Page:Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln, v1.djvu/236

206 all thy mind and thy neighbor as thyself,' that church will I join with all my heart and all my soul."

Then his absolute morality, purity of life, beneficence of conduct, abounding charity, and the catholicity of his love of his kind, must inure to his infinite credit. No ruler of a republic ever had so much power; none ever employed it so tenderly, so benevolently, so mercifully. No man ever saved so many human lives by the pulsations of his kindly heart; no power save the Almighty ever used the power of pardon so graciously and benignly; no man ever dried the mourners' tears, assuaged grief of stricken ones, restored the condemned to life and hope, to such an extent, and with such a sympathetic soul as he. His succor was almost Divine in essence, and gracious and gentle as the dews of Heaven in manner.

More than any other man in modern life, he completely fulfilled the requirement, and justified the asseveration, of James, the brother of our, that "pure religion and undefiled before and the  is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world."

Mr. Lincoln was an extremely sad and melancholy man; at times this sadness was laid aside for an hour, and he felt really blithe and jocund; but his feelings gravitated and tended to the sombre, mystical, and melancholy. In the realms of his diseased fancy, the heavens were always hung in funereal black. He was prone to fits of weird abstraction, and enveloped in an atmosphere of morbid reverie; he lived largely in unseen realms, communed often with invisible