Abraham Lincoln and the Quote of the Day

I have often remarked to family and friends that outside of New Testament scholarship, my one other great passion is on all things Abraham Lincoln.

So it is with this caveat that on a NT blog, I have excused myself from the typical postings on all things NT-related and offer this gem of a quote on writing delivered by Lincoln in his "Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions" read to the Phi Alpha Society of Illinois College at Jacksonville, Illinois, on February 11, 1859:

Writing--the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye--is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination which necessarily underlies the most crude and general conception of it--great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space; and great, not only in its direct benefits, but greatest help, to all other inventions.