eclares that men have no right to be
anything but humble; and he thereby enters into possession of the most
fruitful and the most universal of all religious ideas.

Lincoln's humility, no less than his liberal intelligence and his
magnanimous disposition, is more democratic than it is American; but in
this, as in so many other cases, his personal moral dignity and his
peculiar moral insight did not separate him from his associates. Like
them, he wanted professional success, public office, and the ordinary
rewards of American life; and like them, he bears no trace of political
or moral purism. But, unlike them, he was not the intellectual and moral
victim of his own purposes and ambitions; and unlike them, his life is a
tribute to the sincerity and depth of his moral insight. He could never
have become a national leader by the ordinary road of insistent and
clamorous self-assertion. Had he not been restored to public life by
the crisis, he would have remained in all probability a comparatively
obscure and a wholly under-valued man. But the political ferment of 1856
and the threat of ruin overhanging the American Union pushed him again
on to the political highway; and once there, his years of intellectual
discipline enabled him to play a leading and a decisive part. His
personality obtained momentum, direction, and increasing dignity from
its identification with great issues and events. He became the
individual instrument whereby an essential and salutary national purpose
was fulfilled; and the instrument was admirably effective, precisely
because it had been silently and unconsciously tempered and formed for
high achievement. Issue as he was of a society in which the cheap tool,
whether mechanical or personal, was the immediately successful tool, he
had none the less labored long in the making of a consummate individual
instrument.

Some of my readers may protest that I have over-emphasized the
difference between Lincoln and his contemporary fellow-countrymen. In
order to exalt the leader have I not too much disparaged the followers?
Well, a comparison of this kind always involves the risk of unfairness;
but if there is much truth in the foregoing estimate of Lincoln, the
lessons of the comparison are worth its inevitable risk. The ordinary
interpretation of Lincoln as a consummate democrat and a "Man of the
People" has implied that he was, like Jackson, simply a bigger and a
better version of the plain American citizen