Abraham Lincoln's Religion

by Madison Clinton Peters

It was a dark time and the Lincolns were in dark struggles. Their abode at first was a rude hut, a mere shed of rough poles, open to the suns of summer and the snows of winter. Even when a cabin was at length erected, there were neither doors nor windows in it. The beds were composed of dried leaves and their coverings of the skins of wild animals. Food was scarce and of the coarsest kind and had to be brought from a long distance. In after years Lincoln never cared to refer to this period in his career.

In 1818, when Abraham was nine years old, his mother died and was buried in a cleared space a little beyond the cabin, without any religious ceremonies or observances whatever. However, there was a service held over the grave some months afterwards by an itinerant preacher who came at the request of young Abraham. The prayers that Parson Elkin said above the mound of Nancy Hanks were the first public prayers to which Abraham Lincoln listened.

After a time Thomas Lincoln went back to Kentucky, and shortly returned with a new wife, Sally Bush Johnson, widow of the jailer of Hardin County. She had three children, and these, with the Lincoln household, which included two Hanks boys, kin of the late Mrs. Lincoln, formed a somewhat heterogeneous family.

They were, however, extremely domestic and tenderly attached to one another, which is very seldom the case in mixed households, but they were all of the same class, born and reared under similar circumstances.

The two branches even united in religion and joined the little church a few miles distant, which had as the seat of worship a small frame building lately erected in that region. Young Abraham, however, did not affiliate and follow the example of his kin. He had to work hard, and religion at this time seemed to give him little concern, for, as before observed, he had little opportunity to cultivate it had he desired to do so. At an early age he was cast upon the bitterness of the world, and in the sweat of his brow had he to earn his daily bread. With him the stern battle of life began early; he had to gird on his sword for the combat at an age when the cares and shadows of the world are in the far perspective of the future and the sunshine of happiness illumines the morning of life with its brightest rays.

The specter of poverty was at his side; he could not get away from it; his only hope to exorcise it from his presence lay in unremitting toil, constant endeavor to overcome its influence on his career, and with this end in view he sternly resolved to do all that hard work, patience, and perseverance demanded to free himself from its sinister companionship.

The story of his thirst for knowledge and the limited means at his disposal for assuaging it need scarcely be repeated, for it is a pathetic story familiar to almost all, and becomes hackneyed with repetition.

In August, 1831, at the age of twenty-two, being satisfied that he had fully discharged any debt which he owed his father for such rearing and opportunities as he had received, he left the parent cabin, and, as it turned out, forever. Deep down in his soul he had resolved to make himself something better and higher than his father was or ever could hope to be. From this stage onwards his career is a matter of national history; the man is almost lost sight of in the statesman, and his private life is submerged in the public eminence to which he attained.

We must, however, deal with those phases of his boyhood and young manhood which bear a relation and lead up to the illustrious heights he was destined to gain as the ruler of a nation and the emancipator of a race.

We have said that most people believe that Lincoln was a Providential man, was called of God to be the preserver of a nation and the deliverer of the slave, and this really seems to be the explanation which accounts for the singular success of his unparalleled career; otherwise, how could this backwoods youth, rough, uncouth, little educated, reach the greatest eminence possible for an American; how could he have climbed the heights of fame until he arrived at the culminating pinnacle; how could he have become the recipient of the greatest and grandest honors his countrymen had in their power to confer upon him?