Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Abraham Lincoln, His Mystery, Making and Mastery: Sermon Preached in Calvary Baptist Church, New York, Sunday Morning, February 14, 1909, in Memory of the Centenary Anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Birth
It is doubtful if there was ever a merely human life more mysterious in the elements of its power than the life of Abraham Lincoln. Like Washington, he was of English stock. Notwith standing the marked superficial difference between him and Washington, there are many points of essential likeness. Lincoln was one of the noblest fruits of his parent stem; he was one of the greatest products of the anglo-saxon race: indeed, he was one of the mightiest sons of humanity of any race or time. Hundreds of biographers have essayed to write his life; but it will be a hundred years yet before that life can be exhaustively written. We require the lapse of time and the intervention of space rightly to judge great men and great movements. It was two hundred years before England discovered the truth regarding Oliver Cromwell. One class of Englishmen spoke of him as a brutal tyrant; another class regarded him as a sniveling hypocrite. Not until that burly Scotchman, Thomas Carlyle, published in 1845, his masterpiece, Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches did the world see, for the first time, the true Cromwell. The true Lincoln has never yet been presented by any biographer. The secret of his unique sagacity, rare eloquence. Profound insight, homely wit and merciful tenderness has never yet been discovered. He is still the unexplained child of nature, of America, and of God. The mystery of his life grows upon us as that life is the more carefully studied. This mystery partly explains the spell that Abraham Lincoln has thrown over the world.
This mystery carries us back one hundred years to a log cabin in a Kentucky clearance. We see there Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, the father and mother of the mysterious Abraham Lincoln. His mother could write but little, and his father still less. They belonged to the class known as poor whites. In this cabin February 12th, 1809, was born the immortal Lincoln. He was named Abraham in honor of his grandfather, who had been killed some years before by an Indian savage. In this wretched cabin, the boy Abraham had for a playmate his elder sister, Sarah. In 18] 7, on a rude raft the family floated down the stream until they landed in a wilderness in Indiana. Their home is now a log cabin more wretched than the one they left behind in Kentucky. One side of the cabin in Indiana is entirely open to wind and weather. The fire-place in its center pours its smoke through an opening in the roof. The boy, by grasping pegs driven into the logs, climbs to a wretched bed of leaves and straw in the garret But he grows rapidly; his long, lank body attracting the attention of all.
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