Thus, when he argued in favor of universal salvation he did it upon the basis of the old Calvinistic theology with which he had been familiar all his life. If God was, indeed, absolute sovereign, and as good as He was great, and willed not that any should perish, then no one could finally perish. Universal salvation became logically and ethically compulsory. The Christ who tasted death for every man, did so as the necessary means to the efficiency of a plan of salvation whereby the curse of the fall was fully offset by the sacrifice of Christ, at the instance of the sovereign will of God. As in Adam all died, even so in Christ were all made alive. His theory of universal salvation was the logical expression of his determinism, influenced by his rationalism and confirmed by his appeal to a justice that would not accept a fall more universal than the atonement of Christ. This was not because Lincoln approached the theme from the direction of the grace of Christ, but of the irresistibility of a divine decree. He profoundly believed himself an instrument of the divine will, believing that will to be right, and creation's final law.
If it were asked, where in such a system as his he found a place for the forgiveness of sins, the answer would be first that he had no system, and secondly that he found no place for the doctrine; but it would then be necessary to add that he found the doctrine, nevertheless. He had no system. He thought without logical method. But his thinking was in right lines. He followed simple paths, "blazed" through technicalities and in quite thorough disregard of them. As his office desk was in confusion, and he kept a package marked, "When you don't find it anywhere else, look here," so he had in his thinking a parcel of unassorted first principles to which he recurred when he needed them. Forgiveness and law were to him two unreconciled postulates; but law he had to assume, even though he denied forgiveness. But if he did not admit belief in forgiveness, he did believe in mercy, for he himself was merciful, and he believed that he would be merciful to God if he were God and God were man. Stanton could argue him down as to the necessity for shooting a soldier who slept on duty, but Lincoln injected an intuitive, and from Stanton's point of view, an unreasonable and a certainly unarticulated, element of mercy that forbade the killing of this particular boy.
His theory of governmental forgiveness was as irreconcilable with his theory of military discipline as his theory of divine mercy was with his system of inexorable law. He did not harmonize the contradictions: he was merciful, and let his system take the consequences, and he believed in a divine mercy while holding a theory with which the exercise of mercy was irreconcilable.
To such a mind as that of Abraham Lincoln, it was not necessary to prove the fact of immortality. If God possessed immortality and intended it for man, then God would make His decree effective in man. Adam's fall could not hopelessly lose to man what God designed; and, whether he accepted for himself or not the theory of the fall and of redemption, he accepted both in meeting an argument which by reason of the fall could have deprived man of his birthright of immortality. He believed in the immortality of the soul.
Did he harmonize that doctrine with the rest of his creed? Probably not. He was no theologian, in the strict and formal sense, no logician. He reasoned on the basis of very simple and elementary principles, whose lines of direction were determined by the early Calvinistic preaching to which he listened, the rationalistic method which he learned from Paine, and his simple sense of justice and right.
His was not wholly an optimistic faith. He knew that man was sinful and sad and that "the spirit of mortal" had little occasion for pride; but he believed in an eternal justice and an unconquerable goodness, regnant above the perplexities and contradictions of this life, and triumphant in the life everlasting.
Abraham Lincoln believed in God. Save in his moments of deepest gloom when everything turned black, he appears never seriously to have questioned this fundamental article of belief. It is not easy to see how he could have done so. His idea of causation forbade it, and, what was more, his profound supernaturalism affirmed it as incontrovertible. This element of supernaturalism went the full length of orthodox preaching, as Lincoln heard it and accepted it. It was in accord with the teachings both of the Baptists, whom he heard in Indiana and rural Illinois, and the Presbyterians, to whom he listened in Springfield and in Washington. In a great God, a mighty Creator, a Sovereign Ruler, he was taught to believe by all the forms of Calvinism to which throughout his life he listened, and it was in full essential accord with his own native tendency. His supernaturalism was not only ultra-orthodox; it went the full length of current superstition. The frontiersman of that day had superstition wrought into him by the vastness of the wilderness, the solemnity of the immeasurable forest and plain, and the insignificance of man; the haunting tales of savagery and witchcraft; the presence in every frontier community of some person supposed to be possessed of second sight or other supernatural qualities. The rationalism of his mature years modified but did not in any degree eradicate his supernaturalism.
It must be remembered that Paine and Volney, whose works he read, were far from being atheists. Thomas Paine, whatever he denied, believed as strongly as Peter Cartwright or James Smith in a personal God. So far as we know, Lincoln was never under any strong influence that might have made him an atheist, his doubts and questionings were all within the sphere of an expressed or implicit theism.
The names by which Lincoln referred to God are many and suggestive. The following is a partial list:[68]
Almighty, Almighty Architect, Almighty Arm, Almighty Father, Almighty God, Almighty Hand, Almighty Power, Almighty Ruler of Nations, Creator, Disposer, Divine Author, Divine Being, Divine Majesty, Divine Providence, Divine Will, Eternal God, Father, Father in Heaven, Father of Mercies, God, God Almighty, God of Battles, God of Hosts, God of Nations, Governor, Heavenly Father, Higher Being, Higher Power, Holy Spirit, Judge, Lord, Maker, Maker of the Universe, Master, Most High, Most High God, Omniscient Mind, Power, Providence, Ruler of the Universe, Supreme Being.