THE CONSTRUCTIVE ARGUMENT

We are ready now to undertake the difficult task of determining with some approach to certainty the essential content and character of Abraham Lincoln's religious belief.

We must not be surprised if we find ourselves unable to construct a perfectly symmetrical and consistent confession of faith. The material is much more abundant and explicit and much better attested in some departments than in others. Not only so, but we must never forget the mighty elements of contradiction in Lincoln's personality.

Mediocre men have this in their favor, that it is relatively easy to classify them. Not only may they be readily assigned to their several occupations, and conveniently pigeon-holed as butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers, but it is a comparatively simple task to group them under single adjectives, as good and bad, black and white, tall and short, fat and lean, old and young, intelligent and stupid. The process is less easy with really great men. There is always an admirable element of human inconsistency in men of large mold which would be intolerable in lesser personalities. It has been truly said that no man becomes really great and influential who is not a good subject for caricature. The sublime is own sister to the ridiculous. Genius is next akin to insanity. The men who do really great things are a perpetual puzzle to those who possess only commonplace standards of classification. A commonplace villain is a villain, first, last, and all the time; but a villain like Milton's Satan, Napoleon, or the late German Kaiser is so great a villain as to be half a hero. The two hundred seventy-six dripping men who struggled through the surf at Malta one stormy morning rather more than eighteen hundred years ago and gathered shivering round the fire, were quickly classified, for the most part, into four convenient companies, of sailors, soldiers, passengers, and prisoners; but when one of them shook off a viper into the fire and showed no sign of hurt, it was quite certain that he was either a murderer or a god. Opinions might differ and did differ as to which of the two extremes might properly be claimed for him, but no one proposed to find a place for him in middle ground.

The strength of great men lies in their possession and their counterpoise of opposing qualities. Over against the monotonous uniformity, the stupid consistency, of those common people whom Lincoln said God must love because He made so many of them, this quality displays itself as a peculiar possession of genius. Now and then it is given to a great man sufficiently so to subordinate the inconsistencies without which real greatness could not exist as to incarnate some outstanding principle of which he becomes the exponent. Abraham Lincoln did this; and the world, or that small part of the world which can lay claim to any considerable measure of moral discernment, has redefined its conception of certain high qualities, its measure of the moral significance of certain notable achievements, in terms of his personality. This process is highly desirable as well as inevitable; but the elements of inconsistency are not thereby removed from the character itself. Of him we might say:

It has often been affirmed that "'Lincoln knew his Bible better than any minister," and large claims have been made concerning his use of it in public addresses. Mr. Lincoln did know and use the Bible, and his style is saturated with it; but it would be easy to exaggerate both his knowledge and use of it.

Prof. Daniel Kilham Dodge of the University of Illinois examined twenty-five of Lincoln's extended and carefully prepared addresses with this result:[61]

In five speeches from 1839 to 1852 he found six Biblical quotations, of which four were in his temperance address.

In his reply to Douglas in 1852 there were two Biblical quotations, both from the Old Testament.

In 1856 he found one, and that most notable of all—the "house divided against itself."

In his "lost speech" at Bloomington, as recorded by Whitney, there were six Biblical quotations, four from the Old Testament and two from the New—the largest number in any single speech.

In his ten speeches in the Lincoln and Douglas debates there were two Biblical references, besides a number of allusions to the "house divided against itself."

There were no Biblical quotations in the Cooper Union address or in the First Inaugural or in the Gettysburg address; none in the two messages to Congress in 1861.

His Second Inaugural was itself a kind of leaf out of the books of the prophets.

In the whole of the twenty-five speeches, there were found twenty-two Biblical references, eight in the Old Testament and fourteen in the New. This notwithstanding the impression of many who knew him that Lincoln preferred the Old Testament to the New, as recorded by Noah Brooks.

But this rather meager use of direct quotations and allusions need not disappoint us. Nor does it militate against the essentially Biblical substratum of his style. When we come to the study of Lincoln's literary and oratorical method, we find more striking contradictions and evolutions than we have here. Lincoln's oratory was not of the same style at all periods of his career, nor were his methods uniform at any one period.

He was a ready stump-speaker, yet he became so cautious while in the White House that he was timid about responding even to a serenade without having first written out his address, and on occasion could appear rude in declining to utter even a simple word of greeting and appreciation, as on the night before his address in Gettysburg, when he was very abrupt to the company that serenaded him.

He had been accustomed to large use of gesture, swinging his great arms, and sometimes, even in the Douglas debates, bending his knees till they almost touched the platform, and then rising suddenly almost with a whoop, but he became very quiet and self-restrained in his oratory.

He is alleged to have loved Burns more than any other poet, yet his speeches have been searched in vain for a single quotation from Burns. It is said that next to Burns he loved Byron, and he is not known ever to have quoted Byron in any speech or paper. It is said that his favorite Shakspeare play was Richard III., but his Shakspeare quotations are from Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, the Merchant of Venice; and there is one allusion to Falstaff.

Besides Shakspeare, whom he quoted next to the Bible, his literary allusions are to T. H. Bayley, Dickens, Robert Herrick, Pope and Scott, and they are not numerous. The total number of his quotations, as listed by Professor Dodge, including Shakspeare, but not including the Bible, is thirty.

What is more surprising, Lincoln was known as a great story teller. But his addresses contain hardly a single anecdote. He told stories in jury trials and to illustrate points in conversation, but he rarely told them in his addresses.[62]

No man who knew Lincoln intimately studied him so long, so industriously, or, in spite of many limitations, so appreciatively, as William H. Herndon. He was a profound believer in the mental and spiritual evolution of Lincoln.

In 1887, while Herndon, after many years of interruption, began again the preparation of his Life of Lincoln, he had an extended correspondence, partly from Springfield, and partly from Greencastle, Indiana, where Mr. Jesse W. Weik was at work with him on his book, and with a Boston sculptor, Mr. Truman H. Bartlett, who was planning a statue of Lincoln. Herndon's letters went more and more into detail as the correspondence proceeded, and he gave in some respects the very best affirmation of the development of Lincoln on the higher side of his nature that Herndon wrote at any time.

Herndon seemed to have some apprehension that a study of photographs and life-masks and other evidences of the physical appearance of Lincoln would not reveal the man himself. He said that a person studying his physical nature would say "that his physical nature was low, coarse, and not high and fine." Before he sent this letter he re-read it, and inserted the word "comparatively" before "low." Mr. Bartlett asked him further about this, and Herndon went into detail as to Lincoln's body. "His blood ran slowly. He was of a low or slow mechanical power, within him. I did not intend to say that Lincoln's organization was a low, animal organization. What I meant to say was that it was a slow-working machine. Lincoln's flesh was coarse, pimply, dry, hard, harsh; color of his flesh saffron brown; no blood seemingly in it; flesh wrinkled."

Mr. Bartlett apparently inquired whether the abnormal qualities of frontier life produced these effects, and whether Herndon had known other men of the Lincoln type. Apparently he alluded to the presence of malaria and the large use of pork in frontier diet.

Herndon did not accept the pork and malaria theories. He said that all such theories must give way to facts, and he dealt with facts. The men of the frontier had the best meat in the world, "venison, bear, turkey, and of course some hog."

"You ask me if I ever saw in this great wild west many men of Lincoln's type, and to which I answer, Yes. The first settlers of central and southern Illinois were men of that type. They came from the limestone regions of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, and were men of giant strength, physical force, and by nature mentally strong. They were original, were individualists. The strong alone from 1818 to 1830 could get here, and the strong alone could survive here.... No one was like Lincoln, and yet many were of his type.... He was, as you say, 'a man of extraordinary contrasts.' You would not look for a well-rounded man in such a description."

Lincoln was, then, as Herndon saw him, and as the world must see him, a legitimate product of his environment. Herndon had read Buckle and Spencer and Darwin, and was a thoroughgoing believer in evolution, as was Lincoln, from a far narrower reading, but a very thoughtful study of Vestiges of Creation.

Physically, Lincoln was akin to the strong pioneers of early Illinois, and it was not difficult to find each several trait of Lincoln reduplicated in many of them. But Lincoln himself was never duplicated. He was a product of his environment, but he was also an evolution which in terms of an individual personality went beyond environment, and was still going forward when death came to him.

This evolution of Lincoln, the spiritual Lincoln, as portrayed in these letters to a sculptor, who must not be permitted to forget, if he was in danger of forgetting, that the real man Lincoln had in him more than his bodily measurements could portray, is one of the most suggestive studies disclosed by Herndon, and it is sound, both as approached from the standpoint of science, and as considered in the personal study of Lincoln in his growth from year to year.

Like St. Paul, Lincoln had a warfare in his members. He was an embodiment of forces mutually antagonistic. He would not have been the man he was had either of them been lacking, and the growth of either at the total expense of the other would have given us a man abnormal, which Mr. Lincoln came perilously near to being. But his real development was mental and spiritual.

In another place St. Paul says that "The first man is of the earth, earthy, and the second man is from heaven." It has been assumed without due warrant that what he had in mind was a contrast between Adam and Christ, and this view is strengthened by the intrusion of the words "the Lord" in the authorized English text. But it is quite possible that St. Paul, even if Adam and Christ were a part of his contrast, had really in mind the evolution of any man's life; he being himself in his bodily nature the first man and in the birth and growth of his higher nature the second and contrasting man. "First is that which is natural, and after, that which is spiritual."

This was Herndon's thought of Lincoln, as disclosed in these letters,[63] and it is true of Lincoln. Lincoln was more than an embodiment of contrasts; the solar system is that, and it is more. In the solar system the opposing forces do not neutralize each other, but together hold the earth and planets in their orbits. So it was with Lincoln. But with him the higher and nobler forces became increasingly dominant.

Herndon resented it when anyone said that Lincoln had died at the right time. He believed that, great as Lincoln was, his nobler qualities had not yet come to their full maturity, and that a longer-lived Lincoln would have been an even nobler Lincoln. Here are some of the things he says of him in these letters:

"I said to you once that Mr. Lincoln had not arrived at maturity in 1865, and I say so now. His blood ran slowly—had low or slow circulation and consequently a slow build-up. As he had a slow build-up, so he had a slow development; he grew up like the forest oak, tough, solid, knotty, gnarled, standing out with power against the storm, and almost defying the lightning. Hence I conclude that he had not arrived at his highest development in 1865.... The convolutions of his brain were long; they did not snap off quickly like a short, thick man's brain.... The enduring power of Mr. Lincoln's thought and brain was wonderful. He could sit and think without food or rest longer than any man I ever saw."

He goes into detail concerning Mr. Lincoln's bodily lethargy and its effect on body and mind, the sluggishness of all his functions, and affirms that this must be taken into account in any right estimate of the man; but that steadily, and the more surely because slowly, his mind and soul developed and became more and more dominant.

"His flesh looked dry and leathery, tough and everlasting; his eyes were small and gray; head small and forehead receding; but when this great man was moved by some great and good feeling, by some idea of Liberty, or Justice, or Right, then he seemed an inspired man. It was just then that Lincoln's nature was beautiful, and in complete harmony with the laws of the Great Eternal. I have seen him in this inspired condition, and thought he was molded in the Spirit's best mold. Lincoln was a great man, a good man, and a pure man; and beneath his rough bodily exterior, Nature wove her fine network of nerve.... Lincoln was a gloomy man at one moment and a joyous man the next; he was conscious that a terrible fate awaited him. He said to me, 'I cannot help but believe that I shall meet with some terrible end.' This idea seized him and made him gloomy. At times his better nature would get the mastery of him, and he would be happy till the shadow of his fate flitted before him. In philosophy Lincoln was a fatalist.... In my poor opinion, Lincoln had not arrived, when he was assassinated, at the meridian of his intellectual power.... Were you to read his early speeches thoroughly you would see his then coarse nature. He gradually rose up, more spiritualistic. This is one of the reasons why I say that Lincoln was not fully developed in mind at the last. When a great Boston man said, 'Lincoln died at the right time,' he did not know what he was talking about."

In these and like paragraphs Herndon testified to the mental and spiritual evolution of Lincoln; and he was probably correct when he opined that that evolution was still in process, and that Lincoln was, up to the very hour of his death, a growing man in all that meant most to America and the world.

The religion of Abraham Lincoln was part and parcel of his life; and his life was an evolution whose successive stages can be measured with reasonable certainty. Not only did his religious convictions develop and broaden under the stimuli of Lincoln's constantly broadening intellectual and spiritual environment, but they broadened in the growth of his own personality.

There was an evolution in his apprehension of the ethical implications of public office. The Lincoln who re-entered politics after the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was a changed man from the Lincoln who, with the other members of the "Long Nine," earned by political log-rolling the severe but not wholly unmerited name applied to them by one of Illinois' best governors, "spared monuments of popular wrath." That Lincoln did not in this earlier period commit any personally dishonorable act is not an argument against the theory here advocated. He had, in his later political career, a far higher ideal of political honor, a greatly nobler conception of the dignity of public office—which he always sought—as a field of popular service. His political career was an evolution, and it developed nobler characteristics than that which characterized his earlier political life.

Lincoln's emancipation policy was an evolution. The successive stages of that policy were worthily set forth by Paul Selby in an address before the Historical Society of Chicago.[64] There never was a time when Abraham Lincoln did not believe slavery to be wrong, but there was a time when he was not an Abolitionist. The moral aspect of the slavery question grew in his mind and conscience till he promised his God to free the slaves.

On Sunday evening, September 7, 1862, a public meeting was held in Bryan Hall, Chicago, to urge upon the President the desire of Christian people that he should free the slaves. A petition was circulated, and was signed by all the Congregational and nearly all the Methodist and Baptist ministers of that city, courteously requesting the President to give the matter his earnest attention. The petition was sent to Washington by the hand of Rev. William W. Patton and Rev. John Dempster, who met the President by appointment on Saturday afternoon, September 13, the interview being arranged by Hon. Gideon Welles.

The story of that meeting has often been told in part, with undue emphasis upon Mr. Lincoln's statement then made that if God had a message for him on this subject He would be more likely to communicate it directly to Mr. Lincoln than to others for him. The latest book to misuse this incident is one just from the press in Great Britain, the Short Life of Lincoln, by Hon. Ralph Shirley, who says:

"Some of the ministers in this deputation even went so far as to assure him that they had authority in God's name to command him to emancipate the slaves."

Inasmuch as there were but two of the ministers, and neither of them assumed any such authority to speak the mind of God, such statements ought to cease, especially as the true story, from which all these accounts are garbled, is available for inspection in the files of the Maryland Historical Society.

Mr. Lincoln did say to them that he hoped it would not appear irreverent in him to say that if God were to reveal this duty of his to others, it was probable that He would reveal it also directly to Mr. Lincoln. At the beginning of the interview he was guarded; but as he found common ground with his visitors, he threw first one leg and then the other over the arm of his chair, and talked to them with the utmost freedom, and asked them concerning the opinion of ministers and churches, and assured them that he desired to know the will of God, and whatever seemed to him to be God's will he would do.

The next week occurred the battle of Antietam, and on Saturday, September 20, exactly a week after his interview with the Chicago ministers, Mr. Lincoln called the Cabinet together and read to them the Emancipation Proclamation, which was signed and published on the following Monday. We know now that Lincoln had promised God that if that battle resulted in the success of the Union cause he would issue the proclamation. We also know that the meeting with the Chicago ministers was very timely, and gave him an added assurance of moral support from the churches, if not added confidence in the help of God.

Some time after, Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune, returning from Washington, said, "Secretary Stanton told me to say to those Chicago clergymen who waited on the President about the Proclamation of Emancipation, that their interview finished the business. After that there was no manifestation of doubt or talk of delay. Mr. Lincoln's mind was fully made up."—Proceedings of the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, 1888.

Lincoln's literary style was an evolution.[65] His spread-eagle stump-speeches, with their florid rhetoric and grandiloquent figures of speech evolved into the calm, dignified, and forceful English of his maturer years.[66] An able monograph in which this evolution is traced is cited elsewhere in this volume.[67] That change of style was the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual as well as intellectual grace.

In like manner Lincoln's religion was an evolution, both in its intellectual and its spiritual qualities. Up to the time of his residence in New Salem he had heard only the dogmatic sectarianism of unlettered preachers, proclaiming a creed which furnished him certain lifelong tenets but which as a whole he could not accept. At New Salem he read the negative arguments which confuted the dogmas he had heard, and perhaps unwittingly made room for a more intelligent faith.

He was deeply impressed by the argument of Dr. Smith in his The Christian's Defence. It was the first time he had heard the Christian apologetic rationally presented, and it made a lasting impression upon him without, however, fully satisfying him. He was, however, a much more religious man when he left Springfield than he was when he came to it, whether he knew it or not.

The solemn responsibilities of his office, the daily contemplation of death as it menaced him and came into the homes of the people of his country, the profound conviction that God was working His infinite purpose through the war, and through the human agency of Lincoln himself, took hold of the deepest impulses of his nature, and became the controlling forces of his policy.

Lincoln was no theologian, but I do not find any authority for the statement of Mr. Binns that Lincoln said, "the more a man knew of theology, the farther he got away from the Spirit of Christ." It is possible, of course, for a man to learn theology as an intellectual system and to have little religion as a spiritual experience, and to lose that little in the process of his logical subtleties: but Lincoln was too just a man to make so sweeping and unjust an affirmation of something of which he would certainly have admitted he knew very little.

The rock-bottom foundation of Abraham Lincoln's religious faith was the ultra-Calvinism of his boyhood. He was reared a Predestinarian Baptist; and while he never became a Baptist he never ceased to be a Predestinarian. To this he added a strong rationalistic tendency, inherent in his nature, and strengthened by his study of Paine and Volney. This also he never wholly outgrew. As a lawyer who was not well read, pleading before juries that cared little for the letter of the law, he was accustomed to reduce his cases to simple principles of elementary justice, and to rest all upon these principles. This habit of thought and practice he applied also to his theology. His early recollection of the epitaph of Johnny Kongapod was nothing less than the application of the Golden Rule to theology—the assurance of an eternal justice throned in heaven and intelligible on earth.

Thus, when he argued in favor of universal salvation he did it upon the basis of the old Calvinistic theology with which he had been familiar all his life. If God was, indeed, absolute sovereign, and as good as He was great, and willed not that any should perish, then no one could finally perish. Universal salvation became logically and ethically compulsory. The Christ who tasted death for every man, did so as the necessary means to the efficiency of a plan of salvation whereby the curse of the fall was fully offset by the sacrifice of Christ, at the instance of the sovereign will of God. As in Adam all died, even so in Christ were all made alive. His theory of universal salvation was the logical expression of his determinism, influenced by his rationalism and confirmed by his appeal to a justice that would not accept a fall more universal than the atonement of Christ. This was not because Lincoln approached the theme from the direction of the grace of Christ, but of the irresistibility of a divine decree. He profoundly believed himself an instrument of the divine will, believing that will to be right, and creation's final law.

If it were asked, where in such a system as his he found a place for the forgiveness of sins, the answer would be first that he had no system, and secondly that he found no place for the doctrine; but it would then be necessary to add that he found the doctrine, nevertheless. He had no system. He thought without logical method. But his thinking was in right lines. He followed simple paths, "blazed" through technicalities and in quite thorough disregard of them. As his office desk was in confusion, and he kept a package marked, "When you don't find it anywhere else, look here," so he had in his thinking a parcel of unassorted first principles to which he recurred when he needed them. Forgiveness and law were to him two unreconciled postulates; but law he had to assume, even though he denied forgiveness. But if he did not admit belief in forgiveness, he did believe in mercy, for he himself was merciful, and he believed that he would be merciful to God if he were God and God were man. Stanton could argue him down as to the necessity for shooting a soldier who slept on duty, but Lincoln injected an intuitive, and from Stanton's point of view, an unreasonable and a certainly unarticulated, element of mercy that forbade the killing of this particular boy.

His theory of governmental forgiveness was as irreconcilable with his theory of military discipline as his theory of divine mercy was with his system of inexorable law. He did not harmonize the contradictions: he was merciful, and let his system take the consequences, and he believed in a divine mercy while holding a theory with which the exercise of mercy was irreconcilable.

To such a mind as that of Abraham Lincoln, it was not necessary to prove the fact of immortality. If God possessed immortality and intended it for man, then God would make His decree effective in man. Adam's fall could not hopelessly lose to man what God designed; and, whether he accepted for himself or not the theory of the fall and of redemption, he accepted both in meeting an argument which by reason of the fall could have deprived man of his birthright of immortality. He believed in the immortality of the soul.

Did he harmonize that doctrine with the rest of his creed? Probably not. He was no theologian, in the strict and formal sense, no logician. He reasoned on the basis of very simple and elementary principles, whose lines of direction were determined by the early Calvinistic preaching to which he listened, the rationalistic method which he learned from Paine, and his simple sense of justice and right.

His was not wholly an optimistic faith. He knew that man was sinful and sad and that "the spirit of mortal" had little occasion for pride; but he believed in an eternal justice and an unconquerable goodness, regnant above the perplexities and contradictions of this life, and triumphant in the life everlasting.

Abraham Lincoln believed in God. Save in his moments of deepest gloom when everything turned black, he appears never seriously to have questioned this fundamental article of belief. It is not easy to see how he could have done so. His idea of causation forbade it, and, what was more, his profound supernaturalism affirmed it as incontrovertible. This element of supernaturalism went the full length of orthodox preaching, as Lincoln heard it and accepted it. It was in accord with the teachings both of the Baptists, whom he heard in Indiana and rural Illinois, and the Presbyterians, to whom he listened in Springfield and in Washington. In a great God, a mighty Creator, a Sovereign Ruler, he was taught to believe by all the forms of Calvinism to which throughout his life he listened, and it was in full essential accord with his own native tendency. His supernaturalism was not only ultra-orthodox; it went the full length of current superstition. The frontiersman of that day had superstition wrought into him by the vastness of the wilderness, the solemnity of the immeasurable forest and plain, and the insignificance of man; the haunting tales of savagery and witchcraft; the presence in every frontier community of some person supposed to be possessed of second sight or other supernatural qualities. The rationalism of his mature years modified but did not in any degree eradicate his supernaturalism.

It must be remembered that Paine and Volney, whose works he read, were far from being atheists. Thomas Paine, whatever he denied, believed as strongly as Peter Cartwright or James Smith in a personal God. So far as we know, Lincoln was never under any strong influence that might have made him an atheist, his doubts and questionings were all within the sphere of an expressed or implicit theism.

The names by which Lincoln referred to God are many and suggestive. The following is a partial list:[68]

Almighty, Almighty Architect, Almighty Arm, Almighty Father, Almighty God, Almighty Hand, Almighty Power, Almighty Ruler of Nations, Creator, Disposer, Divine Author, Divine Being, Divine Majesty, Divine Providence, Divine Will, Eternal God, Father, Father in Heaven, Father of Mercies, God, God Almighty, God of Battles, God of Hosts, God of Nations, Governor, Heavenly Father, Higher Being, Higher Power, Holy Spirit, Judge, Lord, Maker, Maker of the Universe, Master, Most High, Most High God, Omniscient Mind, Power, Providence, Ruler of the Universe, Supreme Being.

Lincoln believed in the Bible. I am not sure that he accepted the whole content of the positive arguments set forth so cogently by his pastor, Dr. Smith. When he called this argument "unanswerable," it need not imply that his every doubt was satisfied, his every misgiving reassured. It is entirely possible that there lingered in his mind some vestiges of what he had read in writers opposed to the doctrine of the inspiration of the Scriptures as it was then taught; indeed, that doctrine in the form in which it was currently stated was not one by which a modern man's orthodoxy ought to be tested. But he read the Bible, honored it, quoted it freely, and it became so much a part of him as visibly and permanently to give shape to his literary style and to his habits of thought. When Mrs. Speed presented him an Oxford Bible in 1841, he declared his intention to read it regularly, believing it to be "the best cure for the blues"; and he kept and loved and constantly used his mother's Bible. How he would have defined his theory of its transmission and of the relation of its divine and human elements we do not know, and we need not be too curious to inquire. It is more than possible that Mr. Lincoln never made this definition in his own mind. His attitude toward the Bible was a thoroughly practical one. We do not know that he ever heard Coleridge's pragmatic affirmation, but we have every reason to believe that he would have accepted it, namely, that he valued the Bible because "it finds me as no other book."

Concerning his opinion of Jesus Christ our material for constructive hypothesis is exceedingly scanty.[69] Herndon says he does not believe the name of Jesus can be found in any of Lincoln's authentic writings. I have found it in his writings but I must confess that I have not found it frequently in any which I count to be certainly genuine.[70] There are, however, a number of references to Jesus Christ in his writings and published addresses, and they are both positive and reverent.

On July 4, 1864, the colored people of Baltimore presented him a beautiful copy of the Bible of the usual pulpit size, bound in violet-colored velvet. The corners were bands of solid gold and there was a thick plate of gold upon the cover, bearing this inscription:

"To Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, the friend of universal freedom. From the loyal colored people of Baltimore, as a token of respect and gratitude. Baltimore, July 4, 1864."

In accepting this gift, which was presented in person by a committee of five, the President said:

"In regard to this great book, I have only to say it is the best gift which God has ever given man. All the good from the Saviour of the world is communicated to us through this book."—Carpenter: Six Months in the White House, p. 199; also Nicolay and Hay: Works of Lincoln, twelve volume edition, X, 217-18.

Such references as this show to us the instinctive place which he accorded Jesus Christ in his own unpremeditated thinking. This was the best thing he had to say about the Bible, that through it alone we have knowledge of the Saviour of the world.

Herndon tells us that Lincoln ridiculed the doctrine of the virgin birth of Jesus. If this is true, I am very sorry. But Abraham Lincoln's faith in Christ did not depend wholly or even primarily upon his interpretation of the mystery of our Lord's birth. I approach a discussion of this question with some hesitation, for it is one which, as related to Lincoln we do not know very much about, but it is a subject which we are not free to pass over in silence.

It is a sad fact that the argument for the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ should ever have been based on the mystery of his birth. Not thus does the New Testament establish the doctrine of his divinity. The wonderful story of the birth of Jesus is told in two places only,—in the introduction to the two Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and these are the very two that contain genealogies tracing his descent through Joseph. The theory that one of these gives the family tree of Mary is unsupported by any evidence. So far as we know, Jesus never referred to the mystery of his birth, or attached any importance to it. His two brothers, James and Jude, each wrote a book which we have in the New Testament, and there is no reference in either of them to this doctrine. Peter preached his mighty sermons at Pentecost and afterwards, proclaiming the faith on which the Church was established, and he grounded his argument for the divinity of Jesus not upon his birth, but upon his resurrection from the dead. Paul preached the gospel of Christ throughout the Roman world, and neither in any recorded sermon nor in any letter did he make any reference to that dogma. Mark, earliest of the gospels, and for we know not how long a period the only one, is silent as to the birth of Jesus; and John, the most definitely spiritual of them all, begins and concludes his profound philosophy of the person of Christ without a word concerning the manner of his birth.

It is, therefore, a wholly unwarranted dogmatism which grounds the divinity of Jesus in a question of the domestic relations of Joseph and Mary. Jesus Christ is to be accepted for what He was and is, not for some opinion as to how He became what He was.

We do not know whether Abraham Lincoln ever considered the question of the birth of Christ in any personal thought he may have had concerning his own birth. We may not forget, however, that if Herndon is right, Lincoln lived and died without knowing all the facts about his own mother which later research has made certain. The marriage certificate of his parents was recorded in another county than that in which he supposed it would have been recorded, and he appears never to have been certain that he himself was begotten in lawful wedlock. We know that Nancy Hanks and Thomas Lincoln were married a year before the birth of their eldest daughter, who was older than Abraham Lincoln, but he is believed not to have known that.

What then? Should a man in 1860 or 1864 refuse to vote for Abraham Lincoln because he did not feel certain when or whether his parents were married?

The man who said, "I believe in Abraham Lincoln," did not commonly have in mind any question of his parentage, but believed in his integrity, his patriotism, his moral leadership. Even so the man who believes in Jesus Christ may believe in Him without ever asking, much less ever answering, any dubitable question in metaphysics.

Scant as are the references to Jesus in the authentic utterances of Abraham Lincoln, they do not seem to me unimportant. They testify to a faith that was valid as far as it went. They manifest a spirit which is fundamentally Christian.

Unable to define his own views in terms that would have been acceptable to those who believed themselves the rightful guardians of orthodoxy in his day, it is not surprising that Lincoln was guarded in his references to a dogma which might have involved him in greater difficulties than he was prepared to meet. It was true in that day unhappily as it was in the days of Paul, "Some indeed preach Christ even of envy and strife; and some also of good-will." It is occasion for profound sorrow that Christ has been so preached as that men have sometimes found it difficult to confess their faith in Him without provoking strife and envy.

That Lincoln was unwilling to make his doubt the occasion of dogmatic negation is evident from one or more of the acquaintances of Lincoln, whom Herndon interviewed in an effort to adduce testimony against his faith, and whom Lamon quoted in that part of his book in which he made his attack upon the religion of Lincoln. The following from I. W. Keys, the man who loaned to him Vestiges of Creation, is interesting in itself and especially interesting in its relation to the group of testimonies which these two men assembled:

"In my intercourse with Mr. Lincoln, I learned that he believed in a Creator of all things, who had neither beginning nor end, and, possessing all power and wisdom, established a principle, in obedience to which worlds move, and are upheld, and animal and vegetable life come into existence. A reason he gave for his belief was that, in view of the order and harmony of all nature which we behold, it would have been created and arranged by some great thinking power. As to the Christian theory, that Christ is God, or equal to the Creator, he said that it had better be taken for granted; for, by the test of reason, we might become infidels on that subject, for evidence of Christ's divinity came to us in a somewhat doubtful shape; but that the system of Christianity was an ingenious one at least, and perhaps was calculated to do good."—Lamon: Life of Lincoln, p. 490.

Emphatic proof of Mr. Lincoln's faith is to be found in the positive declaration of the two men who have done most to destroy the world's confidence in it, Lamon and Herndon. In Lamon's later book of Reminiscences, he did much to counteract the harsh and to my mind incorrect impression given in his earlier book. But even in that book he affirmed that while Lincoln rejected the New Testament as a book of divine authority, he accepted its precepts as binding upon him and was a believer in the supernatural even to credulity (p. 503, 504).

In that same work Herndon set forth that Lincoln was a firm believer in God and attempted, as he said, "to put at rest forever the charge that Mr. Lincoln was an atheist." He declared, however, that Lincoln did not believe in a special creation, but in an "evolution under law"; not in special revelation, "but in miracles under law"; and that "all things both matter and mind were governed by laws universal, absolute, and eternal" (p. 494).

To this Herndon gives even more emphatic testimony in his own book. It must then be remembered that while in the loose nomenclature of these authors Mr. Lincoln was an "infidel" it is these same authors that assure us, as Lamon does, that "his theological opinions were substantially those expounded by Theodore Parker."—Lamon: Life of Lincoln, p. 486.

The question whether Lincoln's views underwent any substantial change after leaving Springfield, has been answered in the negative by John G. Nicolay, his private secretary at the White House; who affirmed that "Mr. Lincoln did not, to my knowledge, in any way change his religious views, opinions, or beliefs, from the time he left Springfield to the day of his death."

This probably is correct. Mr. Lincoln was not conscious of any radical change; but Mrs. Lincoln noticed a change in him after Willie's death, which grew more pronounced after his visit to Gettysburg, and his own faith, while undergoing no sudden and radical transformation, manifests a consistent evolution.

But we are not sure how much Mr. Nicolay believed Lincoln's views to have been in need of change. He said in another place:

"Benevolence and forgiveness were the very basis of his character. His nature was deeply religious, but he belonged to no denomination; he had faith in the eternal justice and boundless mercy of Providence, and made the Golden Rule of Christ his practical creed."—John G. Nicolay, in article "Abraham Lincoln" in Encyclopedia Britannica, ninth edition, XIV, 662.

Lincoln believed in divine destiny. He could hardly have believed otherwise. The preaching to which he listened was such as to make it all but impossible for him to hold any other views. He believed so strongly that his own life was under divine guidance that Lamon and Herndon speak of it in a thinly veiled scorn as though it were in Lincoln's mind a mark of conscious superiority. Whether it was such a mark or not does not now concern us. Lincoln believed in divine guidance. He had faith in prayer and his practice of prayer is attested by many and credible witnesses. A man of his temperament and training and sense of responsibility could not well have been kept from praying. Prayer was a necessary part of his life.

Lincoln not only had faith in prayer considered as a means of obtaining results from God; he believed in it as establishing a relation with God, a covenant relation, such as Abraham of old established. If such a faith seems inconsistent with any other elements in the faith or doubt of Abraham Lincoln, then the inconsistency must stand, for he did not hold his views in entire consistency. In no respect does this faith in the covenant relation emerge more strongly than in connection with the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation. Fortunately, the evidence here is incontestable. The Proclamation immediately became historic. Lincoln had to autograph many copies to be sold at sanitary fairs—copies which now sell at one thousand dollars each. Every incident relating to the event became of immediate interest; and members of the Cabinet had to group themselves for Carpenter's historic painting, of which he has left so valuable a literary monument in his Six Months in the White House. The members of the Cabinet had no time to invent or imagine a set of incidents mythical in character, for each of them had to describe many times, and immediately, the circumstances which attended the reading of the Proclamation to the Cabinet on Monday, September 22, 1862.

This is the important and incontestable fact, that Lincoln did not bring the Proclamation to the Cabinet for discussion, except as to minor details. He had already determined to issue it. He had promised God that he would do so.

This was the statement which profoundly impressed the members of the Cabinet,—the President told them that he had already promised God that he would free the slaves.

The Diary of Gideon Welles was first published in full in the Atlantic Monthly in 1909, portions of it having earlier appeared in the Century; but it was written day by day as the events occurred. His record for Monday, September 22, 1862, begins thus:

"We have a special Cabinet meeting. The subject was the Proclamation concerning emancipating slaves after a certain date in States that should then be in rebellion. For several weeks the subject has been suspended, but, the President says, never lost sight of. When the subject was submitted in August, and indeed in taking it up, the President stated that the matter was finally decided, but that he felt it to be due to us to make us acquainted with the fact and invite criticism of the Proclamation. There were some differences in the Cabinet, but he had formed his own conclusions, and made his own decisions. He had, he said, made a vow, a covenant, that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle (which had just been fought) he would consider it his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation. We might think it strange, he said, but there were times when he felt uncertain how to act; that he had in this way submitted the disposal of matters when the way was not clear to his mind what he should do. God had decided this question in favor of the slave. He was satisfied it was right—was confirmed and strengthened in his action by the vow and its results; his mind was fixed, his decision made; but he wished his paper announcing his course to be as correct in terms as it could be made without any attempt to change his determination. For that was fixed."—"The Diary of Gideon Welles," Atlantic Monthly, 1909, p. 369.

We have no present concern with the question whether Lincoln's method of determining the divine will was a reasonable method, or wholly consistent with some of his own questions and doubts; what concerns us is that the President invited no discussion of the Proclamation in its essential elements; any disposition which any of the members of the Cabinet might have felt to discuss the instrument itself or seek to dissuade the President from issuing it was stopped by his quiet and emphatic declaration that he had made a covenant with God, and must keep his vow; and that he was strengthened in his own conviction that the Proclamation was in accord with the will of God.

We must not pass lightly over the religious aspects of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln had submitted his first draft of the Proclamation to the Cabinet on Tuesday, July 22, 1862, and it met with strong opposition. Only two members of the Cabinet favored it; Seward and Chase were strongly against it and the others thought it inopportune. With the memory of this opposition, which in July had practically voted the President down, Mr. Lincoln brought the matter again on September 22, not for discussion, for as he said he knew the view already of every member of the Cabinet, but he had promised God that he would do this thing. That very night Secretary Chase wrote in his diary an account of the meeting, which is condensed as follows:

"Monday, September 22, 1862.

"To Department about nine. State Department messenger came with notice to heads of Departments to meet at twelve. Received sundry callers. Went to White House. All the members of the Cabinet were in attendance. There was some general talk, and the President mentioned that Artemus Ward had sent him his book. Proposed to read a chapter which he thought very funny. Read it, and seemed to enjoy it very much.

"The President then took a graver tone, and said, 'Gentlemen: I have, as you are aware, thought a great deal about the relation of this war to slavery; and you all remember that, several weeks ago, I read to you an order I had prepared on this subject, which, on account of objections made by some of you, was not issued. Ever since then my mind has been much occupied with this subject, and I have thought, all along, that the time for acting on it might probably come. I think the time has come now. I wish it was a better time. I wish that we were in a better condition. The action of the army against the Rebels has not been quite what I should best like. But they have been driven out of Maryland, and Pennsylvania is no longer in danger of invasion. When the Rebel Army was at Frederick, I determined, as soon as it should be driven out of Maryland, to issue a Proclamation of Emancipation, such as I thought most likely to be useful. I said nothing to anyone, but I made the promise to myself, and [hesitating a little] to my Maker. The Rebel Army is now driven out, and I am going to fulfill that promise. I have got you together to hear what I have written down. I do not wish your advice about the main matter, for that I have determined for myself. This, I say, without intending anything but respect for any one of you. But I already know the views of each on this question. They have been heretofore expressed, and I have considered them as thoroughly and carefully as I can. What I have written is that which my reflections have determined me to say. If there is anything in the expressions I use, or in any minor matter, which any one of you thinks had best be changed I shall be glad to receive the suggestions. One other observation I will make. I know very well that many others might, in this matter as in others, do better than I can; and if I was satisfied that the public confidence was more fully possessed by any one of them than by me, and knew of any constitutional way in which he could be put in my place, he should have it. I would gladly yield it to him. But though I believe that I have not so much of the confidence of the people as I had some time since, I do not know that, all things considered, any other person has more; and however this may be, there is no way in which I can have any other man put where I am. I am here; I must do the best I can, and bear the responsibility of taking the course which I feel I ought to take.'"—Warden: Life of S. P. Chase, pp. 481-82, quoted in Nicolay and Hay, VI, 159-60.

In the diaries of Secretaries Welles and Chase we have incontrovertible testimony. The two records were made independently and on that very night, and were not published for years afterward. There was no possible collusion or reshaping of the testimony in the light of subsequent events, no time for imagination to play any part in enlarging upon the incident. The President recognized that the time was not wholly propitious, that a majority of the Cabinet probably would not be disposed to adopt his Proclamation if put to vote, that the people's support of the administration was wavering and unpredicable and none too certain to approve this measure. Under these conditions it is impossible to consider the Emancipation Proclamation solely from the standpoint either of political expediency or of military necessity. The fact which silenced all opposition in the Cabinet was the President's solemn statement that he had made a covenant with God, and that he must keep it.

There is a sense in which the solemnity is heightened by the grotesque incident of the chapter from Artemus Ward read at the beginning. There is an aspect in which the sublimity of that Cabinet meeting's ending is heightened by the ridiculousness of its beginning. In any event, it shows that the mind of Abraham Lincoln that morning was in what for him was a thoroughly healthy condition. However incongruous it might have been for another man to begin so solemn a meeting with a chapter from Artemus Ward, it was a mark of sanity, of thorough normal psychology, when done by Abraham Lincoln. It showed that the moral overstrain was finding its relief from excessive tension in what for Lincoln was an entirely normal way.

As before stated, these two contemporary accounts by Welles and Chase, though made at the time, were not published until years afterward; but there was another publication that was virtually contemporary. Frank B. Carpenter, the artist, began almost immediately his noted painting of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and in the course of his six months in the White House had long and repeated interviews with all members of the Cabinet, and talked with them about every incident connected with that event. He published his account in his book in 1866, while all the members of the Cabinet were living, and, so far as known, was never objected to or proposed to be modified by any member of the Cabinet. According to his statement, Lincoln told the Cabinet that he had promised God that he would do this, uttering the last part of this sentence in a low voice. Secretary Chase, who was sitting near the President, asked Mr. Lincoln if he had correctly understood him, and the President repeated what he had affirmed before, saying:

"I made a solemn vow before God, that if General Lee was driven back from Pennsylvania, I would crown the result by the declaration of freedom for the slaves."—Six Months in the White House, pp. 89, 90.

In this threefold attestation we have irrefutable testimony that the determining motive of President Lincoln in his issue of the Emancipation Proclamation was the keeping of his solemn covenant with God.

It is all but impossible to exaggerate the significance of this incident. The essential fact is as fully proved as human testimony can possibly prove a fact. When we remember the extreme reticence of Abraham Lincoln on all such matters, and the fact of which he must have been painfully conscious that his Cabinet was not very favorably disposed toward the thing that he proposed to do, his quiet, outspoken, and repeated declaration that he had promised this thing to God is sufficient in itself to settle forever the essentially religious character of Abraham Lincoln. If we had no other word from his lips touching on the subject of religion but this one, we should be assured of his unfaltering belief in God, in a profound sense of his own personal responsibility to God, in prayer, and a personal relation with God.

This was no platitude uttered to meet the expectation of the religious people of the United States; it was no evasive generality intended to fit whatever religious desire might lie in the minds of those who heard him. It was no play to the gallery; it was no masquerade; every motive of pretense or hypocrisy or duplicity was absent. It was the sincere expression of the abiding faith of Abraham Lincoln in God, and prayer, and duty.

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Lincoln was a believer in the immortality of the soul.[71] Herndon affirms this and declares that any attempt to deny it would imply that Lincoln was a dishonest man. He believed in the preservation of identity beyond the grave so that we shall be conscious of our own identity and be able to recognize our loved ones.

He believed in future punishment, but not in endless punishment. Punishment seemed to him so inevitable a part of an inexorable divine law that he sometimes objected to the preaching of the doctrine of forgiveness as being subversive of the fact of law, which he held must continue its sway in this world and in every world; but in eternal punishment he did not believe. His old neighbors in New Salem, his friends in Springfield, and those who knew him in Washington agree in this. We have already quoted from the letter of Isaac Cogdal to Mr. B. F. Irwin, April 10, 1874, who tells of a conversation he had with Mr. Lincoln in the latter's office in Springfield about 1859, concerning Mr. Lincoln's religious faith. Mr. Herndon was present. He says:

"Mr. Lincoln expressed himself in about these words: He did not nor could not believe in the endless punishment of anyone of the human race. He understood punishment for sin to be a Bible doctrine; that the punishment was parental in its object, aim, and design, and intended for the good of the offender; hence it must cease when justice was satisfied. He added that all that was lost by the transgression of Adam was made good by the atonement; all that was lost by the fall was made good by the sacrifice. And he added this remark, that punishment being a provision of the gospel system, he was not sure but the world would be better if a little more punishment was preached by our ministers, and not so much pardon for sin."

William H. Hannah, in Lamon's group of citations, says:

"Since 1856 Mr. Lincoln told me that he was a kind of immortalist; that he never could bring himself to believe in eternal punishment; that man lived but a little while here; and that, if eternal punishment were man's doom, he should spend that little life in vigilant and ceaseless preparation by never-ending prayer."—Lamon: Life of Lincoln, p. 489.

Some who have known of Lincoln's particular utterances on certain of these points have been misled, as it appears to me, by the similarity of some of these points to doctrines held by particular religious sects and have sought to identify Lincoln more or less with those denominations. The fact that he took portions of his positive thinking from Theodore Parker and William Ellery Channing, does not necessitate that he was a Unitarian; nor does the fact that he did not believe in eternal punishment compel his classification with Universalists. Theodore Parker and William E. Channing chanced to be the authors whose writings came into his possession at a time when they served to define particular aspects of his own faith. Horace Bushnell, or Henry Ward Beecher might have served him quite as well and possibly in some respects better. For Lincoln's Calvinism was too deep-rooted to be eradicated; and a positive faith, both liberal and constructive, that could have been grafted on to that root might very possibly have served him better than anything so radical as in its nature to deny any essential part of what he felt he must continue to believe. Parker and Channing served him as James Smith's Christian's Defence and Robert Chambers' Vestiges of Creation served him in assuring him that a man could hold the views he held and know more about them than he knew and still be a reverent Christian. Such a Christian Abraham Lincoln appears to me to have been.

I do not think that any claim which I am here making for the faith of Abraham Lincoln can be denied on the basis of any authentic utterance of his. If at any point he is known to have said or written anything which is apparently inconsistent with these affirmations, that utterance I think will be found somewhere in this volume and the reader will have no difficulty in finding it and in giving it its proper weight. But I do not think the general position which this chapter sets forth can be seriously shaken. In the sense which this chapter has endeavored truthfully to set forth, Abraham Lincoln believed in God, in Christ, in the Bible, in prayer, in duty, and in immortality.

Religion is one thing and theology is another. A love of flowers is one thing and a knowledge of botany is another. A man may love a flower and call it by the wrong name, or know no name for it. A man may have the religion of Christ, and hold very wrong opinions or conjectures concerning Christ. We are saved by faith, not by conjecture. No man is saved or lost because of the correctness of his opinions. Correct thinking is important; but it is not so important as a right attitude toward spiritual realities and practical duties. Faith and opinion are not unrelated, but neither are they identical.

Too much of the effort to prove that Abraham Lincoln was a Christian has begun and ended in the effort to show that on certain theological topics he cherished correct opinions. That would not prove him to be a Christian, nor would the lack of these certainly prove that he was not a Christian. Religion is of the heart and life; theology is of the brain and mind. Each is important, but theology is less important than religion.

Abraham Lincoln was not a theologian, and several of his theological opinions may have been incorrect; but there is good reason to believe that he was a true Christian. The world has need of a few theologians, and of a great many Christians.

It was Mr. Lincoln's custom when he read a paragraph which deeply interested him, to draw a pencil line around it in the book; and if it was something which he wished to commit to memory and meditate upon, he often copied it upon a scrap of paper. I own a half page of notepaper containing in Lincoln's handwriting and with his signature, a paragraph from Baxter's "Saint's Rest." The manuscript was owned by Hon. Winfield Smith, Lincoln's Attorney-General in 1864, and was among his private papers when he died. The paragraph reads:

"It is more pleasing to God to see his people study Him and His will directly, than to spend the first and chief of their effort about attaining comfort for themselves. We have faith given us, principally that we might believe and live by it in daily applications of Christ. You may believe immediately (by God's help) but getting assurance of it may be the work of a great part of your life."

It would be interesting to know just what was in Lincoln's mind when he read this paragraph, and sat down with pen and ink to copy and meditate upon it. The "comfort" which Baxter was referring to in this passage was the comfort of assurance of salvation in Christ. It was a theme on which Mr. Lincoln heard many sermons, first and last, by Predestinarian preachers, both Baptist and Presbyterian. If a man was among the elect, how could he be sure of it, and what means could he take to make the assurance more certain? Baxter's answer was that assurance in this matter is less important than to study and obey God's will; and that faith is given us as something in whose exercise we may live daily without greatly troubling ourselves about fathomless mysteries. It was good doctrine for a man who had been reared as Lincoln had been reared, and the remainder of the passage was especially in line with his needs. He could believe immediately, even though the assurance of faith was long delayed. That assurance might be the work of a lifetime, but faith was something that might be lived upon now. The thought is akin to that in the fine lines of Lizzie York Case:

A man can live by a faith of which he has not full assurance—so said the sensible old Puritan, Richard Baxter—he can live on it though it take him nearly all his life to gain assurance; and I am certain he would have added, had he been asked, that if assurance never came, and our heart condemn us, "God is greater than our heart."

The carefully written paragraph in Lincoln's hand appears to indicate that the thought was one which deeply impressed Lincoln. Perhaps he felt that his own faith was of that sort, a faith on which a man could live, while going forward in the study and pursuit of the will of God, not seeking one's own comfort or the joy of complete assurance, but finding in the daily performance of duty the essential quality of true faith.

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