Excerpt from Lincoln the Emancipator: An Address

It is the clear and indisputable teaching of human history that in all contests between the forces which make for freedom or for truth and those which seek to establish or perpetuate oppression or error, the former ultimately triumph. Clear and important is the lesson also that in all such contests, the friends of freedom, whether of thought or of person, must exercise supreme patience and the largest faith, that, while cherishing and lending the most enthusiastic aid and encouragement to the radical forces which enlist themselves in the cause of liberty, it is prudent also to set high value upon the conservative forces that work to the same end, and even to reckon often the real beneficence of radically hostile forces. It was a far cry from Nero to Constantine, from the Waldensian heretics to Martin Luther, or from the Missouri compromise to the Proclamation of Emancipation. The fires of Smithfield, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the Dred Scott decision were not intended to infuse hope into the cause of freedom. These are historical proofs of the great truth so superbly expressed by Lowell:

Careless seems the great Avenger, history's pages but record
One death - grapple in the darkness, 'twixt old systems and the Word,
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,
Yes that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow.

Truly, if ever within the shadow of a great cause, God stood

"Keeping watch above his own, "

it was during that mighty contest over African slavery which was waged in the United States from Washington to Lincoln.

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