Just think of it!—­the sons of God!  The power to become that to as many as will receive the present Christ.

VI.  ABRAHAM LINCOLN.[1]

“He chose David also His servant, and took him away from the sheepfolds; that he might feed Jacob His people, and Israel His inheritance.  So he fed them with a faithful and true heart, and ruled them prudently with all his power.”—­Psalm lxxviii. 71, 72, 73.

While I speak to you to-day, the body of the President who ruled this people, is lying, honored and loved, in our city.  It is impossible with that sacred presence in our midst for me to stand and speak of ordinary topics which occupy the pulpit.  I must speak of him to-day; and I therefore undertake to do what I had intended to do at some future time, to invite you to study with me the character of Abraham Lincoln, the impulses of his life and the causes of his death.  I know how hard it is to do it rightly, how impossible it is to do it worthily.  But I shall speak with confidence, because I speak to those who love him, and whose ready love will fill out the deficiencies in a picture which my words will weakly try to draw.

We take it for granted, first of all, that there is an essential connection between Mr. Lincoln’s character and his violent and bloody death.  It is no accident, no arbitrary decree of Providence.  He lived as he did, and he died as he did, because he was what he was.  The more we see of events, the less we come to believe in any fate or destiny except the destiny of character.  It will be our duty, then, to see what there was in the character of our great President that created the history of his life, and at last produced the catastrophe of his cruel death.  After the first trembling horror, the first outburst of indignant sorrow, has grown calm, these are the questions which we are bound to ask and answer.

It is not necessary for me even to sketch the biography of Mr. Lincoln.  He was born in Kentucky fifty-six years ago, when Kentucky was a pioneer State.  He lived, as boy and man, the hard and needy life of a backwoodsman, a farmer, a river boatman, and, finally, by his own efforts at self-education, of an active, respected, influential citizen, in the half-organized and manifold interests of a new and energetic community.  From his boyhood up he lived in direct and vigorous contact with men and things, not as in older States and easier conditions with words and theories; and both his moral convictions and his intellectual pinions gathered from that contact a supreme degree of that character by which men knew him, that character which is the most distinctive possession of the best American nature, that almost indescribable quality which we call in general clearness or truth, and which appears in the physical structure as health, in the moral constitution as honesty, in the mental structure as sagacity, and in the region of active life as practicalness.