"Ladies and Gentleman:

Today marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest men the world has ever produced and who, even more than that, was one supremely good.

"This is a sacred day - a kind of secular Christmas which calls not for gifts of toys, but for devout thanksgiving to God that the epochal man in American history was the bestower, under God, of the greatest of all gifts to man - freedom, which according to all men of every tribe, language, clime and color, is equality of opportunity to develope his individual soul powers and live his own responsible life, to be and do the very best that is possible for him.

"If ever the face of a man writing solemn words glowed with joy it must have been the face of Abraham Lincoln as he bent over the page when the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was groing into shape, and giving manhood and freedom as he wrote it to millions of his fellowmen.

"Lincoln comes as near to being America's saint as a Protestant country can have. The whole nation now pedastals him, even those who once pilloried him. He is great in the presence which saw and the provision which prepared for destroying the greatest barrier to realizing our declared ideal; he is great in withstanding a great sin without hating the sinner; he is great in the patience which made him bide his time and seek constitutional methods of relief before resorting to force; he is great in finding ways to do the needed thing even against the mummified inertness of great predecessors who had declared that this nation had no power of self-defense in the face of progressing disintegration. Someone asked Lincoln during the war of the Rebellion to appoint a day of fasting and prayer that God might be on their side. "Don't bother about that," said the man of common sense. "God is aways on the right side; you simply get with Him." The only way to command God is to obey Him, just as the only way to command electricity and steam is to obey the laws that govern them.

"We love to think of the character of this great and good man. We hold sacred the day Emancipation, the day when Lincoln said the word that loosed the negro from American slavery.

"We cherish the memory of his sainted dust, and hail the day when all proscription, discrimination and suppression of man's real aspirations towards the highest self-developement may ne a thing of the past.

"Let February be the beginning of the American year; let February 22 be remembered with acclaim while all faces turn with pride towards Mt. Vernon; but let February 12 be the New Year's day of American liberty and let Kentucky and Illinois, mother and fostermother, respectively, lift their proud faces to receive the gratulations of their sisters who count them blessed for the kind of dust that entered into the son they nurtured."

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