In the fourth place, there was in Lincoln's patience a waiting deference before God's silence and delay. His total confidence was in God. That God was negligent, or indifferent, he would not concede. His whole abhorrence of oppression was based on God's decree. Here rested also all his hope of recompense. Vengeance belongs to God. He will rebuke the mighty, and redeem the meek. In both, his righteousness will be complete. And when his judgments fall, all men must own adoringly his perfect equity. Finally, in Lincoln's patience there is explicit recognition and confession of his own complicity with all the land, in the wrong to slaves, and of his own and all the land's delinquency before the Lord, in failure to discern and approbate the divine designs. It had been left with God's far greater patience and far higher moral jealousy to overcome and overwhelm and overrule the devious plans and ways of erring men. In lowly acquiescence it was for him and the land to acquaint themselves with God's designs, confess their wanderings, accept his will alike in redemption and rebuke, and unite henceforth to represent and praise on earth his perfect equity and grace. Here are the elements in Lincoln's patience, and here their sum. Forming with the lowly and oppressed a free and intimate partnership; avowing jealously for all mankind a coequal dignity among themselves and an imperishable affinity with God; declaring unflinchingly to all who tyrannize the full enormity of their primal sin; restraining malice and all avenging deeds; confessing his own misjudgments and misdeeds among his fellowmen and before the Lord; he endures submissively the divine delays, and shares repentantly with all who sin the judgments of a perfect righteousness. Genuinely pitiful for suffering men, sharply jealous for human worth, direct as light to designate the shame in pride, docile as a child before the righteous and eternal rule of God, he illustrates and demonstrates how a perfect patience makes requisition in a noble man of all his noblest manliness. But worthy as are all its qualities, its exercise entails stern discipline in suffering. It costs a man his life. That this was Lincoln's understanding, as he traversed the responsibility of that last inauguration day, is witnessed unmistakably by his letter to Thurlow Weed respecting his inaugural address. These are his words, well worthy to be reproduced a second time:-- "I believe it (the address) is not immediately popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told, and, as whatever of humiliation there is in it falls most directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it."