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.
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.