The Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy, once told of traveling in the Caucasus, where he was the guest of a wild chieftain and his tribe. The chieftain asked about the great leaders of the world who lived beyond his borders. Whereupon Tolstoy spoke of great Tsars and generals, from Alexander to Napoleon. But the mountain man said:

You've not told us about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He spoke like the voice of thunder. He laughed like the sunrise; and his deeds were as strong as the rock ans as sweet as the fragrance of roses. He was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies, and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life. His name was Lincoln, and the country in which he lived was called America. Tell us of that man.

Tolstoy, the cultured Russian, responded to the wild herdsman's request by saying of Lincoln:
 

He was the only real giant in terms of depth of feeling and certain moral powers. He was one who wanted to be great through his smallness. He wanted to see himself in the world and not the world in himself.

Who of us has not heard of the rail splitter from the Illinois prairies, a saintly commoner who called himself Abe, who spoke in a deep fatherly voice, and who cared little about material rewards and social station. He also comes to us as Father Abraham, the great emancipator who led the North off to civil War to free the slaves, and after the conflict ended, offered the south a tender and forgiving hand.

That is the hero of mythology and the folk hero of legend, yet was it the Lincoln who actually lived? In truth, the real Lincoln was down to earth, honest and compassionate, a man with a deep commitment to the right of all people to elevate themselves in a free society. But he was so much more.

There was a story told in Lincoln's time about a man asking the pilot of a Mississippi river boat how long he had been plying his trade.

'Twenty-six years,' the pilot replied.

'Then,' said the man, 'you should know where all the shoals and sandbars and rocks are.'

'No,' said the pilot! 'I just know where they ain't.'

And that's where Lincoln consistently tried to steer our ship of state: out there in the deep waters, far from the sandbars of party sectarianism, the rocks of racial chauvinism.

Perhaps Lincoln was not exactly the flawless mortal that legend claims. For he was at once complex, paradoxical, and richly human. A self-made man, he was proud of his professional achievements; substantially wealthy, obsessed with death, troubled with recurring bouts of melancholy, and gifted with a superb talent for literary expression.

As we, this week, observe still another birthday of Lincoln, we might well wonder whether it is conceivable that the Lincoln of history was in fact less heroic than the Lincoln of legend. We who live in an age when leaders and would-be heroes come inevitably equipped with feet of clay, when candidates for the very presidency flaunt their shadowy moral standards and dare us to find fault or to judge their ability to govern on the basis of their sexual and ethical wandering, we who live in such a society will find new hope in Lincoln the man. For more than he seemed, he was!

Let us begin with some observations of Lincoln's life. He was a man schooled in sorrow. Lincoln did not perceive life as an open frontier with limitless opportunities. Here was a man who was well instructed in life's tragic dimension. The death of his mother when he was nine years of age weighed heavily upon him.

In adulthood, during his years as a Springfield lawyer and state legislator, he underwent a period of agonizing self-doubt, depression and despair. He broke off his earlier engagement with Mary Todd, whom he later married, ostensibly because he feared that his background was simply too humble, and that her aristocratic relatives would never accept him. In despair, Lincoln remarked one day that one 'd' was enough to spell God, but it took two 'd's to spell Todd.

Not too many years after he had recovered from that fit of depression and had married, he and his wife lost a four year old son; and twelve years later, after he had moved into the White House as President, the Lincolns lost their eleven-year-old Willie, who had become the President's darling. For months, the President was cast into another deep depression which caused many to wonder whether his buoyancy would ever be restored.

The pressures of his personal life were, of course, intensified greatly by the anguish of the nation. He was presiding over a house divided against itself with brother killing brother. He was subjected to an incredible barrage of criticism from the press. And he was besieged by persons who confidently exhorted him to follow contradictory paths in order to heal the nation.

Speaking of public criticism, the President once confided:
 

If I tried to read, much less answer all the criticisms made of me, and all the attacks leveled against me, this office would have to be closed for all other business.

I do the best I know how, the very best I can. I mean to keep doing this, down to the very end. If the end brings me out all wrong, then ten angels swearing I had been right would make no difference.

If the end brings me out all right then what is said against me now will not amount to anything.

Author Allen Guelzo in his new work, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President insists that Lincoln was not a Trinitarian, and remained more a Unitarian with Calvinist tendencies toward Providence and Predestination. In truth, Lincoln never embraced the dogmas of any particular Christian denomination. He once said:

I found difficulty in giving my assent to their long and complicated confessions of faith.

Indeed, dear friends, Lincoln came to see himself providentially as a servant of God, a man lifted up to a great task in a critical time. Notice, however, that in Lincoln's piety there was always an overtone of self-searching, of self-criticism and of genuine humility. Lincoln avoided the great temptation to assume that god is always on our side because it is our side.

But perhaps the greatest quality of Lincoln the statesman is revealed to us in the manner with which he wrestled with the greatest question of his time: slavery. In 1862, Lincoln wrote Horace Greeley:
 

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slaves, I would do it. And if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it. And if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

There is clear evidence, through his words, as well as his deeds, that Lincoln regarded slavery as morally wrong. In those famous debates with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln describes slavery as "a monstrous evil which violated the essential spirit of our country's Declaration of Independence."

Why, then, did he argue with Douglas against admitting slavery in the new territories, but mention nothing about the abolition of slavery in its entirety? I believe that Lincoln was firmly convinced that is the mark of moral statesmanship to recognize that in life we must often choose, not between good and evil, but between tow goods, and we must seek the best available option under the circumstances.

In that sense, Lincoln was a statesman rather than a prophet. He argues that if the founding fathers of our country had insisted on the abolition of slavery, the constitution would never have been adopted, and our nation, in fact, never born. And given that choice, had he been there, he would not himself have argued against slavery. In his debates with Douglas, he set forth the principle of not extending slavery, but did not press for its abolition where it already existed.

Lincoln, himself once said:

I say in relation to the principle that all men are created equal, let it be as nearly reached as it can. If we cannot give freedom to every creature, let us do nothing that will impose slavery upon any other creatures. If a moralist in politics demands perfection or nothing, he will be doomed to get nothing.

In his letter to Greeley, Lincoln said, in effect:
 

"I believe that slavery is evil. I want it abolished. But I believe that the destruction of this nation is a worse evil, and I must prevent it."

A great friend of this Congregation, the late Rabbi Bertram Korn, well-known historian of the Civil War period, concludes tat there wasn't an anti-Jewish bone in all of Lincoln's body, and quite the contrary, showed himself to be always open toward his Jewish fellow Americans. Lincoln was the one who first named Jewish chaplains to equal rank with Christian military chaplains.

Perhaps one of the most vicious anti-Jewish incidents of an official nature to take place in all of US history occurred in Dec, 1862 when Gen. U.S. Grant summarily banned all Jews from entering the Tennessee territory. Grant singled out Jewish peddlers who would ordinarily have been trading in cotton, masluney(sp?), medical supplies and food in this area.

Historians are still uncertain as the Grant's motivations. We do know that anti-Jewish bigotry was rife in the Union Army at the highest levels.

The Kaskel brothers of Paducah, Kentucky wired their objections to Lincoln and left right away to meet him face to face. The President said to Cesar Kaskel -

And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan?

And he ordered Grant's policy rescinded immediately!

Truly, as Phillips Brooks has said: "In Lincoln was vindicated the greatness of real goodness and the goodness of real greatness."

The Lincoln of life emerges bigger and more precious than the Lincoln of mythic legend. This was the real Lincoln:

A deeply religious man for whom faith was both a possession and a quest;

An ambitious man, humble enough to wonder about his adequacy

A believer in god's will who was honest enough to admit his difficulty in discovering it;

A patriotic man who was, nevertheless wise enough to admit that God's purposes transcend this nation.

An idealistic man who knew that statesmanship requires compromise;

A gracious man who, on the threshold of a great victory, displayed a spirit of reconciliation, the simple eloquence of which has reverberated across the very corridors of time. What was it that he said just on the eve of the Union's victory over the South regarding those states which had seceded: "Finding them safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad."

In his magnificent and eloquent second inaugural address, the weary President attested to his faith that - "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on, to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." This was Abraham Lincoln - a durable hero - a hero for all times.

Truly, dear friends, the man and his words, belong to the ages.