And he was appointed.
JAMES E. MURDOCH.
It is claimed that few public men have made greater use of the Bible than Lincoln. This is true. He was continually quoting Scripture or alluding to Scriptural scenes and stories, sometimes to illustrate or adorn a serious speech, but more frequently to point or emphasize a joke. The venerable actor and elocutionist, James E. Murdoch, who had met Lincoln, both in Springfield and Washington, relates an anecdote of him while at Washington which serves to illustrate this propensity: "One day a detachment of troops was marching along the avenue singing the soul-stirring strain of 'John Brown.' They were walled in on either side by throngs of citizens and strangers, whose voices mingled in the roll of the mighty war-song. In the midst of this exciting scene, a man had clambered into a small tree, on the sidewalk, where he clung, unmindful of the jeers of the passing crowd, called forth by the strange antics he was unconsciously exhibiting in his efforts to overcome the swaying motion of the slight stem which bent beneath his weight. Mr. Lincoln's attention was attracted for a moment, and he paused in the serious conversation in which he was deeply interested and in an abstracted manner, yet with a droll cast of the eye, and a nod of the head in the direction of the man, he repeated, in his dry and peculiar utterance, the following old-fashioned couplet:
'And Zaccheous he did climb a tree,
His Lord and Master for to see.'"
(L. M. A., pp. 349, 350).
Mr. Murdoch states that in connection with this incident Lincoln was charged "with turning sacred subjects into ridicule." He apologizes for, and attempts to palliate this levity, and affects to believe that Lincoln was a Christian. But almost daily Lincoln indulged in jokes at the expense of the Bible and Christianity, many of them ten-fold more sacrilegious in their character than this trifling incident related by Mr. Murdoch. If the scrupulously pious considered this simple jest, uttered in the midst of a mixed crowd, irreverent, what would have been their horror could they have listened to some of his remarks made when alone with a skeptical boon companion? With Christians and with strangers he was generally guarded in his speech, lest he should give offense; but with his unbelieving friends, up to the end of his career, his keenest shafts of wit were not infrequently aimed at the religion of his day. This shows that the popular faith had no more sacredness for Lincoln, the President, in Washington, than it had for Lincoln, the farmer's boy, who mocked and mimicked it in Indiana, or Lincoln, the lawyer, who scoffed at it and argued against it in Illinois.
HON. MAUNSELL B. FIELD.
Mr. Field, who had met nearly all the noted characters of his day, both of Europe and America, in his "Memories of Many Men," has this significant sentence respecting Lincoln:
"Mr. Lincoln was entirely deficient in what the phrenologists call reverence [veneration]."
This made it easy for him to emancipate himself from the slavery of priestcraft and become and remain a Freethinker. Professor Beall, one of the ablest of living phrenological writers, says:
"No man can 'enjoy religion,' as the Methodists express it, unless he has well developed veneration and wonder" (The Brain and the Bible, p. 109). "All those who rebel against any form of government which in childhood they were taught to revere, must of necessity do so in opposition to the faculty of veneration. Thus it is obvious that the less one possesses of the conservative restraining faculties, the more easily he becomes a rebel or an Infidel to that which his reason condemns. On the other hand, the profoundly conscientious and reverential man, who sincerely regards unbelief as a sin, of course instinctively antagonizes every skeptical thought, and is thus likely to remain a slave to the religion learned at his mother's knee" (Ibid, p. 228).