January 5, 1863, in reply to a letter, Mr. Lincoln wrote the following:
"It is most cheering and encouraging for me that in the efforts which I have made and am making for the restoration of a righteous peace for our country, I am upheld and sustained by the good wishes and prayers of God's people. No one is more deeply than myself aware that without His favor our highest wisdom is but as foolishness and that our most strenuous efforts would avail nothing in the shadow of His displeasure."
"I am conscious of no desire for my country's welfare that is not in consonance with His will, and no plan upon which we may not ask His blessing. It seems to me that if there be one subject upon which all good men may unitedly agree, it is imploring the gracious favor of the God of Nations upon the struggles our people are making for the preservation of their precious birthright of civil and religious liberty."
Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862:
"While it has not pleased the Almighty to bless us with a return of peace, we can but press on, guided by the best light He gives us, trusting that in His own good time and wise way all will be well."
Reply to a committee of colored people who presented him with a Bible, September 4, 1864:
"This occasion would seem fitting for a lengthy response to the address which you have just made. I would make one if prepared; but I am not. I would promise to respond in writing had not experience taught me that business will not allow me to do so. I can only say now, as I have often before said, it has always been a sentiment with me that all mankind should be free. So far as able, within my sphere, I have always acted as I believe to be right and just; and I have done all I could for the good of mankind generally. In letters and documents sent from this office, I have expressed myself better than I now can.
"In regard to this great Book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good Saviour gave to the world was communicated through this Book. But for it we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it. To you I return my most sincere thanks for this very elegant copy of the great Book of God which you present."—Complete Works of Lincoln by John G. Nicolay and John Hay. New and Enlarged Edition, Twelve Volumes. New York: Francis D. Tandy Company, 1905, X, 217-18.
Compiling these and kindred passages from his authentic works, his two secretaries, Nicolay and Hay, were impressed anew with the manifest sincerity and deep religious conviction which they expressed. Commenting upon these as a whole, and having particularly in mind certain stories which given to the public could not, from their date and nature, have been mere conventional expressions, and others so manifestly personal that no consideration of the public opinion could have had any weight with him, they said:
"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 endeavors, 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 the morning when, standing amid the falling snowflakes in 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 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, in the observance of Sunday.
Lincoln's Sunday Rest Order, November 15, 1862: