LINCOLN

I like to think of Lincoln stopping to chat with an old man who stood barefoot and shivering on a frosty morning, trying to earn a dollar chopping wood so that he might buy some shoes. It was illness, not idleness, that had caused the man’s destitute condition. Lincoln stripped off his coat, told the old man to go home, and get warm, and with the powerful ax swing of the rail splitter, finished his job for him. I like to think of Lincoln riding circuit with other Illinois lawyers, ignoring their amused gibes when he got off his horse to search for a robin’s nest from which two tiny robins had been blown by a brisk spring wind.

I like to think of him picking his way through the mire to re- lease a squealing pig caught under a fence—partly to spare the feelings of the pig and partly to save the food supply of a stranger. In a certain sense even a stranger was a neighbor.—G. B. F.

H. g Anti-Christians make much of the fact that Lincoln was not so ardent a churchgoer as he might have been. Perhaps not. But I have as yet to find anyone who will deny that Lincoln was a great Christian.