y in their way as their distinguished son had in his way. How
do we know? Because when God wants to call a strong man He begins by
calling his father and mother. There never was a great man who did not
have a great ancestry, even though the greatness may have been latent
and unconscious.

Every strong man stands upon the shoulders of his ancestors. When you
start for the top of Pike's Peak you start at Omaha. When you reach
Denver you are six thousand feet in the air, and Pike's Peak is
shouldered up on the foot-hills. Socrates is a great teacher, but look
at Sphroniscus, the sculptor, his father. Paganini is a great musician,
but Paganini was born of musicians whose wrists had muscles that stood
out like whip-cords. Bach is a great musician, but there were forty
people of the name of Bach mentioned in musical dictionaries. Charles
Darwin is the great scientist, but there were four generations of
scientists who had made ready for Darwin, just as there were seven
generations of scholars that culminated in Emerson. And standing in the
shadow behind Abraham Lincoln are half a dozen generations of men and
women who handed forward to him a perfect logic engine, a sound mind, in
a sound body; a mental instrument that worked without fever and without
friction and without flaw. At the hands of Stradivarius one piece of
apple wood is fashioned into a violin. If Stradivarius passes by the
other board because he has not time, let no man say the board that was
undeveloped was not full of latent music. The Divine Artist and
Architect shaped Abraham Lincoln's nature into a world instrument, but
the same quality and the stuff were in his father and mother, who lived
and died a bundle of roots that were never planted, a handful of
blossoms that never fruited.

Lincoln's father and mother were like the crystal caves in their own
Kentucky. There the traveller is led through a cave of crystals, newly
discovered. One day a farmer ploughing thought the ground sounded hollow
under his feet. Going to the barn, he brought a spade and opened up an
aperture. Flinging down a rope, his friends let the explorer down, and
when the torches were lighted, lo, a cave as of amethysts, sapphires and
diamonds! For generations the cave had been undiscovered and the jewels
unknown. Wild beasts had wandered above these flashing gems, and still
more savage men had lived and fought and died there. And yet just
beneath was this cave of splendid beauty. Oh, path