Abraham Lincoln's Cardinal Traits;: A Study in Ethics, with an Epilogue Addressed to TheologiansBeardslee, Clark S. (Clark Smith)
Philosophy
Abraham Lincoln's Cardinal Traits;: A Study in Ethics, with an Epilogue Addressed to Theologians
Beardslee, Clark S. (Clark Smith)
Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 -- Psychology
Here in this inaugural address is designation and signature of a man
astute to comprehend a Nation's history, reverent towards
responsibility, a champion and exponent of liberty, commending with
radiant earnestness that all his fellow men so walk with God, so
cherish equity, and so walk in charity as to secure in all the earth
an amity that time can never disrupt.
Something such is the personality which this address attests. While
this speech exists, this testimony will endure. Its word stands firm.
And its signature is plain. He who wrote the speech has left upon its
manuscript his clear and sacred seal. He who gave its body shape was a
freeman none could bend, heedful of the arbiter none might disobey,
humble towards God, loyal to himself, a friend to every man, an
aspirant for life.
Surely these are intimations of personality. Here is Lincoln, a vivid
plenitude in living unison of timeless quietness and harmony,
ordaining freely his own law of even heed for self and brother man,
for God and spirit life. Here is the full manhood of a living soul,
Godlike and earthly-born. None of its features are solidified in
flesh, to be again and soon resolved. All its face is spiritual; all
its action free, self-ordered, and self-judged; all preserving
jealously its own kingly honor; all beaming graciously on other men;
all bearing homage up to God; all vivid with immortality; abhorring
mightily all pride and hate, all falsehood and decay; all sharing
sacrificially with other men the cost and shame entailed in righting
human wrong. This is Lincoln's personality. In Godlike, friendly,
undying self-respect; in heavenly, upright, immortal kindliness; in
humane, divine, self-honoring heed for spirit-life--in each and any
one of these four identical affirmations is Lincoln's personality
exhaustively engrossed, each and any one declaring that he contains
within himself a free and deathless soul, akin alike to God and man,
and bound therein by the self-wrought law of love and truth.
These terms define a life at once of human and of heavenly range, at
once inhabiting and transcending realms of change, at once self-ruled
and environed with responsibility. Here is elemental personality, in
inwrought and indivisible unity, with measureless capacity for
versatility, easily blending fulness of vigor with complete repose,
vestured and transfused with native symmetry and grace. In some such
living, breathing words, themselves transfigured and illumined by the
quickening verities they strive to body forth, may the pure, immortal
soul of Lincoln, and of every child of man, be defined, unburdened,
and declared.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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