“Mr. President, if I have any purpose to-night, it is to strengthen the belief in a Divine Providence; and if I have any further purpose in this time of wars and rumors of wars, it is to show that God Almighty has made nations for higher purposes than mere money making. I am to speak to-night of Abraham Lincoln, the simplest, serenest, sublimist character of the age. Seventy millions of people join in commemorating his greatness. It is not my purpose to review his life; that is too much a part of history. That history should be taught in every American public school and preached from every Christian pulpit. The story of Abraham Lincoln, citizen, President, liberator and martyr, should be in the heart of every American child. I prefer to speak of only one event in his history. Yet that event was the harbinger of a new civilization. “Not long since, as I sat in a crowded court room, engaged in the trial of a case involving the title to a valuable tract of real estate, there came to the witness stand a venerable, white-haired negro. Written all over his old black face was the history of three-quarters of a century of such an existence as few persons have ever known. Born a slave, he had stood upon the auction block and been sold to the highest bidder; he had seen his wife and children dragged from his side by those who mocked his breaking heart; he bore upon his back the scars and ridges of a master’s lash. Now he came into a court of justice to settle, by the testimony of his black lips, a controversy between white men. When asked his age he drew himself proudly up and said: ‘For fifty years I was a chattel. On the first day of January, 1863, old Uncle Abe made me a man.’ “The act which set that old man free was the crowning glory of Lincoln’s life, for by it he not only saved his country, but emancipated a race. When Abraham Lincoln took his pen to sign the Emancipation Proclamation he knew that the supreme moment had come. He had known it years before, when he said: ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe that this government cannot exist permanently, half slave and half free, but I do not expect this house to fall, this government to be dissolved.’ “God has always raised up a great leader for a great crisis. Moses, initiated into the sublime mysteries of the house of Pharaoh, himself a ruler and almost a king, led the children of Israel through the parted waters of the Red Seas into the wilderness in the strange hope of a deliverance. A shepherdess on the hills of France felt herself stirred at the sore trials of her race. Joan d’Arc, the savior of her country, was the instrument of God.