He had said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.  I believe this Government cannot endure permanently, half slave and half free.  I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I expect it will cease to be divided.  It will become all one thing or all the other.”  When the question came, he knew which thing he meant that it should be.  His whole nature settled that question for him.  Such a man must always live as he used to say he lived (and was blamed for saying it) “controlled by events, not controlling them.”  And with a reverent and clear mind, to be controlled by events means to be controlled by God.  For such a man there was no hesitation when God brought him up face to face with Slavery and put the sword into his hand and said, “Strike it down dead.”  He was a willing servant then.  If ever the face of a man writing solemn words glowed with a solemn joy, it must have been the face of Abraham Lincoln, as he bent over the page where the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was growing into shape, and giving manhood and freedom as he wrote it to hundreds of thousands of his fellow-men.  Here was a work in which his whole nature could rejoice.  Here was an act that crowned the whole culture of his life.  All the past, the free boyhood in the woods, the free youth upon the farm, the free manhood in the honorable citizen’s employments—­all his freedom gathered and completed itself in this.  And as the swarthy multitudes came in, ragged, and tired, and hungry, and ignorant, but free forever from anything but the memorial scars of the fetters and the whip, singing rude songs in which the new triumph of freedom struggled and heaved below the sad melody that had been shaped for bondage; as in their camps and hovels there grew up to their half-superstitious eyes the image of a great Father almost more than man, to whom they owed their freedom,—­were they not half right?  For it was not to one man, driven by stress of policy, or swept off by a whim of pity, that the noble act was due.  It was to the American nature, long kept by God in his own intentions till his time should come, at last emerging into sight and power, and bound up and embodied in this best and most American of all Americans, to whom we and those poor frightened slaves at last might look up together and love to call him, with one voice, our Father.

Thus, we have seen something of what the character of Mr. Lincoln was, and how it issued in the life he lived.  It remains for us to see how it resulted also in the terrible death which has laid his murdered body here in our town among lamenting multitudes to-day.  It is not a hard question, though it is sad to answer.  We saw the two natures, the nature of Slavery and the nature of Freedom, at last set against each other, come at last to open war.  Both fought, fought long, fought bravely; but each, as was perfectly natural, fought with the tools and in the ways which its own character had made familiar to it.  The character