“Isn’t that just what he said to Newt Bateman,” Billy stopped long enough to remark.
“‘We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown; but we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.
“‘It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.’
“The longer the war went on, the more and more sure he was that God was workin’ out something, and hard as it was for him, the more and more reconciled he got to God’s Government. Seems to me that’s clear from what he said in his last Inaugural. You remember:
“The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses! For it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away, yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’
“I like to say that just like he said it. Seems kinda like music. He was that way sometimes, swung into sort of talk and made your heart stop to listen; it was so sweet and solemn-like.
“Makes me ache though to think what he had to go through to come out where he could talk so sure and calm about things; for certain as he was that God had a purpose in it all, he wa’n’t so sure always that he was proceedin’ along the lines the Almighty approved of. He never got over that struggle long as he was President, always askin’ himself whether he was on God’s side. Puzzled him bad that both sides thought God was with ’em. He pointed out more than once how the rebel soldiers was prayin’ for victory just as earnest as ours—how the rebel people got the same kind of help out of prayer that the Union people did. And both couldn’t be right.
“There isn’t any doubt he often tested out whether God agreed with his argument or not, by the way things swung. It was that way about the Emancipation Proclamation. You know how he thought about that for months, and for the most part kept it to himself. He didn’t want to do it that way, was dead set on the North buying the slaves instead of takin’ ’em. But he had the Emancipation Proclamation ready, and he’d told God he’d let it loose if He’d give us the victory. Sounds queer, mebbe, but that’s what he did. He told the Cabinet so, and they’ve told about it. A little mite superstitious, some would say. But Mr. Lincoln was a little superstitious, interested in things like signs and dreams—specially dreams, seemed to feel they might be tryin’ to give him a hint. He’s told me many a time about dreams he’d had, used to have same dream over and over, never got tired studyin’ what it meant. You remember that happened in the war. He’d used to dream he saw a curious lookin’ boat runnin’ full speed toward a shore he couldn’t make out clear, had that dream before nearly all the big battles—had it the night before they killed him, and told the Cabinet about it—thought it meant there’d be good news from Sherman.