Here is a cognizance of law and deference before its claims that is curiously composite, if not complex, or even innerly contraposed. He acknowledges the written Constitution to bind all citizens with supreme authority; and gives his solemn oath to honor, uphold, and execute its plain behests. He as plainly betrays the presence within his individual breast of a moral sovereign to which he bows with just as loyal reverence. And before every man with whom he pleads he orders his behavior, even while he pleads, as before a throne whose moral majesty he has no right or power to nullify. And yet within the terms embodying such a deference he expounds the genesis and justifies the conduct of a long-drawn civil conflict, in which his own official decrees can be carried out only by the aid of the death and desolation entailed by war. And when, despite death-dealing guns and deferential pleas alike, vast multitudes of men, even all the captains and armies of the South, despise his arguments and defy his arms, he continues to urge his convictions and appeals, and to reinforce his words with war. Can such a complex attitude be shown and seen to rest in moral harmony? Were his conscience, and the Constitution, and his deference before other men, and his summons of the land to arms equally and alike compelling morally, all indeed morally akin? Beneath the unsparing gaze of his conscience-searching eye, under all the awful testing of his loyalty to oath, in all his patient and persistent pleadings for other men's agreement, and through all the torture and distress of war, what explanation and account can be given of any obligation adequate to bind and justify his course? Instinct himself with deference, and averse to any form of tyranny, how could he so rigidly refuse to yield? Prone toward conciliation in every fiber of his life, how did he inwardly, how could he openly vindicate his unbending determination to uphold his faith, and carry through the war?