The Soul of Abraham Lincoln

by William E. Barton

Some time after, the same journal had a third and very different article, which said:

"Lincoln was an extremely religious man, though not a technical Christian. He thought deeply, and his opinions were positive. His seriousness was a characteristic trait, showing itself even in his genuine good humor. His very jokes were a part of his seriousness.... Lincoln was an extremely practical man. He believed not for belief's sake, but for his own sake. He made a practice of religion; he used it. His religion was his life, and his life was his religious service. It was his own public profession. Religion was a fact to him. He believed in prayer, because he found use for it: and when the fate of the Union seemed to waver, when doubt and despair hovered over the land and the future was uncertain, Lincoln often shut himself within his room and offered up his prayer to God. 'So, many times,' he said, 'I was forced to my knees, not knowing where else to go.'

"While there is considerable in his writings to indicate a strong faith in God and prayer, there is little to indicate his beliefs regarding Christ, the Bible, etc. But the very absence of anything on those points is good evidence that he did not hold the views that have been attributed to him....

"He was a firm believer in the 'great and good and merciful God,' but not in a revengeful or cruel God who could consign them to an eternal hell when nothing good to those who suffered could possibly come from such punishment. He believed in and used prayer as a means to bring himself in closer relations with right in everything.... He believed in 'universal inspiration and miracles under law,' and that all things, both matter and mind, are governed by law. He believed that all creation is an evolution under law, not a special creation of the Supreme Being. He hoped for a joyous meeting in the world to come with many loved ones gone before. He believed that Christianity consists in being, not believing; in loving 'the Lord thy God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself.' He believed that the Bible is a book to be understood and appreciated as any other book, not merely to be accepted as a divine creation of infallibility. He believed in the man Christ, not in the God Christ.... He was once an admirer of Volney, Paine, and Voltaire; later of Theodore Parker, Emerson, and Channing. He was once a scoffer of religion; later a supporter."—R. C. Roper, Religious Beliefs of Abraham Lincoln, Open Court, 1903, pp. 76-85.

Whatever Abraham Lincoln was, he was not an atheist. If any other convenient term were to be applied to him, it would be necessary that the term itself should be defined. Thus, Lyman Abbott has spoken of Lincoln as an agnostic, meaning that Lincoln did not find himself in position to affirm dogmatically on certain of the articles of faith. This article by Dr. Abbott was particularly illuminating as discriminating between the measure of uncertainty which a man may feel in the matter of positive declaration of his views, while cherishing in his heart and manifesting in his life the essentials of a Christian faith. It was published as an editorial in reply to a letter of inquiry, and both are worth reprinting entire:

"'My dear Dr. Abbott: You are quoted in the New York Press of October 15 as having referred in your Yale sermon to Abraham Lincoln in the following terms: "Agnostic though he was." Are you correct in the implication? If so, I should greatly like to know, as it is a subject in which I am much interested. J. G. Holland says, in his Life of Lincoln, page 61 ff., "He believed in God, and in His personal supervision of the affairs of men.... This unwavering faith in a divine Providence began at his mother's knee, and ran like a thread of gold through all the inner experiences of his life"; and much more to the same purpose. You are doubtless familiar with his words on leaving Springfield for Washington: "He [Washington] would never have succeeded except for the aid of divine Providence upon which he at all times relied. On that same Almighty Being I place my reliance. Pray that I may receive that divine assistance without which I cannot succeed, but with which success is certain." The first inaugural would seem to indicate a most pronounced Christian sentiment. Not to consume too much of your time, I might refer further to Nicolay and Hay's Life, the following passages: Vol. VI, p. 539, which contains a statement of Lincoln's religious principles; also, same volume, pp. 323, 324, 327, 328, 341, 342.

R. A. A.'"

To this letter Dr. Abbott replied:

"The life of Abraham Lincoln appears to me to furnish a very striking illustration both of the difference between theology and religion and of the way in which religious experience is often developed in the life of a true man, and is accompanied by a real though generally quite unconscious change in theological opinion. Mr. Herndon, in his Life of Lincoln, portrays the earlier religious faith of Mr. Lincoln, Nicolay and Hay his later religious faith: neither biographer is able to find that he ever formulated his own creed, neither is able to formulate one for him. Yet between the religious convictions of the period when he wrote an essay against Christianity, which, fortunately for his reputation, a wise friend threw into the fire, and the period when he wrote his second inaugural address, there is a difference which cannot be measured by the mere lapse of years.

"Agnostic? What is an agnostic? Huxley invented the phrase to define his own position in contrast with that of his friends whom he called gnostics because they had each a theory of the universe and he had none. He more specifically defines the basis of his no-theory of the universe in a pathetic letter to Charles Kingsley (Life and Letters, Vol. II, pp. 233-239): 'It is no use to talk to me of analogies and probabilities. I know what I mean when I say I believe in the law of the inverse squares, and I will not rest my lifelong hopes upon weaker convictions. I dare not, if I would.' Compare with this Mr. Herndon's measure of Mr. Lincoln's earlier habit of thought: 'As already expressed, Mr. Lincoln had no faith. In order to believe, he must see and feel, and thrust his hand into the place. He must taste, smell, or handle before he had faith or even belief.' Or compare Mrs. Lincoln's expression concerning her husband's religious opinions, as quoted by Mr. Herndon: 'Mr. Lincoln had no faith and no hope, in the usual acceptance of those words. He never joined a church; but still, as I believe, he was a religious man by nature. He first seemed to think about the subject when our Willie died, and then more than ever about the time he went to Gettysburg; but it was a kind of poetry in his nature; and he was never a technical Christian.'

"Religion is always a kind of poetry. Faith is kin to imagination; both faith and imagination look upon the unseen and refuse to base life merely upon the senses or upon mathematical formularies like the law of the inverse squares. This poetry is often quite dissociated from philosophy, or is even inconsistent with the philosophy which the individual entertains. But Mr. Lincoln's early philosophy prepared for his later religious experience. Mr. Herndon reports him as saying: 'There are no accidents in my philosophy. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future. All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the Infinite to the finite.' With this philosophy of fatalism was a profound faith in justice, a profound reverence for it, and an uncompromising obedience to it. At first he did not put this philosophy and this faith together. He who does put them together, that is, he who infuses this philosophy in an overruling cause with this faith, which is a 'kind of poetry,' in the supremacy of righteousness, comes to a faith in a righteous God, who deserves our reverence, not because he is great, but because he is good.

"When Abraham Lincoln began to feel the burden of the nation resting upon him, and felt it too great a burden for him to carry unaided, he wanted the sympathy of all men and women in the country who with him believed in a Power directing the course of human history greater than the actors in it, and who also believed in eternal justice; and he asked their prayers. As the conflict went on and the burden grew heavier and heavier, his faith in righteousness more and more infused his belief in a superhuman power and transformed it into a belief in a righteous God; but it was, till the last, a belief in a God of justice rather than a Christ of pity, even as it phrased itself in that most religious utterance of his life, his second inaugural: 'Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."'

"There is no evidence that Mr. Lincoln had become a gnostic, or that he had a comprehensive scheme of the universe, or that he had either wrought out a system of theology for himself or accepted any that had been wrought out by others; but there is abundant evidence that he had learned in the four years of tragedy a lesson of dependence and trust, that he had insensibly put together his belief in a supreme Power and his faith in righteousness, and that thus there had been born in him faith in a supreme righteous Power, whose will we may help to carry out, and on whose wisdom and strength we may rely in achieving it. It is thus that the life of Abraham Lincoln illustrates both how a reverent agnostic may be deeply religious and how the life of service and self-sacrifice leads through doubt to faith.—L. A."—The Outlook, November 17, 1906.

Was Abraham Lincoln a Roman Catholic?

The question is absurd, and worth asking only that it may receive a simple negative answer. Yet, singularly, a report was current and somewhat widely believed in 1860 that Abraham Lincoln had been baptized as a Roman Catholic and was himself a renegade from that faith. The rumor appears to have had two roots. First was the fact that much missionary work was done in early Illinois by Jesuit priests; and it was assumed, not only contrary to every fact but to every element of probability, that Abraham Lincoln had been baptized by one of them. The other was the fact that he acted as attorney for Rev. Charles Chiniquy, who after fifty years in the Church of Rome came out from that communion and became a notable antagonist of the church in which he had been reared. His unsparing criticisms led to various attacks upon him through the courts and otherwise. When Lincoln was elected President much was made of the fact that Lincoln had been Father Chiniquy's attorney, and the rumor that he also was a renegade Catholic gained wide currency.

Chiniquy professed to see in these rumors a peril to the life of Mr. Lincoln, and both then and at intervals during his administration warned the President that his life was in danger. The scarcely concealed favor of the Vatican toward the cause of the South did not tend to allay this anxiety. The fact that among those concerned in the plot which finally ended in the assassination of the President were several Roman Catholics, revived these reports immediately after his death, and they are occasionally recalled even now.