The Soul of Abraham Lincoln

by William E. Barton

Inasmuch as there were but two of the ministers, and neither of them assumed any such authority to speak the mind of God, such statements ought to cease, especially as the true story, from which all these accounts are garbled, is available for inspection in the files of the Maryland Historical Society.

Mr. Lincoln did say to them that he hoped it would not appear irreverent in him to say that if God were to reveal this duty of his to others, it was probable that He would reveal it also directly to Mr. Lincoln. At the beginning of the interview he was guarded; but as he found common ground with his visitors, he threw first one leg and then the other over the arm of his chair, and talked to them with the utmost freedom, and asked them concerning the opinion of ministers and churches, and assured them that he desired to know the will of God, and whatever seemed to him to be God's will he would do.

The next week occurred the battle of Antietam, and on Saturday, September 20, exactly a week after his interview with the Chicago ministers, Mr. Lincoln called the Cabinet together and read to them the Emancipation Proclamation, which was signed and published on the following Monday. We know now that Lincoln had promised God that if that battle resulted in the success of the Union cause he would issue the proclamation. We also know that the meeting with the Chicago ministers was very timely, and gave him an added assurance of moral support from the churches, if not added confidence in the help of God.

Some time after, Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune, returning from Washington, said, "Secretary Stanton told me to say to those Chicago clergymen who waited on the President about the Proclamation of Emancipation, that their interview finished the business. After that there was no manifestation of doubt or talk of delay. Mr. Lincoln's mind was fully made up."—Proceedings of the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, 1888.

Lincoln's literary style was an evolution.[65] His spread-eagle stump-speeches, with their florid rhetoric and grandiloquent figures of speech evolved into the calm, dignified, and forceful English of his maturer years.[66] An able monograph in which this evolution is traced is cited elsewhere in this volume.[67] That change of style was the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual as well as intellectual grace.

In like manner Lincoln's religion was an evolution, both in its intellectual and its spiritual qualities. Up to the time of his residence in New Salem he had heard only the dogmatic sectarianism of unlettered preachers, proclaiming a creed which furnished him certain lifelong tenets but which as a whole he could not accept. At New Salem he read the negative arguments which confuted the dogmas he had heard, and perhaps unwittingly made room for a more intelligent faith.

He was deeply impressed by the argument of Dr. Smith in his The Christian's Defence. It was the first time he had heard the Christian apologetic rationally presented, and it made a lasting impression upon him without, however, fully satisfying him. He was, however, a much more religious man when he left Springfield than he was when he came to it, whether he knew it or not.

The solemn responsibilities of his office, the daily contemplation of death as it menaced him and came into the homes of the people of his country, the profound conviction that God was working His infinite purpose through the war, and through the human agency of Lincoln himself, took hold of the deepest impulses of his nature, and became the controlling forces of his policy.

Lincoln was no theologian, but I do not find any authority for the statement of Mr. Binns that Lincoln said, "the more a man knew of theology, the farther he got away from the Spirit of Christ." It is possible, of course, for a man to learn theology as an intellectual system and to have little religion as a spiritual experience, and to lose that little in the process of his logical subtleties: but Lincoln was too just a man to make so sweeping and unjust an affirmation of something of which he would certainly have admitted he knew very little.

The rock-bottom foundation of Abraham Lincoln's religious faith was the ultra-Calvinism of his boyhood. He was reared a Predestinarian Baptist; and while he never became a Baptist he never ceased to be a Predestinarian. To this he added a strong rationalistic tendency, inherent in his nature, and strengthened by his study of Paine and Volney. This also he never wholly outgrew. As a lawyer who was not well read, pleading before juries that cared little for the letter of the law, he was accustomed to reduce his cases to simple principles of elementary justice, and to rest all upon these principles. This habit of thought and practice he applied also to his theology. His early recollection of the epitaph of Johnny Kongapod was nothing less than the application of the Golden Rule to theology—the assurance of an eternal justice throned in heaven and intelligible on earth.