ost indescribable
quality which we call in general clearness or truth, and which appears
in the physical structure as health, in the moral constitution as
honesty, in the mental structure as sagacity, and in the region of
active life as practicalness. This one character, with many sides, all
shaped by the same essential force and testifying to the same inner
influences, was what was powerful in him and decreed for him the life he
was to live and the death he was to die. We must take no smaller view
than this of what he was. Even his physical conditions are not to be
forgotten in making up his character. We make too little always of the
physical; certainly we make too little of it here if we lose out of
sight the strength and muscular activity, the power of doing and
enduring, which the backwoods-boy inherited from generations of
hard-living ancestors, and appropriated for his own by a long discipline
of bodily toil. He brought to the solution of the question of labor in
this country not merely a mind, but a body thoroughly in sympathy with
labor, full of the culture of labor, bearing witness to the dignity and
excellence of work in every muscle that work had toughened and every
sense that work had made clear and true. He could not have brought the
mind for his task so perfectly, unless he had first brought the body
whose rugged and stubborn health was always contradicting to him the
false theories of labor, and always asserting the true.

As to the moral and mental powers which distinguished him, all
embraceable under this general description of clearness of truth, the
most remarkable thing is the way in which they blend with one another,
so that it is next to impossible to examine them in separation. A great
many people have discussed very crudely whether Abraham Lincoln was an
intellectual man or not; as if intellect were a thing always of the same
sort, which you could precipitate from the other constituents of a man's
nature and weigh by itself, and compare by pounds and ounces in this man
with another. The fact is, that in all the simplest characters that line
between the mental and moral natures is always vague and indistinct.
They run together, and in their best combinations you are unable to
discriminate, in the wisdom which is their result, how much is moral and
how much is intellectual. You are unable to tell whether in the wise
acts and words which issue from such a life there is more of the
righteousness tha