To the Hon. H. C. Deming, of Connecticut, he said that the "article of his faith was contained in the Saviour's condensed statement of both law and gospel—'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself.'"
Mr. Herndon affirms that Mr. Lincoln did not believe in the "Christian dogma of the forgiveness of sin": he believed that "God would not and could not forgive sin. He did not believe in forgiveness through Christ, nor in fact in any doctrine of forgiveness. In reading Mr. Lincoln's proclamations, however, we find that he does very distinctly recognize the doctrine of the forgiveness of sin on the part of God, and very earnestly implores the people to seek the forgiveness of their sins. In his proclamation of a fast day, August, 1861, are these words:
"And, whereas, it is fit and becoming in all people, at all times, to acknowledge and revere the supreme government of God; to bow in humble submission to his chastisements; to confess and deplore their sins and transgressions, in the full conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and to pray with all fervency and contrition for the pardon of their past offenses, and for a blessing on their present and prospective action," etc.
Read also his proclamation enforcing the observance of the Christian Sabbath in the Army and Navy, and ask yourself, Could an infidel have done this?
The President, Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, desires and enjoins the orderly observance of the Sabbath by the officers and men in the military and naval service. The importance for man and beast of the prescribed weekly rest, the sacred rights of Christian soldiers and sailors, a becoming deference to the best sentiment of a Christian people, and a due regard for the Divine will, demand that Sunday labor in the Army and Navy be reduced to the measure of a strict necessity. The discipline and character of the National forces should not suffer, nor the cause they defend be imperiled, by the profanation of the day and the name of the Most High. At this time of public distress, adopting the words of Washington in 1776, "Men may find enough to do in the service of God and their country without abandoning themselves to vice and immorality." The first general order issued by the Father of his Country, after the Declaration of Independence, indicates the spirit in which our institutions were founded and should ever be defended: "The General hopes and trusts that every officer and man will endeavor to live and act as becomes a Christian soldier defending the dearest rights and liberties of his country."
Abraham Lincoln.
Besides all this, we find Mr. Lincoln often using the very language of the Saviour, as not only expressing but giving the sanction of Divine authority to his own views and opinions. What a remarkable instance of it in the solemn words that fell from his lips in his last inaugural, as he stood on the steps of the Capitol! Standing upon the verge of his grave, as he was that day, and addressing his last official words to his countrymen, his lips touched as with the finger of inspiration, he said:
"The Almighty has His own purposes. 'Woe unto the world because of offenses, for it must needs be that offenses will come; but woe unto the man by whom the offense cometh.' If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of these offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern any departure therein from those Divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that the mighty scourge of war may pass away. Yet if God will that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman'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 with another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so must it still be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"
Thus it appears, that whether Mr. Lincoln was ever accustomed to blaspheme the name of Jesus Christ or not, or whether he was ever accustomed to deny His divinity or not, as his defamers allege, he is willing, in the last eventful days of his life, standing at the nation's Capitol, in the hearing of the swelling multitude that hangs upon his lips, to use the sanction of Divine authority to one of the most remarkable sentences of his official address.
Hon. Isaac N. Arnold, of Chicago, an intimate acquaintance of Mr. Lincoln, and who is engaged in a review of his work on Mr. Lincoln's life, writes me that "from the time he left Springfield, with the touching request for the prayers of his friends and neighbors, to the day of his death, his words were the words of a Christian, revering the Bible, and obeying its precepts. A spirit of reverence and deep religious feeling pervades nearly all the public utterances and state papers of his later life."