But there were crucial instances which test sufficiently whether this wary politician was a true man or not.  The soil of Illinois was free soil by the Ordinance of 1787, and Congress would only admit it to the Union as a free State.  But it had been largely peopled from the South.  There had been much agitation against this restriction; prevailing sentiment to a late date strongly approved of slavery; it was at Alton in Illinois that, in 1836, Elijah Lovejoy, an Abolitionist publisher, had been martyred by the mob which had failed to intimidate him.  In 1837, when the bold agitation of the Abolitionists was exciting much disapproval, the Illinois Legislature passed resolutions condemning that agitation and declaring in soothing tones the constitutional powerlessness of Congress to interfere with slavery in the Southern States.  Now Lincoln himself—­whether for good reasons or bad must be considered later—­thoroughly disapproved of the actual agitation of the Abolitionists; and the resolutions in question, but for one merely theoretical point of law and for an unctuous misuse of the adjective “sacred,” contained nothing which he could not literally have accepted.  The objection to them lay in the motive which made it worth while to pass them.  Lincoln drew up and placed on the records of the House a protest against these resolutions.  He defines in it his own quite conservative opinions; he deprecates the promulgation of Abolition doctrines; but he does so because it “tends rather to increase than abate the evils” of slavery; and he lays down “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy.”  One man alone could he induce to sign this protest with him, and that man was not seeking re-election.

By 1842 Lincoln had grown sensibly older, and a little less ready, we may take it, to provoke unnecessary antagonism.  Probably very old members of Free Churches are the people best able to appreciate the daring of the following utterance.  Speaking on Washington’s birthday in a Presbyterian church to a temperance society formed among the rougher people of the town and including former drunkards who desired to reform themselves, he broke out in protest against the doctrine that respectable persons should shun the company of people tempted to intemperance.  “If,” he said, “they believe as they profess that Omnipotence condescended to take upon Himself the form of sinful man, and as such die an ignominious death, surely they will not refuse submission to the infinitely lesser condescension, for the temporal and perhaps eternal salvation of a large, erring, and unfortunate class of their fellow creatures!  Nor is the condescension very great.  In my judgment such of us as have never fallen victims have been spared more from the absence of appetite than from any mental or moral superiority over those who have.  Indeed, I believe, if we take habitual drunkards as a class, that their heads and their hearts