Typed Manuscript Signed / Typed Letter Signed

Influential Congregational clergyman and author who co-edited "Christian Union" with Henry Ward Beecher and succeeded Beecher as pastor of Brooklyn's famed Plymouth Congregational Church. Exceptional content TMsS, 2pp, 6" X 9", Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY, 1881 December 7. Very good. Original typescript of Abbott's contribution to Osborn H. Oldroyd's 1882 book, "The Lincoln Memorial: Album-Immortelles," a collection of reminiscences and sentiments about Lincoln by notables of the day. Abbott carefully and neatly inks in words and phrases and crosses out others, signing at the close unusually small and neat (knowing this would be the actual signaturee reproduced in the book) and adding the date and place. A fine philosophical statement, reading in part: "...It was the peculiar genius of Abraham Lincoln that he was able by his sympathetic insight to perceive the change in public sentiment without waiting for it to be formulated in any legislative action; to keep pace with it, to lead and direct it, to quicken laggard spirits, to hold in the too ardent too impetuous and too hasty ones, and thus when he signed the emancipation proclamation to make his signature, not the act of an individual man, the edict of a military imperator, but the representative act of a great nation...." Accompanying this typescript is an actual page from Oldroyd's book bearing Abbott's statement (pp. 81-82) and this reproduced signature. Accompanied by a Typed Letter Signed bearing his usual charismatic, ebullient signature, 1p, 5½" X 8½", Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY, 1881 December 7. Addressed to Osborn H. Oldroyd. Near fine. Transmits this manuscript, although "I have no faith that anything which I can say in respect to Abraham Lincoln would be worthy a place in your collection...." A most intriguing pair.