. But don't under- 
 estimate and don't fall heir to that error or that untruth 
 which permeates so much of the more or less hazy atmosphere 
 about Lincoln that his birth is shrouded in mystery. The 
 parenthood of Abraham Lincoln is not in doubt. I hear many 
 people who cast almost an intimate slur upon the fact that 
 Abraham Lincoln was a nameless baby. The parenthood of 
 Lincoln is established beyond all question of doubt. 
 
 We have in the People's Church a woman who is very 
 closely related to the Reverend Thomas Head, who was the 
 clergyman that officiated at the wedding of Lincoln's father 
 and mother, and the Reverend William E. Barton, who is an 
 authority on Lincoln in America, has recently given new light 
 to the world on these early and obscure years of Lincoln. 
 
 Now, my Freudian friend and my psychoanalyst, and you 
 who are always trying to link up something of a physical or 
 animal nature with the transcendental beauty of immortal 
 genius, let me call your attention to the fact that you cannot 
 explain Lincoln by any of your theories of insanity or of 
 sexuality. Abraham Lincoln was the son of a man and a 
 woman who were married and who loved, and Abraham 
 Lincoln's name is a name that is unsullied by any of that 
 
sort of thing. You cannot explain the genius of Lincoln 
 through his nativity. His family did not distinguish itself 
 in the way that we expect or might expect families would 
 distinguish themselves, but neither has the son of Abraham 
 Lincoln. He has a son living today in the United States, who 
 was a resident of the city of Chicago for a great many years. 
 Abraham Lincoln's son, Robert T. Lincoln, was a man who 
 developed great business ability and was somewhat of a 
 financial wizard, associated for many years with the Pullman 
 Company of merica. But Robert T. Lincoln has never given 
 one scintilla of evidence in his entire life that he partakes of 
 one single quality of the genius of his father. 
 
 Don't explain or attempt to explain everything by this 
 law of heredity. 
 
 Ralph Wado Emerson, the most gigantic intellect that the 
 transcendental school of the East ever had, had a son who was 
 an idiot. I could go on and name you hundreds and hundreds 
 and hundreds of men who have distinguished themselves — 
 not to the rank of genius, I will admit, but who have dis- 
 tinguished themselves, that you cannot account for through 
 the mere law of heredity. Of course, it is a sensible child that 
 picks out a great grand-father. We must all admit that. But, 
 nevertheless, we cannot explain genius by the mere law of 
 heredity. 
 
 Now let us look at Abraham Lincoln just a moment and see 
 if we cannot discover in his own persistency and in his own 
 ambition something of the key that will open up to us an 
 understanding of Lincoln. Altogether Abraham Lincoln went 
 to school less than twelve months. Now, think of that! The 
 first four or five of those months were spent in a "blab" 
 school. 
 
 Now I know by the way you receive that that very few 
 of you know what a "blab" school is. If there is anyone 
 here from southern Indiana or some parts of Kentucky they 
 will know what a "blab" school is. It is a school where the 
 students all study out loud in order to convince the teacher 
 that they are studying. And Abraham Lincoln's early 
 schooling was spent in a "blab" school. There these pupils 
 sat and studied out loud. How far we have gone in education 
 in the lifetime of one man! 
 
 Well, altogether, Abraham Lincoln had only twelve months 
 of schooling, as we speak of going to school. 
 
 The first evidence of the latent genius of Abraham Lincoln 
 in the world of the intellectual in which he later expressed 
 his superiority was to be found in the fact that Abraham 
 
Lincoln had such a tendency toward a complete understanding 
 that he permitted no obscurity to take precedence. Lincoln 
 tells us that the only thing in his life that really made him 
 mad was to have people talk about things in his presence as 
 a boy and young man that he did not understand, and he 
 tells us that when his father would have some of the neighbors 
 in and they would sit around the fireside in the evening and 
 discuss some of the growing questions of politics in connection 
 with the frontier and they used words that Abraham Lincoln 
 did not know, that he would stay up after they had gone and 
 would not retire or close his eyes until he had mastered those 
 words and those ideas. It was the predisposition in the mind 
 of Lincoln to master that which he did not understand with 
 a clarity that needed no explanation that was the foundation 
 of Abraham Lincoln's intellectual superiority. It was not 
 that his brain was any different than anybody else's in its 
 physical make-up or its physical inheritance, but he had an 
 inherent predisposition and tendency to master that which 
 was presented to him before he gave up the idea. He would 
 turn ideas over in his mind, and as he once said, he would 
 keep an idea in his mind until he had bounded it on the east 
 and bounded it on the west and bounded it on the north and 
 south. 
 
 Now that was the latent thing in the intellectual life of 
 Abraham Lincoln that is so outstanding in its truthfulness 
 to the one that is trying to analyze the genius of Lincoln. 
 
 Now we are often told that Lincoln was a great reader. 
 There are those who knew him late in his lifetime who said 
 that that might have been true in early years, but it was not 
 true in his later years. Lincoln's library consisted of "Pil- 
 grim's Progress" — I am speaking of him as a young man — 
 "Life of Washington," "Constitutional History of Indiana," 
 a copy of the Constitution of the United States, the i ' Declara- 
 tion of Independence," and the Bible. Shakespeare was 
 lacking, and due to the fact that Lincoln quoted very little 
 in any of his speeches of any literature (Lincoln quoted prob- 
 ably at little as any one that has ever been in American public 
 life), we are led to believe that he did not have a working 
 familiarity with the great classics of literature. He knew 
 little of Shakespeare; he knew nothing of Greek; he knew 
 nothing of Latin. He knew nothing of any tongue other than 
 the tongue of his nativity. But his quality of mind due to a 
 moral rectitude — there is no character in the history of the 
 world that gives as plainly as Abraham Lincoln does the 
 power for illustration, of the effect of the mind over the body 
 
and the career of a man. Abraham Lincoln 's background was 
 his unimpeachable integrity of mind, a mind that he had 
 made so exact and so analytical and yet had retained all of 
 the finer qualities of a beautiful human touch; a mind that 
 controlled his destiny and outlined his life and gave him in 
 his darkest and deepest hours a fortification such as few men 
 in this world have ever achieved. 
 
 Now to the character of Lincoln. To the youth, which is 
 my primary concern this morning. In some of these side- 
 lights of the genius of Lincoln there is everything to make 
 one feel that if any one in the world ought to have given up it 
 was Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln's whole life, from 
 the time he was born until 1860, was largely a life of repeated 
 disappointments and failures. The first thing that happened 
 was a business failure. Most men never recover from that. 
 But Abraham Lincoln was in business and the firm of Lincoln 
 and his business associates simply went into bankruptcy and 
 Lincoln took over the debts of that firm, and for the first 
 early years of his young manhood, for he moved to Spring- 
 field to practice law, Abraham Lincoln was paying the debts 
 of the bankrupt firm. That was the first experience that he 
 had in his life — failure. 
 
 The sweetheart of his youth; the only woman that 
 Abraham Lincoln ever loved, was taken away from him in 
 that tragic death of his sweetheart. And where you find a 
 rugged virile heart, touched by the dew of the out-of-door, 
 with muscles trained by the splintering of oak rails, when a 
 heart like that loves, it loves deeply. Those pioneers in their 
 loves did not gamble with love. They were not butterflies 
 by day and moths by night. Human affections were not things 
 to play with in their days. What a different moral condition 
 we would have in America today if that still held. The 
 sacredness of love was not a coat to put on and take off with 
 Abraham Lincoln. And he loved her and Death took her, and 
 his life was never the same after that. 
 
 There were two things : Bankruptcy and the death of his 
 sweetheart. But that was not all. 
 
 The first time he ever ran for the legislature of the State 
 of Illinois he was hopelessly defeated and they thought he 
 was snowed under for life. That is not all. He went to that 
 legislature four times and was defeated again. Was elected 
 to the Congress of the United States, only served one term, 
 was defeated again; a candidate for the United States Senate 
 and defeated again by a young man thirty-five years old, 
 Stephen A. Douglas. Defeated again. Married a woman that 
 
did not understand him; that probably loved him, but who 
 was never a part of his life in that sweet beauty of com- 
 panionship that makes marriage such a happy and beautiful 
 experience. Mary Todd was only the wife of the President 
 Abraham Lincoln ; she was not the sweetheart of the man 
 Abraham Lincoln. But that is not all. After a marriage 
 that never brought him what a marriage brings when the 
 marriage is right, Abraham Lincoln, when the Whigs were 
 successful and he wanted a position in the land office and 
 was turned down, he went to Philadelphia in 1856 to try an 
 important law suit in which he was associated with Edwin 
 M. Stanton wherein the client was Mr. Robert Emerson. Mr. 
 Stanton in 1856 refused to let Abraham Lincoln make a plea 
 in the courtroom of Philadelphia, because he thought he would 
 reflect discredit upon his cause and upon his client and told 
 him so, and in 1856, four years before 1860 — think of that, 
 four years before 1860, three years before Lincoln made the 
 speech in Cooper Union in 1859 in New York. Think of it! 
 Lincoln was given a complimentary vote for Vice-President 
 of the United States in a national convention, and the dele- 
 gates, after the complimentary vote for Vice-President had 
 been given to Lincoln, arose and asked who Lincoln was! 
 In 1856 ! Lincoln had been in Springfield as a lawyer, and 
 Lincoln was well known at the bar, but he had not gone out 
 beyond the confines of the State of Illinois, then it was that 
 Lincoln in 1859 made that Cooper Union speech. And for 
 the first time Abraham Lincoln was a national figure. 
 
 And I can see him sitting there upon the platform at 
 Cooper Union with that throng in front of him, and I can 
 hear the chairman of that meeting apologize for him; I can 
 hear the little innuendoes and reflections. Then I can see 
 him get up, and I see him unwind those long legs, six feet of 
 solid manhood, and walk out to the edge of that platform, and 
 there — almost the use of monosyllables, words of one syllable, 
 the simplicity of greatness ! There stood Lincoln, home-spun, 
 rough hewn ! Failed at law, failed in business, failed in 
 office, failed in marriage, failed in scholarship, failed in what 
 the world called eloquence. There stood Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 And the world clung to his words, and a few months later 
 the Republican party nominated him for the presidency. 
 
 Explain it to me ! 
 
 Why, there is only one explanation, and Abraham Lincoln 
 gave it himself. 
 
 After the Madison Square speech, Abraham Lincoln went 
 up into Vermont, and he met a minister, and this minister 
 
asked him to explain to him why it was that he had such 
 power of expression and could so definitely analyze his feelings 
 and had such a happy way of giving his ideas, and Abraham 
 Lincoln said: "1 will tell you why. I had a law suit down 
 in Philadelphia and they would not let me speak. It did not 
 make me mad; it made me sad! And I realized that these 
 Eastern lawyers were college graduates, and I realized that 
 they were coming further West all the time, and I realized 
 that if I ever did what I wanted to do in this world I would 
 have to be able to cope with them intellectually. So at the 
 age of forty I started to study Euclid and at the age of fifty 
 I really started to study law. ' ' 
 
 Those are the words of Abraham Lincoln; at the age of 
 forty he started to study Euclid. Now, you High School 
 students know what Euclid is. It is geometry. Right away 
 I can hear some of them say : * ' Well, if you have to do that 
 to be President of the United States you can count me out." 
 Because there are not many youngsters that like geometry. 
 
 But Abraham Lincoln knew that to think clearly and to 
 think fundamentally you must have a trained mind. 
 
 So Abraham Lincoln mastered the first six books of Euclid, 
 which are the first books of Plain Geometry. And there was 
 not a single problem in the first six books of Euclid that 
 Abraham Lincoln could not state and could not solve. And he 
 himself said: "Don't think that I am any different than 
 anybody else. The only difference between me and other 
 folks is that I improved my opportunities. ' ' 
 
 And yet we seem to think that all genius is born. We 
 seem to feel that we never do things because we are not an 
 Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln could have died un- 
 honored and unsung if he had permitted the experiences of 
 his life to floor him at the bottom. Abraham Lincoln could 
 have failed, and he had more reasons to quit than most men, 
 but Abraham Lincoln said, No ! A trained mind ! And he 
 mastered Euclid! 
 
 Is it any wonder that he could stand at Gettysburg and 
 in two minutes and a half make a speech that, as we have 
 been told by authorities, will live as long as the language of 
 Shakespeare is spoken? 
 
 W T hy, there was not any veneer about Lincoln. Lincoln 
 
 so partook of the out-of-doors — and there is no veneer out 
 
 there. Lincoln had the breeding of sincerity, and the first 
 
 mark of all genius is sincerity ; the first mark of all greatness 
 
 is sincerity. And Lincoln, when he met Judge Douglas in 
 
 those debates throughout Illinois, Judge Douglas himself 
 
 10 
 
said : "I have the most formidable foe in debate that America 
 lias ever seen. He is harder than Webster ; he is deeper than 
 Calhoun ; he is more fundamental than Clay ; and he is more 
 human than Horace Greeley." 
 
 When Judge Douglas met him throughout the state of 
 Illinois in those series of debates, what was the Lincoln that 
 won? It was the Lincoln of simplicity. Lincoln did not 
 know much about tariff ; Lincoln was not a scientific economist ; 
 Lincoln did not know very much about international 
 diplomacy; he never pretended to. But there was one thing; 
 that Lincoln never forgot. He never in all his life forgot 
 that there was a moral aspect to the problems of government, 
 and the outstanding contribution of Lincoln to the world is 
 there ; the moral rectitude of his mind and the fact that there 
 was a moral aspect to human government made Lincoln what 
 he was. 
 
 And in those days when his heart was bowed in grief, and 
 those years that were dark and foreboding and nobody knew 
 just what would happen, and those days when the North was 
 not satisfied and the South apparently triumphant; those 
 days that some of you can remember. I can't, of course, but 
 some of you can. Those days when the air was vibrant with 
 uncertainty. This great soul, peaceful foe, would take little 
 Willie of the White House, his only comfort, and stroll down 
 the banks of the Potomac, and when the old moon was twink- 
 ling its melody from out its sky and all the stars were glisten- 
 ing with the beauty of the night, and there would be the 
 voices of the open places. Abraham Lincoln's virgin soul, 
 Abraham Lincoln's universal soul — for the last test of all 
 genius is its universality. Originality is not the test of 
 genius; universality is the test of genius. Shakespeare does 
 not belong to England; he belongs to the world. Socrates is 
 not Grecian; he is the world's. Homer, Shakespeare, and 
 Dante, Milton and all the rest are not the properties of a 
 race or creed or country; they belong to humanity. And 
 Abraham Lincoln was humanity's friend before he was any- 
 thing else, and it was that friendship of humanity that made 
 him loved like he is today. 
 
 We envy the scholer ; we are interested in the scientist and 
 the artist, but we all of us love the Brother, and Abraham 
 Lincoln was the Brother. 
 
 And I like to take that gentle spirit this morning out of 
 
 its past, somewhere ; I would just like to feel that if those 
 
 silent lips could once more penetrate the quietness of the 
 
 tomb, and if that great heart could beat just once more, this 
 
 11 
 
 
 
towering giant born and bred of the open, whose brain was 
 always clear because he had schooled himself to think con- 
 secutively and scholarly and analytically, who always kept 
 a moral background, that in spite of its heartaches and sad- 
 ness and sorrow, kept his grip ; who laughed sometimes when 
 his own heart was breaking — and that is the hardest laughter 
 in the world ; who told a story sometimes to make folks laugh 
 and to establish a point, when darts were pricking at the 
 sensitive places of his own soul. 
 
 Oh, these days, so much veneer ; these days, when men get 
 a blow and don 't recover ; in these days, when so many of our 
 American youth want to take the line of least resistance; in 
 these days when there are so many people that think all you 
 have to do is to go out and let the world give you a living 
 by your wits; in these days when we need to emphasize the 
 dignity of Labor ; in these days, if we could just have a little 
 more of the sweetness and the fire of this immortal Lincoln! 
 
 Oh, great spirit of Lincoln! There were times when you 
 stood alone, and because you stood alone you were all the 
 stronger in the afterlight. 
 
 They knocked you and they fought you, and Horace 
 Greeley and Thomas Nash lied about you and maligned you. 
 Stanton said you were wrong, but you said: "Be sure you 
 are right and then go ahead.' ' 
 
 And when you came out of that Indiana home and away 
 from Kentucky and Indiana and from that Indiana home into 
 Illinois you blazed a trail, and so you blazed trails in our 
 hearts, and there is a trail that you blazed that no one else 
 must follow. It is all yours. As long as America lives, as 
 long as the nation stands, men will look to you, great Lincoln, 
 with your unimpeachable honesty, your finely developed in- 
 tellectual life and your great heart. 
 
 Oh, Lincoln, may your spirit come back to us. 
 
 "The coward never started. The weak died on the way. 
 Only the strong man arrives/ ' and that strength must come 
 from mental and spiritual sovereignty. 
 
 The finest thing Abraham Lincoln ever said was this : 
 
 "I want it said of me after I am gone, that I always 
 plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a 
 flower would grow." 
 
 i*< fowem mm, 
 
UNWEBSITr OF ItLWOIS 
 
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