His practice of cherishing and repeating the
plaintive little verses which inquire monotonously whether the spirit of
mortal has any right to be proud indicates the depth and the highly
conscious character of this fundamental moral conviction. He is not only
humble himself, but he feels and declares that men have no right to be
anything but humble; and he thereby enters into possession of the most
fruitful and the most universal of all religious ideas.
Lincoln's humility, no less than his liberal intelligence and his
magnanimous disposition, is more democratic than it is American; but in
this, as in so many other cases, his personal moral dignity and his
peculiar moral insight did not separate him from his associates. Like
them, he wanted professional success, public office, and the ordinary
rewards of American life; and like them, he bears no trace of political
or moral purism. But, unlike them, he was not the intellectual and moral
victim of his own purposes and ambitions; and unlike them, his life is a
tribute to the sincerity and depth of his moral insight.
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