Part 1

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Abraham Lincoln's Religion

MADISON C. PETERS

_Author of "Justice to the Jew," etc., etc._

BOSTON RICHARD G. BADGER The Gorham Press 1909

_Copyright, 1909, by Richard G. Badger_

_All rights reserved_

_The Gorham Press Boston, U S A_

CONTENTS

I. Lincoln the Man 1

II. Was Abraham Lincoln a Christian 15

III. Why did Lincoln Never Join the Church 39

LINCOLN THE MAN

_Thou, too, sail on O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all its hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate!_

_We know what Master laid thy keel, What Workman wrought thy ribs of steel, Who made each mast and sail and rope, What anvils rang, what hammers beat, In what a forge and what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!_

_Fear not each sudden sound and shock: 'Tis the wave, and not the rock, 'Tis but the flapping of the sail, And not a rent made by the gale!_

_In spite of rock and tempest's roar, In spite of false lights on the shore, Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea! Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee, Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, Are all with thee_--are all with thee!

_Henry Wadsworth Longfellow_

I

LINCOLN THE MAN

The name of Abraham Lincoln is imperishable, immortal; can never fade from the pages of history or grow dim with the lapse of time.

Had this lowly born Kentucky boy been ushered into the world centuries ago in England, doubtless he would have become the father of a royal family, the founder of a kingly dynasty, the pioneer of a courtly line whose proudest boast would be to acclaim him their progenitor.

Fortunately he belongs to modern time and sprang from the loins of a democratic race in a young and democratic country, around whose virgin brow he twined the garlands of a never-fading luster.

His fame is America's, but his glory belongs to the world, and humanity is proud to honor him as one of the noblest among the sons of men.

He founded no royal house to perpetuate his name on its escutcheon, yet no Caliph or Conqueror, no Emperor or Excellency, no Master or Monarch, no Prince or Potentate, no Prelate or Pontiff, no Saladin or Sultan has left behind a name so dear to the hearts of posterity as that of this plain man of the people, this champion of human rights, this friend of the down-trodden and oppressed, whose heart went out in sympathy and love to all mankind, irrespective of race or religion.

No character in American history or, perhaps, in the world's history stands out so clearly silhouetted against the background of time as Lincoln; none so free from defect or flaw, with no irregularities to mar its outlines, no inequalities to detract from its perfect formation; its every curve and section a symmetry of proportion.

Born, February 12, 1809, as lowly as Jesus of Nazareth, in a one-room, shackling Kentucky cabin, the child of a poverty-stricken man, whom misfortune had seemingly chosen for her own, and whose ambitions were blighted and hopes almost dead, he conquered every environment of an untoward fate, burst every link that bound him to the misery of his surroundings, and came forth in invincible majesty to write his name in letters of adamant on the walls of Fame.

Reared in gripping, grinding, pinching penury and pallid poverty, amid the most squalid destitution possible to conceive, successively a choreboy, common laborer, rail-splitter, river pilot, and country storekeeper, he made his way through trials and difficulties that would have overwhelmed the bravest spirit; broke down every barrier, turned all obstacles into stepping-stones to progress, until he entered the arena of public life as a lawyer, commanding the confidence and respect of all who knew him and the terrible odds he had to fight against to win out in the battle of life.

Practically an unknown man when nominated for the Presidency, his election due to factional strife among his opponents, the people of America when approaching the greatest crisis in their history, turned as if by chance, and Providence that chance did guide, to this comparatively obscure man of the prairies, and with one bound he took his place with the world's greatest statesmen, the leader of his party, the real ruler of a mighty nation.

Led as it were by an Unseen Hand to the front, he solved problems that staggered the wisest minds of the nation, directed military campaigns, and conducted diplomatic relations with such skill as to astonish the most astute statesmen, cabinet ministers, and army generals. The rail-splitter of the Sangamon had become at the supreme moment the man of destiny to whom the nation looked in the most crucial period it had yet encountered.

Such a man is not an accident,--he is more than a circumstance. He is sent upon a mission and bears his credentials from a Higher Power than that of earth,--there is a purpose and a plan in his existence, the latter is mapped out, the former must be fulfilled.

In view of the fact that Lincoln had barely a year's schooling, where and how did he acquire his profound wisdom and his depth of knowledge?

That he was a God-ordained man, raised up to accomplish a divine design, few, who have closely studied the character and work of the man, will gainsay.

As the early prophets were inspired by God to utter golden words of divine wisdom, so Lincoln was inspired from the same source to speak, and act in conformity to divine intention. The keynote of this idea is forcibly struck by Henry Watterson, when he writes: "And a thousand years hence, no tragedy, no drama, no epic poem will be filled with greater wonder, or be followed by mankind with deeper feelings, than that which tells the story of his life and death."

Lincoln was a Providential man,--of that there can be little question, but every man has it in his power to be Providential also, though not in the same way, by being the deliverer of a race and the saviour of a nation, but by living up to the promptings of his better nature and seizing the opportunities God sends his way. Any man can thus be Providential in the full length and breadth and sweep of his life.

Next to Washington, Lincoln stands out the most colossal figure in American history, and is pre-eminent to Washington in the affection with which his memory is enshrined in the hearts of his countrymen; though Washington, as the Father of his Country, must always be given the more exalted place.

Washington gave us a country; Lincoln preserved it; Washington wrote the first page of our history; Lincoln was called upon to write another, and at a period which covers the most momentous crisis the country had witnessed since Liberty Bell proclaimed the birth of a separate and independent nation. He wrote the page and he kept it clean, though to do so he had to wash it in rivers of human blood, the warm heart's blood too of the countrymen he loved, but he would have willingly washed it in his own also, had the sacrifice been necessary. Alas! Lincoln's blood was shed in the end, not on the altar of his country, but by the hand of an assassin; not for the glory of the flag, but for the sorrow of the nation.

More, perhaps, has been written concerning the illustrious martyr President than of any other national character, and nearly all of this writing has been eulogy approaching almost to deification. We have enshrined Lincoln in a Pantheon of Glory, all by himself, for the praise and emulation of future ages, just as we have placed Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr in a Pillory of Shame to be held up for the scorn, execration, and anathema of all time.

The beatification of Lincoln, especially by Northerners, is due, in a great measure, to his devotion and loyalty to the cause of the Union. The issue of the war was to amalgamate the contending parties into a unified whole under one flag, but Lincoln was not to see the full fruition of his mighty work, the final triumph of his policy. The hand of the assassin fell upon him just at the very zenith of his fame, the meridian of his greatness, a time when public sentiment was at the boiling-point. He had struck the shackles from the limbs of four millions of people, brought order out of chaos, planted the banners of victory on the broken ramparts of defeat, and had done it in such a way that the vanquished almost fancied themselves the conquerors, and willingly, proudly, saluted the flag of a cemented Fatherland.

He had brought together the warring elements into a splendid and invincible Union; he had become the idol of his people as Washington had once been; he had been hailed as the Messiah of the slave and the Saviour of the oppressed, and then, in a moment, his great light was extinguished in the gloom and darkness of universal sorrow. With all that he had accomplished, nevertheless, he went down to the grave, like another Columbus, unconscious of the great work he had consummated.

His Emancipation Proclamation not only melted the manacles of the slaves by its electric touch, but it freed the whole nation from the bondage of years. Free speech had been suppressed, men dared not utter their convictions, the pulpit had been overawed, the press had been shackled, we were being reproached by the nations of the earth for violating the first principles of freedom by holding men in bondage. Europe was in transports of laughter at a country proclaiming human liberty, while clinging to all the traditions of slavery, and her risible faculties were really excusable in face of such a paradox. Lincoln keenly felt the sneers and taunts, and in the indignation of his mighty manhood he arose and freed the nation from its incubus of shame. He made its soil too hot for the feet of slaves; he unshackled the pulpit; he unmuzzled the press; he removed the dark blots from the national honor, and united and free he placed his country greatest among the nations of the earth.

The immortal Proclamation linked his name with the rights of man, the cause of personal liberty, and the progress of humanity. This is why Lincoln is enthroned on so high a pedestal; this is why the great War President is enshrined in the heart of hearts of his countrymen.

Some are of the opinion, that had the illustrious Tribune been spared, his plans of Reconstruction would have antagonized the best men of his party, and instead of coming down to posterity as the most revered and popular President, after Washington, he would have left his name in our annals as probably that of the most unpopular Executive we have had. But such surmise is a piece of far-fetched anticipation very remotely removed from the boundary of probability. Lincoln would not have antagonized, he would have converted and brought men to the same viewpoint as himself.

As it is, he towers so majestically above our horizon, that in his great and commanding national role, we are apt to quite forget his character as an individual, his personality as a man and what it represented in the domain of private life.

That Lincoln was a man of strong character and tenacious purpose, rather than brilliant and intellectual, is a point conceded by all who have studied him in the calm of impartiality and in no sense indulged in hero worship. Despite the claim of his divine mission, his greatness was service in loyalty to an ideal and it was subordination of the personal self to his ideals rather than any extraordinary gifts with which nature had endowed him, which gives glory to him and the men who stood with him.

He has been contrasted with Napoleon, whose star was just sinking below the horizon as his was ascending above it, but it is rather invidious to contrast two so widely divergent actors on the stage of fame. The difference between them is the difference between the iron heel and the helping hand, between tyranny and freedom, between a man living for self and glory, and a man living for the broadest kind of cosmopolitanism and the widest type of humanitarianism.

Lincoln's whole career is a manifestation of his absolute integrity of purpose, of his fearless honesty in all things, of his considerate feeling for others, of his profound respect for conscience, and his reverential fear of God.

WAS ABRAHAM LINCOLN A CHRISTIAN?

_God give us men! A time like this demands Clean minds, pure hearts, true faith, and ready hands. Men who possess opinions and a will; Men whom desire for office does not kill; Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy; Men who have honor; men who will not lie; Tall men; sun-crowned men; men who will live above the fog In public duty and in private thinking; Men who can stand before a demagogue And denounce his treacherous flatteries, and without winking. For a while base tricksters with their wornout creeds, Their large professions, and their little deeds, Wrangle in selfish strife, lo! Freedom weeps, Wrong rules the land and waiting Justice sleeps._

--_J. G. Holland_

II

WAS ABRAHAM LINCOLN A CHRISTIAN?

In regard to his religious views, Lincoln was always exceedingly reticent, but this reserve gives but greater force to the striking proof of the deep faith professed in his proclamations and public addresses, and that his life was actuated by high religious principles. He was too broad, too big brained, to care for doctrinal beliefs or sectarian differences.

His mother and father were Free-Will Baptists in Kentucky. In Indiana they became members of what was then known as the Predestinarian church, not from any change in belief, but because it was the only denomination in the neighborhood. When Thomas Lincoln removed to Illinois he united with the Christian church, commonly known as "Campbellites," and in that faith he died.

In his early days Lincoln had little opportunity for the practice of religion, and his parents, though religious enough in themselves, as has just been pointed out, took little trouble to inculcate its precepts on his youthful mind. The charge has been brought against him that he was an agnostic, but this arose from the fact that when a young man at Salem, in 1834, he prepared a review of Thomas Paine's "Age of Reason" and Volney's "Ruins of Empires," with a view to reading it before a literary society that had been organized in the neighborhood. A friend of his--Sam Hill--burned the manuscript, which made the young man very indignant, as he had spent much time in its preparation. He had, to an extent, indorsed the views of these deistic writers, and their works had made a deep impression on him, but he came to realize their specious sophistries at their true value and turned away from them with feelings of strong aversion, so that he thanked Sam Hill for the service he had done him in destroying the manuscripts of approval and thus turning his thoughts in the right direction which led him to see the evils of infidel teachings.

He never was an unbeliever, and as he advanced in years his religious conceptions deepened and his faith and reliance on the Divine Power strengthened with time.

In common with those reared under similar circumstances in rural localities he was highly superstitious, and this superstition he was never able to shake off in after life, though to offset it and counteract the morbid influence it exerted over him he had recourse to humor and tried to look on the bright side of everything, often on the ludicrous side, and gave such free rein to his inclination in this direction that he gained for himself something of the reputation of a humorist and wag, but in reality his love for jesting and telling humorous stories came to him as a second nature, an inheritance from his father, who was renowned in his section for droll sayings, funny anecdotes, and striking illustrations.

He was also somewhat interested in spiritualism, but as the occult art of communicating with the denizens of the unseen world had not attained such a degree of perfection in his day as in ours, his opportunity for investigation was limited to a few seances given by peripatetic mediums, which, however, instead of increasing his faith in intercommunication with the _manes_ of the departed, only excited his disgust for the fakirs who laid claim to the power of summoning spirits to mortal presence.

All his life Lincoln was a man who thought for himself; he would not allow the opinions of others to obtrude themselves on him, he investigated for himself, and his intellectual honesty would not permit him to make pretense to faith or simulate what he did not feel.

Some writers would have us believe that he was not a Christian at all, in fact, was an out and out infidel of the stripe of Voltaire and Paine; but we have seen what gave rise to this misconception of his character and caused it to gain circulation. The works of Paine and Volney were the only books of an infidel tendency that he ever read, and when he saw his error he tried to disabuse his mind of their teachings as quickly as possible.

To get at a right consideration of his religious beliefs, we must go back to those early days in the life of the future statesman after the family had removed from Kentucky to Indiana. It was a wild place in which his boyhood was spent; the primeval American wood which was only beginning to hear the voice of a crude civilization, and had not, as yet, heard the sound of a church bell. There were no places of worship; there were no schools or even stores or shops; in truth, so isolated and primitive was the location of the Lincoln camp that the necessities of life were many miles removed from it.

His father, Thomas Lincoln, though a good man in a general way, was but an indifferent parent, and consequently a poor guide or mentor for the youth. The poor man had received many hard knocks from the iron hand of misfortune and had become almost wholly disheartened, which led to carelessness and thriftlessness, and besides, he was illiterate and unpolished. It could not be expected that a man thus handicapped himself could give his boy good training, either morally or intellectually. The mother, too, had been ground down by poverty to such a degree as to lose almost all interest in life; her burden soon became too heavy to bear, and she had to lay it down before coming to the middle milestone of life. It is not to be wondered that, under such circumstances and amid such surroundings, the boy Abraham grew up after the manner of a wild, strong weed, following the bent of his own rugged nature.

It was a dark time and the Lincolns were in dark struggles. Their abode at first was a rude hut, a mere shed of rough poles, open to the suns of summer and the snows of winter. Even when a cabin was at length erected, there were neither doors nor windows in it. The beds were composed of dried leaves and their coverings of the skins of wild animals. Food was scarce and of the coarsest kind and had to be brought from a long distance. In after years Lincoln never cared to refer to this period in his career.

In 1818, when Abraham was nine years old, his mother died and was buried in a cleared space a little beyond the cabin, without any religious ceremonies or observances whatever. However, there was a service held over the grave some months afterwards by an itinerant preacher who came at the request of young Abraham. The prayers that Parson Elkin said above the mound of Nancy Hanks were the first public prayers to which Abraham Lincoln listened.

After a time Thomas Lincoln went back to Kentucky, and shortly returned with a new wife, Sally Bush Johnson, widow of the jailer of Hardin County. She had three children, and these, with the Lincoln household, which included two Hanks boys, kin of the late Mrs. Lincoln, formed a somewhat heterogeneous family.

They were, however, extremely domestic and tenderly attached to one another, which is very seldom the case in mixed households, but they were all of the same class, born and reared under similar circumstances.

The two branches even united in religion and joined the little church a few miles distant, which had as the seat of worship a small frame building lately erected in that region. Young Abraham, however, did not affiliate and follow the example of his kin. He had to work hard, and religion at this time seemed to give him little concern, for, as before observed, he had little opportunity to cultivate it had he desired to do so. At an early age he was cast upon the bitterness of the world, and in the sweat of his brow had he to earn his daily bread. With him the stern battle of life began early; he had to gird on his sword for the combat at an age when the cares and shadows of the world are in the far perspective of the future and the sunshine of happiness illumines the morning of life with its brightest rays.

The specter of poverty was at his side; he could not get away from it; his only hope to exorcise it from his presence lay in unremitting toil, constant endeavor to overcome its influence on his career, and with this end in view he sternly resolved to do all that hard work, patience, and perseverance demanded to free himself from its sinister companionship.

The story of his thirst for knowledge and the limited means at his disposal for assuaging it need scarcely be repeated, for it is a pathetic story familiar to almost all, and becomes hackneyed with repetition.

In August, 1831, at the age of twenty-two, being satisfied that he had fully discharged any debt which he owed his father for such rearing and opportunities as he had received, he left the parent cabin, and, as it turned out, forever. Deep down in his soul he had resolved to make himself something better and higher than his father was or ever could hope to be. From this stage onwards his career is a matter of national history; the man is almost lost sight of in the statesman, and his private life is submerged in the public eminence to which he attained.

We must, however, deal with those phases of his boyhood and young manhood which bear a relation and lead up to the illustrious heights he was destined to gain as the ruler of a nation and the emancipator of a race.

We have said that most people believe that Lincoln was a Providential man, was called of God to be the preserver of a nation and the deliverer of the slave, and this really seems to be the explanation which accounts for the singular success of his unparalleled career; otherwise, how could this backwoods youth, rough, uncouth, little educated, reach the greatest eminence possible for an American; how could he have climbed the heights of fame until he arrived at the culminating pinnacle; how could he have become the recipient of the greatest and grandest honors his countrymen had in their power to confer upon him?

His accomplishments surely prove beyond question that this obscure, lowly born man was the chosen instrument of a Divine Wisdom, raised up to fulfill the designs of an all-wise Providence in freeing a race from bondage, just as Moses was raised up to lead 'the chosen people' from the land of their captivity.