Lincoln as secular saint

[Juan Marrero]

[quote='LincolnToddFan' pid='47900' dateline='1432151250']


I think you framed the question very well. A great deal of the Lincoln mystique is based on the wonder that the right person would emerge at the crucial moment and that such a person lacked many of the conventional traits of leadership. At the end of his life, it seems that he began to see that he had been used as an instrument of Providence and that made him even more humble. I try not to deify or romanticize Lincoln but he is the great hero without feet of clay.

I recently read a biography of a remarkable British woman (sadly now much forgotten) named Edith Cavell. She was a British nurse who was setting up a teaching hospital in Belgium at the outbreak of WWI. Caught in enemy occupied territory, she saved many Allied soldiers who would come at night to the hospital to escape capture. She managed to smuggle many back to the UK. The German military made a huge mistake in trying and executing her as a spy, causing world-wide condemnation of an atrocity against a blameless woman. The biographer stated in an interview that she had spent years researching and writing the book and had to conclude reluctantly that there was nothing about Nurse Cavell's life or character that would stain the record.

It is wonderful that we have people like her and Lincoln to look up to, even when, unlike the biographer, we find inperfections.