Among my favorite writers is Britain's F. W. Boreham. Here is an edited essay about Abraham Lincoln that appears in his book The Temple of Topaz written a half century ago. Boreham compares Lincoln to Moses, saying Lincoln, too, metaphorically climbed Mt. Sinai. The massive personality of Abraham Lincoln is like a granite boulder torn from a rugged hillside. Too gigantic to be localized he bursts all the bounds of nationality and takes his place in history as a huge cosmopolite. As Edward Stanton so finely exclaimed, in announcing that the last breath of the assassinated President had been drawn, "He belongs henceforth to the ages!" He was an immense human.Some men are far mightier than their achievement. What they do is great; but what they are is infinitely greater. Abraham Lincoln is the outstanding example of the men of this towering and gigantic cast. The world contains millions of people who know little of American history, and who have but the haziest notions as to the issues at stake in the Civil War, yet upon whose ears the name of Abraham Lincoln falls like an encrusted tradition, like a golden legend, like a brave, inspiring song. Lincoln climbed Mount Sinai with Moses... Abraham Lincoln's young mother died when he was barely nine. Her husband had to nurse her, close her eyes, make her coffin, and dig her grave. Abraham helped him carry that melancholy burden from the desolated cabin to its lonely resting-place in the woods. He never forgot that mother of his. "All that I am," he used to say, "my angel-mother made me!" And the memory that lingered the longest was the thought of her as she sat in the old log-cabin teaching him the Ten Commandments. Many a time afterwards, when he was asked how he had found the courage to decline some tempting bribe, or to resist some particularly insidious suggestion, he said that, in the critical hour, he heard his mother's voice repeating once more the old, old words: "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods before Me." He treasured all through life her last words: "I am going away from you, Abraham, and shall not return. I know that you will be a good boy, and you will be kind to your Father. I want you to live as I have taught you, to love your Heavenly Father and to keep His commandments." President McKinley has told us how, in that fateful hour (when he left Springfield to assume the Presidency), Lincoln received a flag... On its silken folds he read, beautifully worked, the words: "Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: For the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest. There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life. As I was with Moses, so shall I be with thee The greatest grief of his life was the death of his son. As the boy lay dying, Lincoln's reason seemed in peril. Miss Ida Tarbell has told the sad story with great delicacy and judgment. When the dread blow fell, the nurse and the father stood with bowed heads beside the dead boy, and then the nurse, out of her own deep experience of human sorrow and of divine comfort, pointed the weeping President to her Savior. The work that this private sorrow began, the public sorrow completed. Lincoln had long yearned for a fuller, sweeter, more satisfying faith. "I have been reading the Beatitudes," he tells a friend, "and can at least claim the blessing that is pronounced upon those who hunger and thirst after righteousness." He was to hunger no longer. A few days before his death he told of the way in which the peace of heaven stole into his heart. "When I left Springfield," he said, not without a thought of the flag and its inscription, "I asked the people to pray for me; I was not a Christian. When I buried my son-the severest trial of my life-I was not a Christian. But when I went to Gettysburg, and saw the graves of thousands of our soldiers, I then and there consecrated myself to Christ." From that moment, Dr. Hill says, the habitual attitude of his mind was expressed in the words: "God be merciful to me, a sinner!" With tears in his eyes he told his friends that he had found the faith that he had longed for. He realized, he said, that his heart was changed, and that he loved the Savior. The President was at the Cross! Happily, he lived to see the sunshine that followed the storm. He lived to see Peace and Union and Emancipation triumphant. His last hours were spent amidst services of thanksgiving and festivals of rejoicing. One of these celebrations was being held in Ford's Theater at Washington. The President was there, and attracted as much attention as the actors. But his mind was not on the play. Indeed, it was nearly over when he arrived. He leaned forward, talking, under his breath, to Mrs. Lincoln. The war was over, he said, he would like to take her for a tour of the East. They would visit Palestine-would see Gethsemane and Calvary-would walk together the streets of Jeru___! But before the word was finished, a pistol shot - "the maddest pistol - shot in the history of the ages" - rang through the theater.
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