More than seven churches have striven for the dead Abraham Lincoln, some of whom would not even now admit to their membership a living man who professed his sentiments.
Before we undertake the difficult task of assessing the real faith of Abraham Lincoln, let us dispose of a few of the claims that have been made on his behalf, or the charges that have been made against him, and which clearly have no sufficient weight of evidence. Let us ask first,
Was Abraham Lincoln an atheist?
Herndon declared that Lincoln was an infidel, "sometimes bordering on atheism." This last phrase has been overstrained. What Herndon appears to have meant was that in some of Lincoln's blackest hours of gloom his mind hung over that utter void; and he more than hints that in such hours Lincoln's mind was scarcely sound. Herndon was far from believing or meaning to charge that atheism was Lincoln's real view of God and the world. The contrary is shown in a score of places in Herndon's works and letters.
Some years ago the Open Court of Chicago contained an article by Theodore Stanton, quoted from the Westminster Review. It said:
"That Lincoln was an orthodox Christian nobody pretends to assert. But his friends and biographers differ as to how much of a Christian he was. If Lincoln had lived and died an obscure Springfield lawyer and politician, he would unquestionably have been classed by his neighbors among freethinkers. But as is customary with the Church, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, when Lincoln became one of the great of the world, an attempt was made to claim him.... The shrewd politician who has not an elastic conscience—and that was Lincoln's case—simply keeps mum on religious subjects, or, when he must touch on the subject, deals only in platitudes, and this is just what Lincoln did. Lincoln thought little on religious subjects, and read less. That, when left to himself, he was quite indifferent to religion, is frequently evident in the acts of his life."—Open Court, September 24, 1891, pp. 2962-63, quoting Westminster Review of September, 1890.
This statement was not sufficiently radical for one reader of the Open Court, who thought that Mr. Stanton had made Lincoln out to have been virtually an agnostic, and who wished to prove him an atheist. He wrote an article in which he said:
"Free-thinker means anything or nothing.... Plain words are the best. That Lincoln was A-theos connotes a definite attitude toward the great religious chimera, and really defines Mr. Lincoln's position more closely than any of Mr. Stanton's epithets [as, e.g., Agnostic]. It is positive, not negative, indicates what the man professedly was rather than what he was not or what he oppugned. We are in position to define his life-creed with all due measure of exactness."—"What Was Abraham Lincoln's Creed?" by George M. McCrie, Open Court, November 26, 1891.
This writer then proceeded to define Mr. Lincoln's creed in terms of atheism. But his argument was based on a subjective scheme of philosophy, a kind of Hylo-Idealism derived from Hegel more than from Lincoln, and one which it is safe to affirm Lincoln would neither have admitted nor even understood.