The Soul of Abraham Lincoln

by William E. Barton

Lincoln had a profound respect for every form of sincere religious belief. He steadily refused to show favor to any particular denomination of Christians; and when General Grant issued an unjust and injurious order against the Jews, expelling them from his department, the President ordered it to be revoked the moment it was brought to his notice.[84]

He was a man of profound and intense religious feeling. We have no purpose of attempting to formulate his creed; we question if he himself ever did so. There have been swift witnesses who, judging from expressions uttered in his callow youth, have called him an atheist, and others who, with the most laudable intentions, have remembered improbable conversations which they bring forward to prove at once his orthodoxy and their own intimacy with him. But leaving aside these apocryphal evidences, we have only to look at his authentic public and private utterances to see how deep and strong in all the latter part of his life was the current of his religious thought and emotion. He continually invited and appreciated, at their highest value, the prayers of good people. The pressure of the tremendous problems by which he was surrounded; the awful moral significance of the conflict in which he was the chief combatant; the overwhelming sense of personal responsibility, which never left him for an hour—all contributed to produce, in a temperament naturally serious and predisposed to a spiritual view of life and conduct, a sense of reverent acceptance of the guidance of a Superior Power. From that morning when, standing amid the falling snowflakes on the railway car at Springfield, he asked the prayers of his neighbors in those touching phrases whose echo rose that night in invocations from thousands of family altars, to that memorable hour when on the steps of the Capitol he humbled himself before his Creator in the sublime words of the second inaugural, there is not an expression known to have come from his lips or his pen but proves that he held himself answerable in every act of his career to a more august tribunal than any on earth. The fact that he was not a communicant of any church, and that he was singularly reserved in regard to his personal religious life, gives only the greater force to these striking proofs of his profound reverence and faith.

In final substantiation of this assertion, we subjoin two papers from the hand of the President, one official and the other private, which bear within themselves the imprint of a sincere devotion and a steadfast reliance upon the power and benignity of an overruling Providence. The first is an order which he issued on the 16th of November, 1864, on the observance of Sunday:

"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 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 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 or 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 their 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 indicated 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.'"[85]

The date of this remarkable order leaves no possibility for the insinuation that it sprung from any political purpose, or intention. Mr. Lincoln had just been re-elected by an overwhelming majority; his party was everywhere triumphant; his own personal popularity was unbounded; there was no temptation to hypocrisy or deceit. There is no explanation of the order except that it was the offspring of sincere conviction. But if it may be said that this was, after all, an exoteric utterance, springing from those relations of religion and good government which the wisest rulers have always recognized in their intercourse with the people, we will give one other document, of which nothing of the sort can be said. It is a paper which Mr. Lincoln wrote in September, 1862, while his mind was burdened with the weightiest question of his life, the weightiest with which this century has had to grapple. Wearied with all the considerations of law and of expediency with which he had been struggling for two years, he retired within himself and tried to bring some order into his thoughts by rising above the wrangling of men and of parties, and pondering the relations of human government to the Divine. In this frame of mind, absolutely detached from any earthly considerations, he wrote this meditation. It has never been published. It was not written to be seen of men. It was penned in the awful sincerity of a perfectly honest soul trying to bring itself into closer communion with its Maker.

"The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be and one must be wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true; that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By His mere great power on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun, he could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds."

The following brief address by Mr. Lincoln appears never to have been published. It was discovered, just as this book was going to press, by Mr. Jesse W. Weik, who hastened to send it to me. It is the shorthand report of a brief address delivered by Mr. Lincoln at a railroad junction near La Fayette, Indiana, a few hours after he had left Springfield on his way to Washington, Saturday, February 11, 1860.

W. H. B.