"I made a solemn vow before God that if General Lee were driven from Pennsylvania, I would crown the result by declaring freedom to the slaves."
(4) On the same subject [slavery] remember he said: "Whatever appears to be God's will, I will do."
ONE MORE FINAL PUBLIC ACT
and I am done. At Baltimore he was presented by the negroes of that city with a copy of the Scriptures. In reply, Lincoln said:
"In regard to the great Book, I have only to say, it is the best gift which God has given to man. All the good from the Saviour of the world is communicated to us through this Book. But for that Book we could not know right from wrong. All those things desirable to man are contained in it."
It may appear unnecessary for me to repeat Lincoln's
PUBLIC EXPRESSIONS OF RELIGION
in conjunction with what I have issued to the world for the first time, as to his religious life in private before he was President, but as my object is to connect his private and public religious expressions together, and bring them down from the time he was sixteen years old to his death, and to show that he was, for these thirty years,
UNIFORMLY A CHRISTIAN MAN,
you will pardon my repeating in part what the whole world already knows. Take Lincoln's expressions altogether as above quoted by me, and I submit you will find not only an absence of the slightest doubt of religion on his part, but an entire reliance on God alone for guiding himself and the events of the world. And yet that foolish man, Herndon, will say—and I am sorry to see a small portion of the American press will repeat—that Abraham Lincoln was an Infidel. Marvelous! I am proud to think I have in my possession—as a reward for a few insignificant services done by me on account of Mrs. Lincoln—the great and Martyred President's psalm book, which he used while at the White House, and I shall retain it as a proud memento for my family, of "Lincoln the Good—the Saviour of his Country."