DOES HEREDITY OR ENVIRONMENT MAKE MEN? 545 



when a baby, Abraham Lincoln had been placed by the side of all the 

 other babies in the world of that time, the best baby-show judges on 

 earth could have found very little difference between him and the thou- 

 sands of others. And I am sure that if all the germ-cells from which 

 these babies were born had been weighed and measured and analyzed 

 and peered at through microscopes by all the biologists on earth, they 

 could not have told which one would produce Abraham Lincoln. Yet 

 existing somewhere, somehow, within this tiny microscopic cell, which 

 had been handed down to his parents and which represented his com- 

 bined ancestry, were mighty and resplendent forces which ordained in 

 advance that the child born from it would be one of the greatest human 

 beings in all the tide of time. 



But it will be said that the Civil War "gave Lincoln his oppor- 

 tunity." Certainly it gave him this particular opportunity. No 

 man could ask for a greater chance to serve mankind and enter among 

 the human immortals. But the same opportunity existed for the four 

 or five million other men who were born and grew up about the same 

 time. The Civil War discovered Lincoln, but Lincoln also discovered 

 the Civil War. Even the men in his Cabinet who had the stimulus of 

 his overwhelming personality did not become Lincolns. Millions of 

 men since then have taken him as their example and striven to be 

 like him. 



Of course we are all better because of the example of Lincoln. 

 That is the value of a rich environment full of high ideals. I am a 

 better man and so are you because this great soul lived and blessed 

 the world. And I do not doubt that Lincoln himself was stimulated 

 by his studies in the firelight of the lives of the men of the great gen- 

 erations gone. I do not doubt he tried to emulate them. Just in pro- 

 portion to his own greatness does a man try to be like other great men. 

 He does not try to copy them, he tries to expand his own powers in the 

 light of their radiant examples. And I have noticed that the greater 

 men are in real character, the more they have blessed the world with 

 beauty, and truth and happiness, men such as Lincoln and Washing- 

 ton, and Foch and William the Silent, and Gustavus Adolphus, and 

 Faraday and Huxley and Darwin and Pasteur and WilHam James, the 

 more nearly do they approach in their lives and personal characters to 

 the Supreme Teacher — that other Carpenter who two thousand years 

 ago also uttered some sayings that have changed the whole course of 

 human history, Huxley, a thoroughgoing agnostic in philosophy, was 

 almost fierce in his admiration of the character of Tesus. 



