and "good for nothing at all-a merely pernicious abstrac tion."

"We all agree,” he continued, "that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper practical relation with the Union, and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those States is to again get them into the proper practical relation. I believe that it is not only possible, but in fact easier, to do this without deciding or even considering whether these States have ever been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad. Let us all join in doing the acts necessary to restoring the proper practical relations between these States and the Union, and each forever after innocently indulge his own opinion whether in doing the acts he brought the States from without into the Union, or only gave them proper assistance, they never having been out of it."

As the winter passed into the spring the President saw every day that the end was approaching and as he realized that at last the mighty problem over which he had agonized for so many months was unfolding, as he saw not only that the primary object for which he had been struggling—the Union-was to be attained but that even before this end was attained the evil which had caused all the trouble was to be eradicated, he experienced a lofty exaltation, a fresh realization that the will of God prevails in human affairs. From the time of his election he had been animated by a simple theory:-If we do right, God will be with us and if God is with us we cannot fail. He had struggled to see what was right and no man or men had been able to bring to bear pressure heavy enough to turn him from a step he had concluded was right. Yet as the days went on he saw his cause fail again and again. Many times it seemed on the verge of destruction. He pondered deeply over this seeming contradiction. Was he wrong in his own judgment of

what was right or could it be that God had some end in view different from either that of the North or South? Late in 1862, evidently to help clear up his mind, he wrote down on a slip of paper a statement of the puzzling problem. His secretaries later found it and published it in their history.

"The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true; that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power on the minds of the now contestants, he could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun, he could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.'

As time went on and his conviction that his cause was right grew stronger, in spite of the reverses he suffered, he began to feel that God's purpose was to wipe out slavery and that the war was a divine retribution on North as well as South for the toleration of slavery. In a letter written in April, 1864, he expressed this view:

At the end of three years' struggle, the nation's condition is not what either party, or any man, devised or expected. God alone can claim it. Whither it is tending seems plain. If God now wills the removal of a great wrong, and wills also that we of the North, as well as you of the South, shall pay fairly for our complicity in that wrong, impartial history will find therein new cause to attest and revere the justice and goodness of God."

By the spring of 1865 this explanation of the continuation of the war fully possessed him and in his inaugural he laid it

before the people in a few solemn, beautiful sentences-a prophet's cry to a nation bidding them to complete the task the Lord God Almighty had set before them, and to expiate in humility their sins.

66

The Almighty has his own purposes," he said. 66 6 Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.' If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope fervently do we pray-that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'

"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan-to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations."

It was in this lofty spirit that Abraham Lincoln entered on his second term. Every act of the few days of that term which he served was in full harmony with the words of his inaugural. Although the criticism on him for pardoning prisoners of war was at that time very bitter, even General Grant protesting against his broad exercise of the pardoning power, he could be persuaded easily to set free