Classic Audiobook Collection - Abraham Lincoln - The Practical Mystic by Francis Grierson ~ Full Audiobook [biography]

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

Abraham Lincoln - The Practical Mystic by Francis Grierson audiobook. Genre: biography Francis Grierson's Abraham Lincoln - The Practical Mystic is a brief, provocative portrait of the 16th president that shifts the spotlight from policy and battlefield headlines to the inner life behind them. Writing in the early twentieth century, Grierson argues that Lincoln's greatest strength was a rare fusion of hardheaded realism and spiritual perception: a leader who could weigh men and events with a lawyer's precision, yet remain guided by a profound sense of moral law, destiny, and the unseen forces shaping history. Through vignettes, character sketches, and reflections on Lincoln's words and habits, the book follows Lincoln from his frontier simplicity into the pressures of national leadership, examining how patience, humor, and empathy became tools of statecraft. Grierson explores themes such as the divine will, premonition and intuition, the tension between material power and conscience, and the way Lincoln's quiet reserve could conceal deep contemplation. Part biography, part philosophical essay, this is an interpretive study that invites listeners to reconsider Lincoln not only as a master politician, but as a man whose faith in higher principles informed every practical choice. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 1 (00:14:19) Chapter 2 (00:28:07) Chapter 3 (00:45:47) Chapter 4 (01:02:31) Chapter 5 (01:13:55) Chapter 6 (01:28:59) Chapter 7 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Abraham Lincoln, the practical mystic by Francis Grierson. The practical mysticism of Abraham Lincoln. A knowledge of the influences which ruled the life of Lincoln, the greatest of practical mystics, is essential now that a new form of paganism and slavery threatens humanity. In Lincoln's time, the black slaves of America had to be freed. In our time, the white slaves of Europe have to be freed. We have returned to the conquest. History is being repeated, but on a far vaster scale.

The whole world is groaning under the threatened deeds of tyranny that seeks to become an absolute. What Abraham Lincoln stood for in the middle of the 19th century, the English-speaking peoples must stand for at the beginning of the 20th. Materialism produces Prussian autocracy. The spiritual power brought America safely through the order ordeals of the civil war. But the material and the spiritual cannot both rule at the same time. One must yield authority to the other, and we cannot succeed by denying the very thing

which caused Lincoln to triumph over all enemies and obstacles. In 1862, the Reverend Byron Sutherland went with some friends of the President to call upon him. On September the 15th, 1872, Dr Sutherland wrote to the Reverend J. A. Reid. The president began by saying, The ways of God are mysterious and profound beyond all comprehension. Who by searching can find him out? Now, judging after the manner of men, taking counsel of our sympathies and feelings,

if it had been left to us to determine it, we would have had no war. And going farther back to the occasion of it, we would have had no evil. There is the mystery of the universe which no man can solve, And it is at that point that human understanding backs down. There is nothing left, but for the heart of man to take up faith and believe where it cannot reason.

Now, I believe we are all agents and instruments of divine providence. On both sides, we are working out the will of God. Yet how strange the spectacle! Here is one half of the nation prostrated in prayer that God will help to destroy the union and build up a government upon the cornerstone of human bondage. And here is the other half equally earnest in their prayers and efforts to defeat a purpose which they regard as so repugnant to their ideas of human nature and the rights of society, as well as liberty and independence.

They want slavery, we want freedom. They want to serve our class, we want to make equality practicable as far as possible. And they are Christians and we are Christians. They and we are praying and fighting for results exactly the opposite. What must God think of such a posture of affairs? There is but one solution. Self-deception. Somewhere there is a fearful heresy in our religion,

and I cannot think it lies in the love of liberty and in the aspirations of the human soul. I hold myself in my present position, and with the authority invested in me as an instrument of Providence, I have my own views and purposes. I have my convictions of duty and my ideas of what is right to be done. But I am conscious every moment

that all I am and all I have is subject to the control of a higher power. Nevertheless, I am no fatalist. I believe in the supremacy of the human conscience and that men are responsible beings, that God has a right to hold them and will hold them to a strict personal account for the deeds done in the body. God alone knows the issue of this business. He has destroyed nations

from the map of history for their sins. Nevertheless, my hopes prevail generally above my fears for our republic. The times are dark. The spirits of ruin are abroad in all their power, and the mercy of God alone can save us. The Divine Will September 30th, 1862 when everything looked dark and the future of our lives, the future of America was uncertain, Lincoln wrote the following meditation on the divine will. The will of God prevails. In great contests, each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, 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 affect his purpose. I am almost ready to say this is probably true. That God wills this contest and wills that it shall not end yet. By his great power on the minds of the contestants, he could have either saved or destroyed the union without war. Yet the contest began. And having begun, he could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds. The mystical awakening. A mystical epoch is upon us, and like all vital movements, it has come without systematic propaganda and without organized effort. The world upheaval did not cause this new movement. It has simply advanced it by stripping materialism of its elusive trappings,

and showing it naked to the civilized world. It is not the work of one man or any single group, sect or nation. Its characteristics are Anglo-American, and its development will prove the only antidote to the new pagan culture, which opposes not only Christian morals, but everything that places the spiritual above the material. Abraham Lincoln, the greatest practical mystic the world has known for 1900 years, is the one man whose life and example ought to be clearly set before the English-speaking peoples

at the supreme climax in the history of civilization. The thoughts, incidents, manifestations, which the majority of historians glide over with a careless touch or sidetrack because of the lack of moral courage are the only things that count in the life of that great sear. His whole existence was controlled by influences beyond the ken of the most astute politicians of his time, His genius was superhuman, and since this world is not governed by chance, a power was at work which for ordained him for his unique mission. W. H. Herndon has this to say in his biography of the immortal statesman. Nature had burned into him her holy fire and stamped him with the seal of her greatness.

In other words, the seal of the practical mystic, which may be taken as the keynote to the spiritual theme of his marvellous experiences, for it is futile to continue to harp on Lincoln's political acumen, his knowledge of law, his understanding of the people, his judgment of individuals, his poverty, his disregard of the conventional, as causes of his greatness. The same may be said of thousands of others, yet there is no other Lincoln. To arrive at a just appreciation of the man and his achievements, I felt it essential to read very carefully all the books written by those most intimate with the great president, a study which has required a period of 30 years. The writing of The Valley of Shadows was one of the results of that study. That book being, as far as I could make it, a depiction of the spiritual atmosphere of the Lincoln country in Lincoln's time,

the atmosphere in which he lived and moved, thought, worked. Too long has the materialism of weights and bushel measures dimmed the light that shines from the example of that incomparable sear. Too long have politicians used his name to fish for gudgeons in the muddy waters of sectional politics. Too long has Lincoln been held up in speeches and electioneering manoeuvres as a politician who arrived because he was honest. As if Webster, Calhoun, Clay, Sumner and scores of others were not equally honest without ever attaining a world influence. What caused Lincoln's honesty? His conscience. And what created his conscience? His innate mystical knowledge of the difference between good and evil. Philosophers and puppets,

the solemn dignity of duty and the sham dignity of ambition. His was the clear vision in the darkest hour while others were magnifying events through long-distance spectacles, or minimizing them in near-sighted details. The mystical trend now visible in England and America, is not a revival but a renaissance. It has come in the natural course of events, being the only thing that responds to the spiritual aspirations and needs of the dispensation ushered in by the Great War.

The Renaissance of practical mysticism is now apparent both in and outside the churches, but its great influence is exerted on the large class which, before the war, had no religious convictions of any kind. We have arrived at a climax in history. All methods and systems are passing, but not the old fundamental truths.

Conditions, not principles, have changed, and our attitude towards things has changed with conditions. Thousands can now see clearly where once they saw through a veil of agnosticism, it required a mighty force to lift the veil, and a vast amount of machinery and metaphysics had to combine to accomplish such a miracle. But the miracle is here, alive with a vital flame unknown since the days of the prophets and the apostles. The spiritual renaissance is not a drawing-room fad. It is not founded on a passing whim. Novelties and opinions shift with the wind, and people who are influenced by them are influenced by shadows. Mere notions can never take the place of

ideas. Novelties possess no fundamental basis on which the spirit of man can build, and the difference between an idea and a notion is the difference between a university and a lunatic asylum. The spiritual renaissance is not confined to any particular profession, and this is why it is making headway among people of such diverse views. The war has crushed the juice out of the orange on the tree of pleasure, and nothing is left, but the peel over which materialism is slipping to its doom. This stupendous movement was not sprung upon the world in a night. It has had its slow stages of development. Everything comes and goes in cycles which are graded in kind and proceed in accordance with the mutative, law. This spiritual movement has had its special phases of preparation. It is not true that the

voices of the prophets have been inaudible. What is true is that every voice that has sounded since the dawn of historical civilization has been heard and heeded. Emerson uttered a great mystical truth when he said, a book written for three will gravitate to three. And similarly, a voice intended for three will be heard and heeded by three. The agnostic, a the mystic. Herndon's agnosticism left no lasting impression on the mind of Lincoln. Lincoln was more or less influenced by Herndon at the beginning of their acquaintance, but such influence did not last long.

This is remarkable, because Herndon was a man with a powerful originality and a strong will. Another curious thing is that Mr. Herndon, in spite of his probity, his practical ability and his talent as a lawyer, never became known beyond. his own state. He never was put forward as a leader. Perhaps he entertained no particular ambition to lead, being too much of a philosopher, but the remark is in order that what was lacking in his temperament was just a spark of the mystical illumination which gave Lincoln his faith, his conviction and his power. No doubt, Herndon was singularly fitted for the position he held with Lincoln for the space of 20 years. Had he been a leader in public affairs, he could not

have aided Lincoln as he did. That the great president never had a mentor is plain to all who have studied the best biographies. He did sometimes act upon suggestions from friends in matters of minor importance in his private affairs. When one day, after he had become president, Mrs. Lincoln informed him that the gossips declared he was being ruled by Seward. His reply was, I may not rule myself out, certainly Seward shall not. The only rule is my conscience, following God in it, and these men will have to learn that yet. And, Seward did learn it, as well as Stanton and Chase and every member of the cabinet, and all others who came within the radius of his mystical circuit.

Indeed, the generals all learnt it, some of them to their sorrow long before the war ended. Lincoln's authority became apparent to all whenever he delivered a speech on important occasions. Then, as Judge Whitney has said, he was as terrible as an army with banners. Colonel Henry Waterson, in his memorable address before the Lincoln Union in Chicago, puts the question, where did Shakespeare get his genius? Where did Mozart get his music? Whose hand smote the liar of the Scottish plowman? God alone.

And if Lincoln was not inspired of God, then there is no such thing as special providence or the interposition of divine powers in the affairs of men. And of Section 1. Section 2 of Abraham Lincoln, the practical mystic by Francis Grierson. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. The logic of the supernatural. Judge Henry C. Whitney has asked the following questions. By what magic spell was this the greatest moral transformation in all profane history wrought?

What genius sought out this roving child of the forest, this obscure flatboatman, and placed him on the lonely heights of immortal fame? Why was this best of men made the chief propitiation for our national sins? Was his progress causative or fortuitous? Was it logical or supernatural? Was the unseen power, or he himself, the architect of his fortune? The blunders that were committed by raw and reckless commanders in the field were sufficient to make angels weep, but they were all mosaics in the process of fate to work out the divine plan.

If we could see the whole scheme of human redemption, it would be quite clear to us that not only Abraham Lincoln, US Grant, W.T. Sherman, but equally Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Raphael Semes, were necessary instruments of the great disposer of event. that the bullet which terminated the glorious career of the president was not more surely sped by fate to its mark than was the bullet which ended the life of Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh and which ultimately averted ruin to the Union forces on that blood-stained field

and that in the sublime procession of destiny all events apparent accidents calamities crimes and blunders were agents of the omnipotent will now as cause, then as interlude or eddy, a non as effort, all working apparently, and to human comprehension fortuitously, but in reality all harmoniously to their divine appointed end. The mystical mood. There was to me, says Henry B. Rankin in his personal recollections of Abraham Lincoln, always an unapproachable grandeur in the man when he was in this mood of inner solitude. It isolated and I always thought, insulted him above his ordinary life.

History will discern and reverently disclose the strength in Lincoln's character and the executive foresight for which this mood gave him revelings. And the Reverend Joseph Fort Newton adds to the sentiments of his friend Rankin these words. Lincoln was a man whom to know was a kind of religion. His deep musings on the ways of God on the souls of men, on the principles of justice and the laws of liberty, bore fruit an exalted character and exact insight. Hence a style of speech remarkable for its lucidity, direction, and forthright power with no waste of words,

tinged always by a temperament at once elusive and alluring, which Bryce compares to the weighty eloquence of Cromwell without its haziness. Going into the silence. During an important criminal trial, Amcim McWilliams said, Lincoln will pitch in heavy now for he has hid. One who knew him declared, he seemed never alone. I have frequently seen him in the midst of a court in session with his mind completely withdrawn from the busy scene before his eyes,

was completely abstracted as if he were in absolute solitude. Judge Whitney wrote, In religion Lincoln was in essence a mystic, and all his adoration was in accordance with the tenets of that order. A judgment which agrees with that of Alexander H. Stevens, vice president of the Southern Confederacy, with Lincoln the Union rose to the sublimity of a religious mysticism. The mystical mood cannot be likened to any other mood.

People in a hurry never experience such a mental state. Personal ambition forbids it and the feeling of vain glory renders such a condition impossible. What renders the life of Lincoln so instructive is the fact that with him everything was so natural. He did not experiment. He did not practice special hours and seasons. He had no fixed times for this or that.

He professed no subtle methods of inducing moods and took no stimulants. Nature and a mystical providence arranged and provided. His moods were between himself and his God. No one ever dared approach him as to the why or the wherefore of his silence. And it is proper here to comment on the instinctive good sense

of the American people in whose midst Lincoln passed his whole life. They instinctively knew too much to presume upon the privacy of his mystical moods. In this, their attitude was wholly admirable.

The American people were at the time practical democratic seers, without whom the greatest practical mystic could not have existed. The Lincoln people possessed intuition and illumination without resorting to human aid is clear and irrefutable. His words were simple and his actions were simple, like those of the Hebrew seers. He announced, and he pronounced, without subtle explanations or mysterious formulas,

all which proves that practical mysticism can nourish as much under a democracy as under any other form of government. Men do not receive their gifts from those in power. they come into the world with them. Lincoln was opposed on all sides from the start. He had to contend with poverty, provincial ignorance, aristocratic prejudice, academic opposition, and he had against him his homely features,

his awkward bearing, and the lack of influential patronage. He had no family connections that could be of assistance anywhere at any time. Never had there been a man of great interlational so absolutely alone in the intellectual world, so removed from social and political favours of time and circumstance. Invisible Powers

We are compelled to look at all sides of Lincoln's political career in order to arrive at a just appreciation of his stupendous achievements. And when that is done, we have to dismiss the notion that he succeeded because of his brilliant intellectual gifts. Others possessed great intellects without attaining altitudes of commanding power and enduring fame. Why did the influence of Caesar, Darius, Alexander, Bonaparte and Bismarck

cease as soon as they passed away because the influence they exerted was based on material dominion. With the collapse of the material, everything collapses. The material can never go beyond or take precedence of the spiritual. Marcus Aurelius is read today

because he placed spiritual things above all worldly possessions and privileges. The universe was created by a supreme mind, and the direction of affairs is in the hands of this all-seeing power, manifesting in all forms, sometimes personal, sometimes collective. In Lincoln's case, it took a pronounced individual form, isolated and unique, as in Moses. The ease with which Lincoln overcame opposition amazed, those who are near him. They judged it miraculous. Miracles and manifestations for which science has no definition, no analysis. Lincoln's intelligence was not bound by the known rules and

laws of science. It requires intuition and illumination for its realization. Such intelligence cannot be handled in detail as chemists handle the elements of matter. In the mystical world, all the elements, forces and combinations act and develop together as one manifestation at one time. No mental chemistry can separate them. The fusion of spirit and matter. The existence of a great man,

says Victor Cousin, the French philosopher, is not the creation of arbitrary choice. He is not a thing that may or may not exist. He is not merely an individual. Too much or too little, of individuality are equally destructive to the character of a great man. On the one hand, individuality of itself is an element of what is pitiful and little, because particularity, the contingent and the finite tends unceasingly to division, to dissolution and to nothingness.

On the other hand, every general tends to absolute unity. It possesses greatness, but it is exposed to the risk of losing itself in abstractions. The great man is the harmonious, combination of what is particular with what is general. This combination constitutes the standard value of his greatness, and it involves a twofold condition. First, of representing the general spirit of his nation, because it is in his relation to that general spirit that his greatness consists, and secondly of representing the general spirit which confers upon his greatness in his own person in a real form, that is, in a finite, positive, visible and determinate form, so that what is general may not suppress what is particular, and which is particular may not

dissipate and dissolve what is general, that the infinite and the finite may be blended together in that proportion which truly constitutes human greatness, all of which applies to Lincoln. Conceive a great machine, wrote Gizzo, the historian, the design of which is sent, in a single mind, though its various parts are entrusted to various workmen, separated from, and strangers to each other. No one of them understands the work as a whole, nor the general result which he concerns in producing, but everyone executes with intelligence and freedom by rational and voluntary acts the particular task assigned to him. It is thus, by the hand of man, the designs of providence are wrought out in the government of the world,

It is thus that the two great facts which are apparent in the history of civilization come to coexist. On the one hand, those portions of it which may be considered as fated, or which happen without the control of human knowledge or will, on the other hand the part played in it by the freedom and intelligence of man and what he contributes to it by means of his own knowledge and will. His miraculous progress. One of the most searching biographers of Lincoln maintains that between the ages of 14 and 28,

he displayed no sign of embryonic or assured greatness. If this be true, it means that none of Lincoln's early friends were intuitive enough to discover his greatness. Even the best writers who have dealt with this fascinating subject have failed to see all the facts, all the influences, all the correlated powers in connection with what looks to many

like a life of miracle. Intelligence and power are not attained by any mental hocus pocus or metaphysics. Diamonds in the rough are still diamonds, or no one would think of having them polished. The same laws work in nature as in human nature. The great man is born, but he is not born with all his faculties developed,

and he, like others, must pass through stages of progressive development. There is not one law for genius, another for mere talent. A distinguished writer says, Lincoln achieved greatness, but can the genesis of the mystery be analyzed? Certainly not by the ordinary process of ordinary philosophers and scientists. What or writers up to the present have failed to see is that Lincoln's powers were a combination of the normal practical and the practical supernatural.

His supernaturalism was positive, mathematical and absolute. The only things which Lincoln had to learn as he went were the modes of application. He had to learn system and method, as was natural, but the principle came into the world with him. Everything that is concrete appears simple. The various qualities and elements that produce what we call mental illumination

are hidden from the crowd, and even from those who most professed to understand. Jesse Dubois wrote to Judge Whitney that, after having been intimately associated with Lincoln for 25 years, I now find that I never knew him. The great man had unconsciously deceived his friends because of his outward simplicity,

and this outward freedom was backed by his simplicity of speech and direct logic. It was all too simple. They were fooled by the outward material because the inward mystical took that form. His friends liked the man and worked to elect him principally for that reason, and this is why they were astonished later on when the practical mystic rose clear above all systems of politics and all the accepted philosophies

and accomplished the miraculous. The impossible happened. The president had to go more than halfway through the civil war before the real Lincoln became manifest to observing critics. End of Section 2. Section 3 of Abraham Lincoln the Practical Mystic by Francis Grierson, This Libravox recording is in the public domain. A prophetic witness.

In his book, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln, Judge Whitney comments, As early as 1856, independent of all contemporary opinion, I conceived the idea that Mr. Lincoln was a prodigy of intellectual and moral force. Others associated with this deemed him superlatively great, but still human. I went farther. my view was definite and pronounced that Lincoln was ordained for a greater than a merely human mission, and I avowed this belief as early as that time. His character as a lawyer was controlled and moulded by his character as a man.

He understood human nature thoroughly and was an expert in the cross-examination of witnesses. If a witness told the truth without evasion, Lincoln was respectful and patronising to him. But he would score a perjured witness unmercifully. He took no notes, but remembered everything quite as well as those who did so. I remember once we all, court and lawyers, except Lincoln, insisted that a witness had sworn so-and-so, but it turned out that Lincoln was correct and that he recollected better than the United Bench and Bar. But with all his candour, there was a method in shrewdness which Leonard Sweat well understood and which he had thus forcibly expressed.

As the trial progressed, where most lawyers object, he would say he reckoned it would be fair to admit this sin or that, and sometimes, when his adversary could not quite prove what Lincoln knew to be the truth, he would say he reckoned it would be fair to admit the truth to be so-and-so. When he did object to the court, when he heard his objections answered, he would often say, well, I reckon I must be wrong. He was wise as a serpent in the trial of a case, but I have got too many scars from his blows to certify that he was harmless as a dove. When the whole thing is unraveled, the adversary begins to see that what he was so blandly giving away was simply what he couldn't get and keep.

By giving away six points and carrying the seventh, he carried his case, and the whole case hanging on the seventh, he traded everything, which would give him the least aid in carrying that. Anyone who took Lincoln for a simple-minded man would very soon wake up on his back in a ditch. Lincoln's simplicity. There are two kinds of simplicity.

One is without reason or discrimination, that believes all that is seen and heard if presented under the guise of honesty. The other is the kind that penetrates beneath manner, dress, verbiage, and meets all subterfuge, artifices and sophistry with statements and facts at once logical and irrefutable, and irrefuge. irrefutable. Lincoln was the most simple man in dress, in speech, in manners, in looks that ever stood before the world in so great a role. But his intellect was anything but simple. He was never deceived by cunning devices and cunning manoeuvres. Bacon has an essay showing the difference

between cunning and wisdom, and it may be said that Lincoln's knowledge took the form of wisdom as distinguished from cunning. His management of a law case was that of a seer. The points he may were not made for personal gratification, but for love of truth and justice. Not only he did not want to risk being deceived, he took every precaution to ensure against deception. Here is where his welding of reason and logic produced in his marvelous intellect a kind of clairvoyance which his friends at the bar felt but could not analyze. The combination was unheard of. The lawyers and the judges could only reason from their own experience. They could only cite examples in their own lives, and this man Lincoln was unlike all that had been

and all that was. Lincoln's simplicity seemed to the casual observer of a character so trusting and so naive that it deceived all the members of his cabinet during the first two years of the war. They were used to smart men, clever men, academic men. They called for the routine of respectability and official dignity. To their minds, the president seemed pliable and willing, and they set about instructing him in the ABC of high politics and the first principles of statesmanship. The President was in no way frustrated. He understood them in advance, having weighed them in the balance of his own judgment.

He had found them honest but inexperienced, sincere but saucy. He knew they were living in an atmosphere of low visibility. At the proper moment he would turn on the searchlights and give them their bearings. Some of them expected to act as the President's pilot. while others expected to be captain of the ship of state with the president as pilot. It took them more than two years to find out that this pioneer of the West was captain, pilot and master of charts on a political sea the like of which they little dreamed existed. In one sense, he wore out their obstinacy by his patience.

In another he awaited opportunities to attest their errors and show his judgment, but matters proceeded with such calm that they could not understand, with what power he acted, with what prescience he divined. What mystified them was the combination of the practical with the spiritual, their clear vision with the maxims of ordinary business affairs, the penetration of the future while working in seeming darkness. Lincoln's clairvoyant wit. Lincoln was not deceived by an outward show of religion.

A southern woman begged the president to have her husband released from a northern prison. for, she said, although he is a rebel, he is a very religious man. Lincoln replied, I am glad to hear that, because any man who wants to disrupt this union needs all the religion in sight to save him. He treated with indifference, people who commandeered. A haughty woman came to Lincoln and demanded a colonel's commission for her son. I demand it, she said. Not as a favour, but as a right, sir, my grandfather fought at Lexington.

My father fought at New Orleans, and my husband was killed at Monterey. I guess, madam, was Lincoln's reply? Your family has done enough for the country. It is time to give someone else a chance. When Hugh McCulloch, Secretary of the Treasury in Lincoln's second term, presented a delegation of New York bankers at the White House, McCulloch said, These gentlemen of New York have come on to see the Secretary of the Treasury about our new loan.

As bankers, they are obliged to hold our national. national securities. I can vouch for their patriotism and loyalty, for, as the good book says, where the treasuries, there will the heart be also. To which, Lincoln replied, there is another text, Mr. McCulloch, I remember, that might equally apply. Where the carcasses there will the eagles be gathered together. Lincoln condemned as tedious a certain Greek history. When a diplomat present said, the author of that history, Mr. President, is one of the profoundest scholars of the age, no one has plunged more deeply into the sacred fount of learning. Yes, replied Lincoln, or come up drier.

When in Chicago in 1860, the mayor John Wentworth, asked Lincoln why he did not get some astute politician to run him. Lincoln replied that, events are not a man's own exertions, made presidents. To Henry C. Whitney, Lincoln remarked, Chad and Ray and those fellows think I don't see anything, but I see all around them. I see better what they want to do with me than they do themselves. They were deceived not by Lincoln who never cared what individuals thought, but by nature which often sets a trap for people who live in a world of their own illusions. Nature, the medium through which the divine mind manifests,

is, so to speak, a mask through which egoists cannot penetrate and by which the cunning are led to destruction. Lincoln let them talk and even act, knowing that they themselves were the tools for their own undoing. While the ward politicians and others who thought themselves far superior laid their plans, schemed and intrigued, the man of clear vision awaited and perturbed the events which he knew would put them all in their proper places. Little did they dream that they were mere incidents among the millions of incidents.

The go to the making of one epoch-making event. The practical mystic is little concerned with incidents. the multitude do not know in what direction they're going, moved and influenced as they are by the incidental, the accidental, the shifting illusions in which they live. But the man who knows why they are influenced also knows why he is influenced. Lincoln was patient with the men who considered him a sort of political accident.

He understood their point of view. He did not entertain feelings of revenge. Hundreds of men like John Wentworth are only mentioned today because of some passing incident which connected them with the man whom they regarded as a failure in politics. A prophetic vision of Hades that William Blake was a mystic of the practical kind

there can be no question. In art and in poetry, he had that illumination which Lincoln had in statesmanship. The New York Times says that a century has failed to heap the dust of oblivion over England's greatest mystic, William Blake, is exemplified by the reproduction in a recent issue of country life of one of Blake's engravings for Dante's Inferno,

in which four fiends with cruel faces are torturing a soul in hell. The face of the chief devil, who is not actually engaged in the torture, but is an eager and interested spectator, might easily be taken for a portrait of the German emperor. As suggested by W.F. Budiland, the familiar up-term must have, of puzzled Blake in his vision. He represented them as tusks growing from the corners of the

mouth. It is to be noted that this fiend alone among the four has the tusks. It is recorded of Blake as a lad that his father would have apprenticed him to Rylans the court engraver, a man much liked and in great prosperity at the time, but Blake objected, saying, Father, I do not like his face. He looks as if he would live to be hanged. Twelve years later, Rylans committed forgery and the prophecy came true. Blake's visions, startling though they be, are not more startling than the prophecies made by Lincoln, as, for instance, his prophecy of prohibition, women's rights,

and the end of slavery. Not to mention his visions concerning himself, the practical mystic sees through, the scientific materialist sees only the surface. Eternity is the everlasting now. Blake drew a faithful portrait of the Kaiser Wilhelm I. second of Germany long before the Kaiser was born, and Tycho Brahe predicted the birth of a Swedish conqueror, and what he would accomplish. In these things there is no place for chance, nor is it

true that the practical mystic is limited to poetry or art, or to music, or to religion, politics, and philosophy. Neither is the practical mystic confined to any particular social class or any creed. Abraham Lincoln could not have directed affairs, had he been a recluse. Before he became an adept in the direction of material affairs, he had to be familiar with the practical ways of the world, and as a lawyer he passed through a school that left no place for vague theories or vain illusions. He frequently stripped others of their illusions, but, being free of illusions himself, he had none to lose.

This made him invulnerable. His enemies were swayed by theories. Nothing short of knowledge sufficed for this man who reduced his adversaries to the position where they were kept constantly on the alert to know what manoeuvre to employ next. They moved in a region of guesswork, where there was no law except that of their own confusion and discomfiture.

Shakespeare and Lincoln. Lincoln, says Judge Whitney, was one of the most heterogeneous characters that ever played a part in the great drama of history, and it was for this reason that he was so greatly misjudged and misunderstood, that he was on the one hand described, as a mere humorist, a sort of Artemis Ward or Mark Twain, that it was thought that by some irony of fate,

a low comedian had got into the presidential chair and that the nation was being delivered over to conflagration, while this modern Nero fiddled upon its ruins. One of his peculiarities was his inequality of conduct, his dignity interspersed with freaks of frivolity and inanity, his high aspiration and achievement, and his descent into the most primitive veils of listlessness. In the chief draw of his cabinet table,

all the current joke books of the time were in juxtaposition with official commissions, lacking only the final signature, applications for pardons from death penalties, laws awaiting executive action, and orders which, when launched, would control the fate of a million men and the destinies of unborn generations.

Hence it was that superficial persons, who expected great achievements, to be ushered in with a prologue, could not understand or appreciate that this great man's administration was a succession of acts of grand and heroic statesmanship, or that he was a prodigy of intellect and moral force. The mystic Shakespeare and the Mystic Lincoln have a connecting link in their wit and humour. Had Shakespeare left us only two dramas, Macbeth and Othello, no one would have dreamed of a creation-like fullstaff emanating from the same mind. Yet it is because of the union of the tragic and the humorous, that Shakespeare is universally human,

worldly wise, as well as spiritual and metaphysical. Shakespeare makes of the grave-digger in Hamlet a sort of clown with a spade, and throughout all his dramas, wit and humour, pathos and tragedy go hand in hand. Without his humour, Shakespeare would have been little more than an English racine, where Lincoln humour was made to serve a high psychic purpose. By its means he created a new atmosphere and new conditions, through which he could all the more freely work and act. He brought humour into play for his own good as well as that of others. He was not a theorist or a dreamer of dreams. He was a practical mystic.

A prophecy fulfilled. In a letter written from Springfield, Illinois, August 15, 1855, to the Honourable George Robertson of Lexington, Kentucky, Lincoln said, the autocrat of all the rushes will proclaim his subjects free, sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves. On the day before Lincoln's first inauguration as President of the United States, the autocrat of all the Russians, Alexander II, by imperial decree, emancipated his serfs. While six weeks after the inauguration, the American masters, headed by Jefferson Davis, began the Great War of Secession to perpetuate and spread the institution of slavery.

This is only one of Lincoln's prophecies which proved true. In stating them, he did not pass into an abnormal state. He spoke as one would speak of the coming weather. He did not consult the stars nor any person, before making a prophetic statement. Seeing clearly was as natural to him as eating or sleeping. He was not a psychic machine uttering thoughts which seemed strange and enigmatical to himself

because his intellectual and spiritual powers were part of himself. men of genius are not instruments in the vulgar meaning of the word. They do not act in ignorance of what they are doing and saying. Lincoln, more than any other, could give deliberate reasons for what he did and said, and it is exceedingly difficult to name another in history who was under such logical and commanding control of all the moral and intellectual faculties. When he seemed to the superficial observer to be dreaming, he was reasoning, calculating, comparing, analyzing, weighing, turning things upside down and inside out,

until he satisfied the dictates of his conscience and his sense of moral responsibility. He placed no reliance on halfway measures and palliatives, no faith in the workings of chance. He therefore was not and could never have been a passive instrument in the hands of some unknown power. When it was said of a certain musician that he composed his operas under the direct influence of Mozart,

the answer was, then who influenced Mozart? Great originality belongs to the mystical unity of the supreme intelligence. Had Lincoln imitated Henry Clay, whom he so much admired as a statesman and thinker, what would have become of Lincoln and the country he governed? He who originates is authoritative, and as Carlisle said, all authority is mystical in its origin. In no single thing of importance did Lincoln copy anyone's methods or systems.

His trend of thought was at variance. with the prevailing trend, even of those who are supposed to know the most. End of Section 3. Section 4 of Abraham Lincoln, the practical mystic by Francis Grisson. This Libravovaks recording is in the public domain. The ordinances of heaven. Canst thou bind the sweet influence of Pleiades or lose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazuroth in his season?

Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? Job. Phenomena that arrive with the days, months, seasons, centuries are accompanied by events of corresponding significance in the human world for everything is related to everything else. In 1858, a new party came into being. It was as much a phenomenon in the human world

as the comet of that year was in the starry heavens, an apparition first observed by the Florentine astronomer Donati. Some scientific authorities give Donati's comment an orbit of 2,000, others 3,000 years. Its advent was as unexpected as was the advent of Lincoln. Its immense orbit, the splendor of its train, its seeming close proximity to the earth, the pre-sentiments which had inspired in millions of the people, corresponded with the sentiments and sensations inspired by the phenomenal progress of Lincoln, the avatar of democratic freedom and justice.

The following description is taken from the Valley of Shadows. After a long period of cloudy weather, the sky cleared, and when darkness closed in, the night came with a revelation. Never had such a night been witnessed by living man. For a great comet hung suspended in the shimmering vault, like an immense silver arrow, dominating the world and all the constellations, an unparalleled radiance illum in the prairie.

The atmosphere vibrated with the sky, the strange, mysterious glow. And as the eye looked upward, it seemed as if the earth was moving slowly towards the stars. The sky resembled a phantasmagoria seen from the summit of some far and fabulous Eden. The Milky Way spread across the zenith like a confluence of celestial altars, flecked with myriads of gleaming tapers, and countless orbs rose out of the luminous veil-like fleecy spires tipped with the blaze of opal and sapphire. The great stellar clusters appeared as beacons on the shores of infinite worlds. A night was the window from which the soul looked out on eternity.

Such was the celestial apparition that ushered in the new party, which was to support Abraham Lincoln and send him to the White House. In all vital phenomena, there is periodicity. The barometer comes to its minimum height for the day between four and five in the evening. Again, it is at its maximum height between 8 and 10 in the morning, and between 8 and 10 in the evening. The two first of these periods is when the electric tension is at its minimum, at its maximum during the two latter periods.

The basic unit of the lunar day is 12 hours. An ordinary or solar day is two days, and an ordinary week is two weeks. This hebdomadal or heptil cycle governs either in its multiple or sub-multipal an immense number of phenomena in animal life, in which the number seven has a number seven has, a prominent place.

Mr. Hay of Edinburgh writing some 60 years ago says there is harmony of numbers in all nature. In the force of gravity and the planetary movements, in the laws of heat, light, electric and chemical affinity, in the forms of animals and

plants, in the perceptions of the mind. Indeed, the direction of natural and physical science is towards a generalisation which shall express the fundamental laws of all by one, numerical ratio. The mysticism of Pythagoras was vague only to the unlettered. It was a system of philosophy found on existing mathematics, which comprise more of the philosophy

of numbers than our present. Philosophical students of human nature have taken note of the danger professional and businessmen encounter when they extend their mental activities beyond the hour of 4pm by the sun. Thousands fail because of their ignorance of the fundamental laws governing all things physical. The morning hours up to 10 a.m. adjust as dangerous for many who are highly susceptible to the electric tension, which occurs up to that hour. The feeding that prevails from 4 to 8 in the afternoon is one of mental or physical fatigue, that in the morning, one of irritability. Lincoln was not immune from natural law. On one occasion at 5pm, he was suddenly informed of the defeat of the Northern Forces, and it was feared by those who were

present that he would fall to the ground. Mr. C. C. C. Coffin sprang forward to assist the president, who, however, succeeded in returning to the White House unaided. Nature creates the natural, man, the unnatural. Solomon declared, to everything there is a season and a time to every purpose. Tycho Brahe and Lincoln. When Hugh Miller, the noted geologist, faced the inexplicable, he committed suicide. But Tyco Brahe, the Danish astronomer, the greatest practical mystic, the world of science as known, experienced a sense of joy and exhilaration every time he viewed

the starry heavens through his telescope. He considered astronomy something divine. His was the joyful pride of the seer who revels in the unexplained mysteries of the universe, and from time to time obtained clairvoyant glimpses of the working of the miracle. Brahe, like Abraham Lincoln, had moments

when he perceived the inevitable, with unalloyed vision. After carefully studying the comet of 15 he declared that it announced the birth of a prince in Finland who should lay waste Germany and vanish in 1632. Gustav Adolphus was born in Finland overran Germany and died in 1632. Brahe was the forerunner of the true scientist. Lincoln, the forerunner of the true statesman. It is not a fact that science and intuition are antagonistic.

The antagonism exists only in the imagination of second-rate thinkers. The great discoverers always put the spirit. spiritual and the mystical above learning. Brahe and Newton, as scientists, were unequalled in their age, and have not been surpassed in this. The culture of modern Germany has but emphasized the danger of pseudoscience in all walks of life, and made it plain that no nation can prosper under such an illusion. The Prussians have forced many to revert back to a consideration of the gifts of such men as Tycho Brahe, Newton, Lincoln,

and the difference between their science and that of culture is a difference that, strikes the normal thinker with amazement. The true scientist is a seer who discloses new facts and discovers hidden laws. The true scientific mystic creates, but the votaries of culture destroy without creating. Yet, they will be destroyed by their own weapons. Modern materialism will go down under the weight of the material. The denial of the mystical forces of the universe is the vulnerable spot in the scientific armour of croup culture. Let anyone who wishes to be convinced by crude facts alone, read the history of Frederick the so-called Great, and then read a history of Lincoln. Then let the student ask which is the greater nation today. Prussia headed

by Frederick's descendant or America, represented by Woodrow Wilson, the legitimate outcome of Washington, the inspired Patriot and Lincoln, the inspired emancipator. Section 5 of Abraham Lincoln the Practical Mystic by Francis Grisson. This Librevox recording is in the public. domain. Herndon's analysis and testimony. W. H. Herndon, for more than 20 years, the law partner of Mr. Lincoln, delivered an address in Springfield, Illinois, upon the life and character of the lamented president, which, for subtle analysis, has few equals in biographical literature.

The following are excerpts. Mr. Lincoln's perceptions were slow, cold, and exact. Everything came to him in its precise shape and color. To some men, the world of matter. and of man, comes ornamented with beauty, life and action, and hence more or less false and inexact. No lurking illusion or other error, false in itself and clad for the moment in robes of splendour, ever passed undetected or unchallenged over the threshold of his mind. That point that divides vision from the realm and home of thought. Names to him were nothing and titles naught,

assumption always standing back abashed at his cold intellectual glare. Neither his perceptions nor intellectual vision were perverted, distorted or diseased. He saw all things through a perfect mental lens. There was no diffraction or refraction there. He was not impulsive, fanciful or imaginative, but calm and precise. He threw his whole mental light around the object, and in time substance and qualities stood apart. Form and colour took their appropriate places,

and all was clear and exact in his mind. In his mental view he crushed the unreal, the inexact, the hollow and the sham. To some minds the world is all life for soul beneath the material, but to Mr. Lincoln, no life was individual or universal that did not manifest itself to him.

His mind was his standard. His perceptions were cool, persistent, pitiless in pursuit of the truth. No error went undetected, and no falsehood unexposed if he once was aroused in search of truth. An Original Mind Mr. Lincoln

saw philosophy in a story and a schoolmaster and a joke. No man saw nature, fact, thing from his standpoint. His was a new and original position, which was always suggesting, hinting something to him. Nature, insinuations, hints and suggestions were new, fresh, original and odd to him. The world, fact, man, principle, all had their powers of suggestion to his susceptible soul. They continually put him in mind of something known or unknown. Hence his power and tenacity of what is called association of ideas.

His susceptibilities to all suggestions and hints enabled him at will to call up readily the associated and classified fact and idea. Mr. Lincoln was often at a loss for a word and hence was compelled to resort to stories and maxims and jokes to embody his idea that it might be comprehended. So true was this peculiar mental vision of his that though mankind has been gathering, arranging and classifying facts for thousands of years, Lincoln's peculiar standpoint could give him no advantage over other men's labour. Hence he tore up to the deep foundations or arrangements of facts,

and coined and arranged new plans to govern himself. His labour was great, continuous, patient and all enduring. The great books. The truth about the whole matter is that Mr. Lincoln read less and thought more than any man in his sphere in America. When young he read the Bible, and when of age he read Shakespeare. The latter book was scarcely ever out of his mind.

Mr. Lincoln is acknowledged there have been a great man, but the question is, what made him great? I repeat, that he read less and thought more than any man of his standing in America, if not in the world. He possessed originality and power of thought in an eminent degree. He was cautious, cool, patient and enduring. These are some of the grounds of his wonderful success. Not only was nature, man, fact and principles suggestive to Mr. Lincoln,

not only had he accurate and exact perceptions, but he was causative, i.e. his mind ran back behind all facts. Things and principles to their origin, history and first cause, to that point where forces act at once as effect and cause. He would stop and pause in the street and analyze a machine. He would whittle things to a point and then count the numberless inclined planes and their pitch, making the point.

Mastering and defining this, he would then cut that point back and get a broad transverse section of his pine stick and peel and define that. Clocks, omnibuses, language, paddle wheels, and idioms never escaped his observation and analysis. Before he could form any idea of anything, before he would express his opinion on any subject,

he must know its origin and history. in substance and quality, in magnitude and gravity. He must know his subject inside and outside, upside and downside. He searched his own mind and nature thoroughly, as I have often heard him say. He must analyse a sensation, an idea and words, and run them back to their origin, history, purpose, and destiny. He was most emphatically a merciless analyser of facts, things and principles. When all these processes had been well and thoroughly gone through, he could form an opinion and express it, but no sooner. Hence when he did speak, his utterances rang out gold-like, quick, keen and current upon the counters of the understanding.

He reasoned logically through analogy and comparison. All opponents dreaded him in his originality of idea, condensation, definition and force of expression. And woe be to the man who hugged to his bosom a secret error. If Mr. Lincoln got on the chase of it, I say woe to him. Time could hide the area in no nook or corner of space in which he would not detect and expose it. Veneration and truth. The predominating elements of Mr. Lincoln's peculiar character

were, firstly, his great capacity and powers of reason, secondly, his excellent understanding, thirdly, an exalted idea of the sense of right and equity, and fourthly, his intense veneration of what was true and good. His reason ruled all other faculties of his mind. His pursuit of the truth was indefatigable, terrible. He reasoned from his well-chosen principles with such clearness, force and compactness that the tallest intellects in the land bowed to him in this respect. He came down from his throne of logic with irresistible and crushing force. His printed speeches proves this.

But his speeches, before the Supreme Courts of the state and nation, would demonstrate it. Mr. Lincoln was an odd and original man. He lived by himself and out of himself. He was a very sensitive man, unobtrusive and gentlemanly, and often hit himself in the common mass of men in order to prevent the discovery of his individuality. He had no insulting egotism and no pompous pride, no haughtiness. He was not an upstart and had no insolence. He was a meek, quiet, unobtrusive gentleman. Not only were Mr. Lincoln's perceptions, good, not only was nature suggestive to him, not only

was he original and strong, not only had he great reason and understanding, not only did he love the true and good, not only was he tender and kind, but in due proportion, he had a glorious combination of them all. He had no avarice in his

nature or other like vice. He did not care who succeeded to the presidency of this or that Christian Association or railroad convention, who made the most money, who was going to Philadelphia, when and for what, and what were the costs of such a trip, he could not understand why men struggle for such things as these. The great puzzle.

One day at Washington he made this remark to me. If ever this free people, if this government itself is ever utterly demoralized, it will come from this human wriggle and struggle for office, a way to live without work. It puzzled him at Washington to know and to get at the root of this dread desire, this contagious disease of national robbery and the nation's death struggle. This man, this long, bony-wari, sad man, floated into our country in 1831, in a frail canoe, down the north fork of the Sangamon River, friendless, penniless, powerless and alone, begging for work in our city, ragged, struggling for the common necessities of life. This man, this peculiar man, left us in 1861, the President of the United States, backed by friends, power, fame and all human force.

Lincoln's Energy and Will Energy is usually a blind force in the conduct of human affairs and the greatest with which we have to deal. History is made up of the deeds of individuals with a surplus of energy, which overflows and damages governments as floods, damage lands. Will, energy and energy,

ambition are in most cases synonymous terms. Without energy, the will breaks down, and without ambition, energy and will would prove innocuous. No one can doubt that misdirected energy was at the bottom of much that moved the Prussians, that their ambitions were wholly material, limited to geographical boundaries. Lincoln displayed physical as well as mental energy in a supernormal degree. His will was as a mountain of adamant. While his ambition was not personal, but national and usual, universal. Only the practical mystic could direct such forces with wisdom, and as we look still closer into the mystery of his temperament, the question of pride and vanity rises and the relation to ambition and will. In the first place, what causes ambition? Pride, answers the world,

but the world is wrong. Ambition is not the result of pride, but of vanity. Solomon, the wisest and greatest man of his time was a proud man and a wise ruler until he began to import apes and peacocks. Then Vanity usurped the place of pride and he came to the end of his temporal tether. Vanity caused Napoleon to have himself crowned emperor of the French and from that day his power declined. A proper sense of pride would have led him to stop where he was and refuse all further manifestations and developments of worldly honour. Pride tends to moral dignity and intellectual reticence and that is why Lincoln blushed in the presence of the institution of slavery. His pride gave him an acute sense of shame and his honour an acute sense of justice.

Only the vain will consent to live in idleness while others slave for them. Vanity induces anything from the ridiculous to the criminal, and those controlled by it are subject to absurd statements and ridiculous actions. They cannot avoid both. Washington and Lincoln were free from the fetters of ridicule, They were imbued with a subconscious pride which stood for the whole nation. End of Section 5. Section 6 of Abraham Lincoln, the practical mystic by Francis Grierson.

This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Nature and prophecy. Herndon says, I cannot refrain from noting the views Lincoln held in reference to the great questions of moral and social reforms under which he classed suffrage for women, temperance and slavery. All such questions he observed one day as we were discussing temperance in the office must find lodgment with the most enlightened souls who stamp them with her approval.

In God's own time, they will be organised into law and woven into the fabric of all our institutions. As the divine principle permeates all nature, so Lincoln, being a pure product of nature, possessed the secret, consciousness of natural power, illumined by mystical intuition and guided by the higher forces of the spirit. He realized the superiority of mind over matter, of intelligence, of ignorance, of wisdom over learning, of illumination over mere knowledge. He was another Marcus Aurelius, without the influence of paganism, free from the trammels of mythology. He inquired into the mystery of his own being and delved into the darkest corners of personality and character.

Some of his deepest thoughts on the mysteries of life and death were never voiced by this man who never spoke unless he deemed it imperative to speak. Lincoln indeed never gossiped about people and books. He was not a gossip. His jokes were for a purpose, his talk was for a purpose, and his meditations were fundamental.

The seal of nature. Herndon was right when he said that Lincoln's features were stamped with the seal of nature, this is the only seal that is beyond imitation. All else can be mimicked. We have seen how ghastly one or two persons appeared when they attempted to look like Lincoln. The imitation took on the appearance of pale, dull putty.

The notion that Lincoln's personality could be imitated with success was quite in keeping with that other notion that the great president was, in spite of everything, just one of the common people. but Lincoln, as he appears in popular histories, and Lincoln as he was known to his associates, and those who came into personal contact with him are two different persons.

Perhaps no one has summed up the matter with such concision and force as Don Peart, who knew him well. With all his awkwardness of manner and utter disregard of social conventionalities that seemed to invite familiarity, there was something about Abraham Lincoln that enforced respect.

No man presumed on the apparent invitation to be other than respectful. I was told at Springfield that this accompanied him through life. Among his rough associates, when young, he was leader, looked up to and obeyed, because they felt of his muscle and its readiness and use. Among his associates at the bar, it was attributed to his wit, which kept his duller associates at a distance. But the fact was that this power came from a sense of reserve force of intellectual ability that no one took account of, save in its results.

Through one of those manifestations of nature that produce a Shakespeare at long intervals, a giant had been born to the poor whites of Kentucky, and the sense of superiority possessed Lincoln at all times. Seward, Chase and Stanton, great as they were, felt their inferiority to the master. Law and Authority We are beginning to feel the reality of that power

that lies above appearance and formula, that power manifested in Job and Isaiah, which we accept is inspiration in religion, intuition, in philosophy, and illumination in art, producing saints in one age and mystical scientists and another. We float through the ether on a revolving miracle called the earth, returning again and again to attain the same figure on the dial of time. The things done by human automaton's count for nothing in the course of destiny.

we think we are wise when we invent a new name for an old truth, and vanity aims to confide the infinite within the limits of a stopper bottle or a glass showcase, or attain inspiration by means of a Ouija board. Can anyone conceive what would have happened to this country, had Lincoln made use of such a contrivance to direct the course of his actions? The scourge of dead agnostic seems like an ironical stroke of nature to discount their disbelief. Not only does this clumsy instrument make wits like Mark Twain talk like poor Paul, but it makes philosophers reason like first-grade pupils at our common schools.

Immortality is destined to have the last word, even though it be pronounced in the most fantastic manner. Lincoln believed in law, order and authority. He believed in the mission of the churches. He was a regular worshipper in Dr. Gurley's Presbyterian congregation at the capital. He was a praying president like George Washington, and while he was not a member of any church, he was convinced that all the churches were necessary. He was not a free thinker, as that term is commonly used, loose reasoning and vague uncertain doctrines he could not abide. He demanded proofs and would not accept a man's word merely from sentimental motives.

No one ever induced him to sidetrack from the main line of argument and reason. His attitude in the matter of inspiration and spiritual direction may be summed up in a few words spoken at the time the delegation of Chicago ministers came to him, urging him in God's name to free the slaves without further delay. His reply was that when the Almighty wanted to free the slaves, he would deal directly with Lincoln himself instead of indirectly through Chicago.

A vacillating president would have been influenced by such a request at such a time, but the President had faith in his own illuminations, and awaited orders from a supreme source. Had he been influenced by advice given by all sorts of people who called at the White House on all sorts of missions, possessing no authority themselves, what turmoil and chaos would have resulted to the army and the nation?

Practical mystic that he was, he did not seek nor wish for advice from people in matters which concerned his own judgment alone. It is true that on several, occasions, he was approached by persons who came with messages of various kinds, assumed to be spiritual, but Lincoln received them with a neutral politeness, sometimes mingled with a grim humour, as when Robert Dale Owen read to him a long manuscript presumed to be highly inspirational and illuminating, and Lincoln replied, well, for those who like that sort of thing,

that is the thing they would like. Lincoln as critic, nothing escaped Lincoln's powers of philosophical and metaphysical analysis. He did not read the Bible in Shakespeare, merely for pleasure, as people read novels. He could give excellent reasons for everything he did. Even in his most listless moods, he never lost his firm grip on affairs, both general and individual. When he read a book, it was because there was something in it which helped him to penetrate deeper into the recesses of life and character. He would study a passage or a chapter until he had a assimilated its wisdom and its mystical import. Lincoln was a natural critic. When Walt Whitman's leaves of grass was first published, a copy of the book was read and discussed by several of his

friends in Springfield. Lincoln at once recognized the fact that a new poetic genius had appeared, and he did not permit adverse opinions to influence his judgment. He cared nothing for the romantic in itself, he cared only for those phases of literature which induced serious philosophical and spiritual thought. While his partner read Carlisle, he read Shakespeare. In the spring of 1862, the president spent several days at Fortress Monroe, awaiting military operations upon the peninsula. As a portion of the cabinet were with him that was temporarily the seat of government, and he bore with him constantly the burden of public affairs. His favourite diversion was reading Shakespeare. One day it chanced to be the day before the capture of Norfolk. As he sat reading alone, he called to his side, Colonel LeGrand B. Cannon.

You have been writing long enough, Colonel, he said. Come in here, I want to read you a passage in Hamlet. He read the discussion on ambition between Hamlet and his courtiers, and the soliloquy in which conscience debates of a future state. His style. No criticism of Mr. Lincoln, says the spectator, can be in any sense adequate, which does not deal with his astonishing power over words. It is not too much to save him

that he is among the greatest masters of prose ever produced by the English race. Self-educated, or rather not educated at all in the ordinary sense, he contrived to obtain an insight and power in the handling a mechanism of letters such as has been given to but few men in his or indeed in any age. Though the gift of oratory should be a natural gift,

is understandable enough. For the methods of the orator, like those of the poet, are primarily sensuous and may well be instinctive. Mr. Lincoln did not get his ability to handle prose through his gift of speech. It is in his conduct of the pedestrian portions of composition that Mr Lincoln's genius for prose style is exhibited. Lincoln avoided the superfluous in writing as in speaking,

and style came after the matter of his thought, not as a conscious effort while he was uttering his thoughts. He was not consciously a literary artist. When, in his famous inaugural address, he made prey rhyme with away, it sounded like a false note struck in the movement of a great symphony. That blemish remains like a flaw in a diamond which cannot be removed.

But the miracle remains that this master of men and moods accomplished in his speeches and letters what no one else accomplished in his time. Lincoln's Serenity Lincoln says the same writer in the spectator saw things as a disillusioned man sees them and yet in the bad sense he never suffered any disillusionment. For suffusing and combining his other qualities

was a serenity of mind which affected the whole man. viewed the world too much as a whole to be greatly troubled or perplexed over its accidents, to this serenity of mind was due an almost total absence of indignation in the ordinary sense. This is true because, as Walt Whitman says, the foundation of his character more than any man's in history were mystic and spiritual. Lincoln was, before all things a gentleman, says the spectator, and the good taste inseparable from that character made it impossible for him to be spoiled by power and position. This grace and strength of character is never better shown that in the letters to his generals victorious or defeated, if a general had to be reprimanded, he did it

as only the most perfect gentleman could do it. Nevertheless, the invulnerable president did show his anger or indignation on some few occasions, and justly so. As a rule, he did not consider it worth his while to permit himself to be moved by the sayings and doings of anyone. The foolish are unworthy of indignation. They must be dealt with quietly but effectively, while the others must be managed with gentle firmness backed by the fundamentally drastic. Fuss and fury were unknown to this pioneer politician, philosophical statesman and mystical leader.

No man can be serene who doubts himself. Lincoln, when in doubt as to the actions of others, did not grope in the darkness but waited. His invincible trust in Providence held him aloof from the petty circumstances and daily routine of intrigue, and his imagination soared in the Imperium while those around him flattered themselves that he was being influenced or led by their councils and their interests. He treated people who bedeviled him with importunities and all sorts of advice as the wise parent treats a child who asks for the impossible. He knew that a little waiting would wear them out, and they would end by forgetting. Often, in place of a flat refusal, he would turn away the office seeker by a sudden adroit stroke of his humour,

thus sending the man and his friends away smiling good-humouredly at Lincoln's inimitable tact. The Romance of His Character There is a romance of character that accompanies people of exceptional achievements, as Emerson has so justly said, and Lincoln possessed it without being in the slightest degree conscious of the fact. This is one reason why his life surpasses in interest any book of fiction ever written. He united all the realism of pioneer life with the romance of the inexplicable and the fascination of the unexpected. Those who come to Lincoln in search of the shifting romance of bohemianism will be disappointed,

for the romance of change and vacillation is the kind that leads to the poor house or the hospital. This romance of character belonging as it did to the temperament of the man was hidden from the multitude. but all could readily see the romance of the progressive events of his life. Lincoln was at times awed but not alarmed by the turn of affairs which placed him at the head of the nation. He realized the tremendous responsibility without regrets or fear. He was fully conscious of his mission but quite unconscious of the romantic elements which enveloped it. For Lincoln's life included both the romance of character and the romance of experience. Without the first, the second would have unfitted him for the heavy responsibilities of his high office later on.

He did not seek experience for the sake of experience like so many in our day, or under the illusion that truth and wisdom arrived per force. He forced nothing. He followed a natural course of events, dealing with each according to the light of his own judgment, asking for no advice. Neither the romance of character nor the romance of experience comes to those who seek them. self-consciousness dissipates romantic mystery.

End of Section 6. Section 7 of Abraham Lincoln The Practical Mystic by Francis Grisson. This Librovax recording is in the public domain. President by the grace of God. Lincoln lived long enough to become convinced that everything exists for a purpose. He saw that the rebellion had to be,

and that in the seeming confusion of sentiments and interests, the divine ruled over. all persons and parties. Events had to follow as ordained by the spiritual power that lies behind appearance. Lincoln worked in the light. Tsar Nicholas of Russia lived in the dark.

He could not tell why he occupied the Russian throne. Lincoln knew why he occupied the White House. The Kaiser was not able to see why will, energy and money should not rule the world. Never with the lessons taught by Lincoln's career so much needed as now when a ruthless autocracy is seeking to get rid of all moral responsibility,

while on the other hand thousands are awakening to the necessity of a new order of fostering the mystical renaissance. Science in the mystical. Quintillian said, No man can become a perfect orator without a knowledge of geometry. It is not without reason that the greatest men have bestowed extreme attention on this science. Locke, the philosopher, gives the reason. Geometry develops the habit of pursuing long trains of ideas which will remain with the student who will be enabled to pierce through the mazes of sophism and discover the latent truth, when persons who have not this habit will never find it.

Lincoln was passionately fond of geometry. His oratory was based on logic, but his logic came from the mystical absolute, a geometric science of the soul which he alone could appropriate through his perception of fundamental principles. of universal law. He could perceive that an idea as a personal conception of a mathematical truth, as distinguished from mere beliefs, notions and sentiments. Others turn politics into the art of influencing crowds

through their sentimental opinions. Lincoln engaged in trying to make them think logically. While others gave vague reasons for their political views, he gave reasons based on law, which he explained with simple force and lucid phraseology. He never attempted to

tell all he knew. The practical mystic never does. He knew how he acquired his knowledge, but his reticence was as pronounced as his gift of expression. It was this quality of reticence that kept him from taking counsel from all sorts of statesmen and explaining the inexplicable. There was not a man among them that could have understood. In this, Lincoln was a mystic fully fledged, initiated, as by centuries of experience. His innate wisdom taught him exactly how much the people could understand, how much politicians could digest, and how much statesman could divine. Not only did he hold the allegiance of the wigs, but he gained the allegiance of the abolitionists. This indeed was intellect. The old and the

new. How old, yet new, are nature's moods and manifestations. How mysteriously the souvenirs of the past are revived and quickened in new forms, faces and phenomena. The seasons come and go with varying moods and seem new, but they are older than the formulas of civilization. Strangers bring with them new influences, but we discover in them something familiar from the vague and shadowy past. Every single thing is related to every other thing, and illuminated minds are the periods that separate the cycles, but not the laws of human progress. The form is new, the principle remains unchangeable. Solomon was unique in his glory,

but Athens had Pericles, Rome a Caesar, Europe are Bonaparte, and the new world are Lincoln. Real genius is elemental. It influences humanity as much as heat and cold, rain and sunshine. People who offer the greatest opposition to it are those who fall before its onward march. Indeed, it seems to be, from all historical accounts, a sort of car of juggernaut to those who willfully oppose it. And this is not surprising,

since it is the greatest power of which man has any personal knowledge, supported by all the forces of the material and the spiritual. Destiny versus Will Great men float into power on mystical waves moved by the force of destiny, the greater the mind, the greater the fixture of force behind it. Between George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, presidents came and went as figureheads of parties or props to some ephemeral political scaffold.

The majority were stopgaps. They, like the majority of politicians and many others, put their trust in will and desire. They could not understand that a man is not great because of his will, but because of his innate knowledge. Washington realised his destiny and understood. Lincoln realized what he was and what he would become long before his nomination for the presidency, but he was wholly unconscious of any will to power. The born statesman is aware of his invincible, hidden knowledge, and he places his will in the second rank.

He knows it counts for nothing in the fundamental issues. Lincoln discerned at an early age the difference between desire and destiny. He saw the dangerous illusions under which the will to power politicians and others labored and how vain were their hopes. Will and ambition are characteristics of men whom is seen. state the material for the permanent. Bonaparte and Bismarck exercised their will for the possession of the material and both failed. The Hoanzolans and the henchmen have failed in the same exercise. This exercise is indulged in by people who believe that to become intensely individualistic

means the development of powerful personality. They talk of their rights as if their desires gave them the privilege of robbing their neighbours. And what some are doing publicly, others are doing privately. The motives for this desire for material domination vary with the individual. With one it is to get even with a group, with another it is to get even with a party. With others it is to appear in public, to be frequently named and sometimes applauded. Compromise and subterfuge are ingredients inseparable from the illusion of the will. While Lincoln often assisted his friends, he refused to hedge or trim in order to please. Destiny behind him was invulnerable. His own.

own sense of justice inexorable. While others were working for the good of their city, state, or section, he was thinking of the good of the whole country, with all humanity behind it. Destiny created the man and the crisis at the same time, as always happens. The one could not exist without the other. Destiny is the collective conscience acting through elective genius. For this reason, Lincoln was not only the man of his time, but the man whose example will exert the greatest influence on future eras. James Shuck Practical Mystic

In the hubbub and confusion created by the upheaval which began in 1914 it is of vital importance for thinking people of the English-speaking countries to know what went on in the inner circles at Washington during that year of trial 1864 when the destiny of the Union seemed to be hanging in the balance. It is time to know the truth about Lincoln

's supernaturalism. Your favourite historian avoids the subject. He will not touch on a matter so dangerous to his neutral agnosticism. He avoids the details of the supernatural events of that wonderful time. He will discuss anything but that. He knows that once thinking people become acquainted with the facts, they will begin to form their own conclusions. In Lincoln's day, agnosticism had not taken root in the intellectual soil of this country.

The negative writings of Darwin and Spencer were unknown among politicians and statesmen, and the churches still believed that spirit ruled matter, and the Providence was directing the affairs of the nation. In Lincoln's time, agnostic ministers were unknown, all believed in a positive religion. The union was saved from disruption because Lincoln and his aides were firm believers in a higher power and a higher destiny. Doubt, cynicism and skepticism would have handed the country over to universal chaos.

The downfall of the Union would have meant the end of the British Empire, and today, Kaiserism would be in supreme command of the remnant of Anglo-Saxon civilization. It is the fashion to read romantic novels, but the story of Jacques's peace mission is more fascinating than any novel, because it is fact instead of fiction, and because its basic element is a supernatural. James Jacques was himself a practical mystic of no uncertain power, but whose great gifts were overshadowed by the personality of Lincoln, his revered chief.

Before the Civil War, Jacques was a mathematician, a Greek and Latin scholar, a college president and one of the most forcible Methodist preachs of the age. His field of work was the country around Springfield, where Lincoln often heard him preach. Long before Jacques received the mystical command to undertake his peace mission to the rebel headquarters at Richmond, Lincoln knew and respected him as a sincere and earnest patriot. Jacques was Colonel of an Illinois regiment during the war

and had already taken a valiant part in some of the most terrible battles. Colonel Jacques was inspired to act as he did without at first consulting anyone. He conceded the idea of going to Richmond, interviewing the Confederate leaders and so gaining some definite information that would eventually lead to peace

through victory for the Union. His mission was a secret known only to a limited circle, including the President, General Rosecrans, General Garfield, who later became President, and James R. Gilmore, the friend of Lincoln. Mr. Gilmore, in his personal recollections of Lincoln, devotes many pages to this peace mission, with all the details from its inception by Colonel Jacques

to its final wonderful results. General Garfield, writing to Mr. Gilmore from his military headquarters, on June 17, 1863, said, Colonel Jacques has gone on his peace mission. The President approved it, though of course he did not make it an official matter. There are some very curious facts relating to his mission,

which I hope to tell you someday. It will be sufficient for me to say that enough of the mysterious is in it to give me an almost superstitious feeling of faith and certainly a great interest in his work. He is most solemnly in earnest and has great confidence, in his mission. Colonel Jacques succeeded in gaining a respectful hearing before the highest authorities at Richmond without being shot as a spy, more than one of his friends having predicted such a fate for him. He returned to the north determined to wait patiently for another opportunity

to try again. In 1864, after conferring with Mr. Gilmore and the president, it was decided that a second mission should be set on foot, this time in company with his friend Gilmore, whom a special Providence had chosen to record all the incidents and events of that unprecedented undertaking. On this occasion, Colonel Jacques learned all that he had hoped to learn. And more, from the lips of Jefferson Davis, President of the Southern Confederacy, and when Jacques and Gilmore returned Lincoln requested Mr. Gilmore to prepare a detailed account of the astounding revelation for the Atlantic Monthly. This vital recital of the facts was published, and it created a sensation from one end of the

country to the other. It turned the tide in favour of Lincoln's election for a second term and saved the Union. This, in brief, was the work of Jacques, the mystic, whose name today is only known to the more serious students of Lincoln's life and work. Had the president been less a practical mystic than he was, he would have forbidden Colonel Jacques to undertake a journey full of risks and peril, and what that ordinary businessmen would have called an insane adventure. Images and Dreams Noah Brooks in his life of Lincoln gives the following account of a vision

which the president described to him It was just after my nomination in 1860 when the news was coming thick and fast all day and there had been a great hurrah boys so that I was well tired out and went home to rest and threw myself on a lounge in my chamber opposite where I lay was a bureau

with a swinging glass and looking in the glass I saw myself reflected, nearly at full length. But my face I noticed had two separate and distinct images, the tip of the nose of one being about three inches from the tip of the other. I was a little bothered, perhaps startled and got up and looked in the glass, but the illusion vanished. On lying down again, I saw a second time, plainer, if possible, than before.

Then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler, say, five shades, than the other. I got up and the thing melted away. I left and in the excitement of the hour forgot all about it, nearly but not quite, for the thing would once in a while come up and give me a little pang as though something uncomfortable had happened. Later in the day I told my wife about it and a few days later I tried the experiment again.

When, sure enough, the thing came again. My wife thought that it was a sign that I was to be elected to a second term of office and that the paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should not live through the last term. Not long after his second inauguration, he said to a friend in Washington, I have seen this evening what I saw on the evening of my nomination. As I stood before a mirror, I saw two images of myself, a bright one in front and one that was pallid standing behind.

It completely unnerved me. The bright one I know is my past. The pale one my coming life. I do not think I shall live to see the end of my second term. In his biography, Morgan relates a dream which Lincoln had. He thought he was in a vast assembly, and the people drew back to let him pass. Just then, Lincoln heard someone say, He is a common-looking fellow.

Lincoln, in his dream, turned to the man and said, Friend, the Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason he makes so many of them. Shortly before Lincoln's assassination, some friends were talking about certain dreams recorded in the Bible when the President said, About two days ago I retired very late. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream.

There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing. but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room. No living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along.

It was light in all the rooms, every object was familiar to me, but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking,

I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. Before me was a catafalque on which was a form, wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it was stationed soldiers who were acting as guards. There was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon the catafalc, others weeping pitifully. Who is dead in the White House, I demanded of one of the soldiers. The president was the answer. He was killed by an assassin. Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which worked me from my dream. The New Era The principles anunciated by Abraham Lincoln

are abiding examples not only for the English-speaking peoples but for the whole world. Out of what seems universal confusion tending towards chaos there arises a new era. A material transformation had to occur before the uprising of the spiritual and the truth is beginning to dawn in the minds of thousands that behind all material phenomena that dwells the divine idea. Before the gates of oblivion closed on civilization, we were plucked from the Gulf in accordance with the divine purpose.

Amidst the strife of contending factions, the thunder of upheaval reverberates, from continent to continent, heralding the close of a dispensation that has known the trials and triumphs of nearly 2,000 years, from which is emerging the mystical dawn of a new day. End of Section 7. End of Abraham Lincoln, the practical mystic by Francis Grierson.