put him into any profession where he shall have to explain or enforce truth, and he will use the language of growth. He knows the tragedy and mystery of the breaking seed. He is not surprised at the rain falling on the just and the unjust. He is an evolutionist, not a revolutionist. He cannot endure for a moment unnatural processes which are proposed through legislation alone to the end of manufacturing a state of affairs which, therefore, has no inner vitality. It has also no power of growth and, therefore, it is denied the possibility of being improved. All the way through Abraham Lincoln's political manner of thinking there is the movement, the method, the ideal of growth, as in nature; and all the way through his dealings with men there come out of that great schoolroom in which he sat as a student under the tutelage of the Almighty, illustrations, metaphors, sly hints that are as sweet as the wind and as bright as the stars, and the use of nature's own phrases by so sincere a man made the national mind more natural and vital. Has your boy the advantages of such a schoolroom?

Another advantage this boy had was the advantage of poverty. Nicholas Poussin, having failed to reach the height towards which his genius seemed to point and having thus disappointed his best friends, was met one day by a serious-minded artist who knew beauty and truth together, and he said: "Poussin, you lack one thing, and only one to make you a great painter." I suppose the rich painter put his hands in his pockets and touched the coin so much like the coin which you and I grasp in days of bargain and sale and luxury, when false ideals of life and education permit us to neglect the unpurchaseable. He was thinking he might be able to buy this superior thing. "No," said his friend, "the thing without which you shall not become a great painter is something you cannot buy; it is poverty."

When God gets in earnest about a man on this planet, he strips him of everything that shall in any way overweight him or hinder his course towards the realizing of the truest ideals. All the way through the history of that moral genius which identifies itself with the great experiences of nations, there work the healthful limitations that keep the soul strong and the organizing elements of humanity in their richness and their activity. These are met in the gift of poverty. He had another immense advantage in his education. He was a man of labor. Has your boy that advantage? Is the American youth of to-day limited in any possible manner so that, as Emerson hints, like the shot in the steel walls of the cannon there is an inevitable direction in his life? Are we not denying our boys to-day the culture of labor? Here was a man whose brain reached to the very ends of his fingers. Gray matter had gotten into that man's arms. His sinews, strong as steel, were as responsive to that brain as the strings of a violin were responsive to the touch of Paganini. The whole man was surcharged with all those spiritualities that abide in the finer and higher dome of soul. You will never have a great American until every American in the most republican manner shall win in himself the gift and privilege of labor. No man is educated in his head alone. The church can take the heart. The school can take the head. Life's necessities can take the hand. The school will never be a great school until it takes all of the man, head, hand and heart. Until the head is filled with heart's blood to give these ideas warmth and passion, and until the hand has done what the head dreams and what the heart feels is duty, there is no clearness. There is no intellectual mastery until a man can thus distribute his brain over his entire body and pervade and unify his faculties with soul.

Abraham Lincoln was trained, as great men have been trained

for national and international revolution and evolution, in the camp of the foe. When Providence wished to lift Holland out of the perils of the sea and make her master of the ideals of those Puritans and Pilgrims who should come to her coast to learn how to hold town meetings, when the Holland represented at this table and in this city in such generosity of genius and public spirit was to hurl the Spaniard back, God had educated his William the Silent in the court of Charles the V. of Spain. When there came the moment in this same long conflict for justice and freedom and the battle was to be fought for republicanism and righteousness in England, God gave to the blood of the Stuart a kinsman of Charles the I., the impulse and the ideal; and the young Roundhead felt the muscles of the Cavalier at Hinchinbrook. So Oliver Cromwell was prepared by the royalist to take off a royal head. When heaven had gathered the people of earth to look toward the American colonies, and here God sought to deliver the land's destiny and give her a spiritual fortune through the self-education of free men under law. He educated His Washington in the army of a British soldier; made him a surveyor at the order of the British throne. At length, when God would smite slavery and destroy its hateful presence, He bred His Lincoln in a slave State, educated his conscience in sight of the monster's activity. In those early hours when he was recipient of all the impressions that unfold in the lifetime of wisdom, his open eye beheld its tyranny and cruelty. Lincoln never mistook the mighty power of greed, pride and ambition behind human slavery. There he became familiar with the resources and the tremendous activities that came out of the haughty and athletic wickedness of the slave power, and his knowledge of the better humanity of the South, which, like Jefferson and Washington, hated or feared slavery, never failed him.

This was not an uneducated man. For the most part, ladies and gentlemen, this is the kind of education that the great mass at the base of this pyramid called the American public must have. Out of these advantages the best servants of progress have been educated-shall we not say, without them none has been educated? It would be better indeed for the top of the pyramid if we had the education of nature, the education of the limitations of poverty, the education of labor, all so continuously working at the bottom that our democracy on which we rest so broadlybased might guarantee us a true aristocracy. This boy's whole life gave the impulse of naturalness and an essential republicanism to all his activity, because he was not a child of privilege, and because he could certainly understand this, that at the very bottom of this pyramid is a democracy out of which there shall come the aristocracy of intellect and the aristocracy of character whose leader he was.

The essential power in any truly Republican State must always lie in its ability to continue intelligently the history of the past. The great man of a republic is a man who must so honor the past in his own personality, in the quality of his mind, in his temperament, in his attitude towards all questions of life, as to bring the whole past up to date in a living personality and influence. He must harvest the years that are gone in order that in his seed bag there may be the most golden grains for the larger harvest of the future.

Here was the secret of the greatness of Abraham Lincoln. Here is his essential republicanism. He knew enough of man's soul and history to see that republicanism is not a matter of yesterday. He had so vast a retrospective that when he spoke he had room for the massiveness of his thought; and freely did he move around with the great centuries behind him. They were

in his consciousness. He saw that just government received its invincible impulses toward freedom from the alliance of freedom and law in the long past, with which he was perfectly familiar. He had the first profound and enlightening history of man in the Bible which he knew so well. As he walked with Moses out from Egypt and followed him as he should follow him at the last in history, dying as Moses died this side of Canaan, never realizing here how much man loved and honored him, cruelly murdered as Moses was kissed to sleep by the lips of Almighty God, he could not stop at Sinai. He went on in his own moral development and he saw while he mused at the foot of the cross on Calvary the true vision of man's worth. He obtained there an estimate of the common man, so much more clear to him in the long years of his public work, that whether black or white, bond or free, he knew that a man in God's eyes was worth the tragedy of the Cross.

He saw that the marks of valuation upon any man were marks which had been placed there through the agonizing hours of Gethsemane and that midnight of Golgotha. Here was and is your truly progressive Christianity, and here was and is all advancing republicanism. He saw that institutions exist for humanity, and not humanity for institutions. He studied the Man of Galilee as He took into His one hand a certain institution, the Sabbath, a most delicate thing, the most elusive thing that any thinker may handle, for it is not a visible institution, but an invisible one. He saw Him put humanity in His other hand, and behold, the Sabbath was outweighed by humanity, and Jesus Christ said, "The Sabbath belongs to man and not man to the Sabbath." He had found the illumination of a principle. So Lincoln demonstrated that an institution at best is only a constitution embodied, and it can be reformed in the interest of