llQCol Qass. Book \ c rii The Religion of Abraham Lincoln m ^ George A. Tmam-r Minister of 1 he Fir^ Congregational L nitarian Church of Cincinnati FEBRUARY. 1909 Cincinnati Thi Ebbcrt Sc Richardson Co. UfiCm e: 45 ^^ 'He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. Surely he hath borne our sorrows; he was wounded for our transgressions, the chastisement of our peace was upon him. — Isaiah jj; j, 4, 5. THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN Whether or not Abraham Lincohi was a religious man, and what were the essential ideas of the world, as governed by spiritual laws, which guided him in his Presidential office, are problems often debated and upon which it is profitable at an im])ortant anniversary of his birth to seek li^ht. II(»w far was Lincoln's ability to meet effectively the burden^ <.f hi> public service derived from religious conviction, which has borne so large a part in forti- fying men in difficult activities? In what respect was he a religious man. and h<»w did his religion corres- pond to what passes under that name in our X'ation at large" Let Us look at the early circumstances of his educa- tion ; of his moral and intellectual evolution. If I repeat a few conunonplaces of this story, the justification will lie in the fact that the familiar in history is stranger to the average man than those of us who deal much in books are apt to recognize; so that many an old story is a new tale to some listeners. I)orn in Kentucky in L^09, moving with his parents when he was seven into Indiana, then at twenty-one, in ls;{(), continuing the migration into Illinois, he spent those early years, and indeed his entire early life, until he was chosen President, in a rather rude, uncul- tivated comnuuiity, where education was rare — so far as it depended upon books and book knowledge — and 4 THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. where religious institutions were quite as primitive and illiterate as the rest of the intellectual influences. Preaching-, as those frontier settlements knew it, was largely an emphasis upon the need of escaping the wrath to come after death, supported upon a concep- tion of God and human nature which set the Christian religion apart from every other body of opinion about which the wit of man was disposed to exercise itself. That is, theology, the doctrines of what God is, how He feels towards His human creatures, how He makes known His will to them, what He expects of them, was not a system of ideas which one should reason about, as every citizen of the country could reason out why he should vote for the Whig or the Democratic party, or why he should cultivate his crops in one way rather than in another way, but it was something to be taken because a mysterious, . infallible revelation laid it down as everlasting truth. And yet oddly enough, with this one unerring revelation at the hand of every man who could read the Bible, there were innumerable shades of doctrine as to the contents of the Bible, their meaning, the proper emphasis to be laid upon one feature over another, forming an ever-increasing com- pany of sects and fanaticisms — Baptists, Freewill or Predestinarian Baptists, Covenanters, Wesleyans, Bi- ble Christians, Presbyterians and what-not besides. Inevitably the expounders of these different shades of theory about the one infallible revelation were largely unlettered men, often narrow and intolerant of sympathy, sometimes having considerable native elo- quence and capable of moving congregations to tem- pests of emotion, of hope and fear, but oftener \k^ 3 1911 T}]E RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LIXXOLX. dry, dull and stupid in their exhortations; and under such expounders of the Bible, Lincoln's acquaintance with the vast unseen universe into which we all like to peer, in wonder and awe, was first developed. His introduction to secular learning, to arithmetic, geogra- phy, history, fiction, was through very scanty facilities; a few weeks' schooling in a year, books of any sort, poor or good, far between, the necessity of contributing^ to the family living or to his own support, demanding long hr)urs. with little time left to study ; such were the conditions under which he gained his mental dis- cipline, and it shows Ivnv strong were his native powers, derived, no one can guess from what inheri- tance, or what mystery of the evolution of the brain, that he rose so high above the average man of his environment, and came to think so widely and wisely ujxtn all sorts of j)roblems of human duty. .Shf.wing thus a striking originality in insisting upon l)iing a student when everybody about him was entirely satisfied to live as mere day-by-day plodders uj)on the earth which begat them, and would soon re- ceive them into its bosom, he early showed a spirit of independence in viewing religious (|uestions, and for a time earned and undoubtedly long retained theoj)pro- brium of being an inl'idel (»r >kej)tic and denier, which probably in any proper sense he never was. These epithets in illiterate communities have always been apj)lied to minds which departed from the me- chanical lines of thinking about faith anrl duty. He who reasons for himself, who asks troublesome ques- tif)ns of the established systems of faith, used to be rudely disposed of. either by being turned over to the 6 THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. officers of the state to be dealt with as a criminal, or by being branded by local public opinion as a social out- cast, an enemy of the things which lie at the root of the public peace and safety. But those of us who are measurably acquainted with the history of opinion, know that the minds which seek the grounds of fact and probability, which support every great system of doctrine, social, political, scientific, or religious, are often the most honest and disinterested spirits of their age, guides and leaders of our race out of its degrada- tions, its servitudes, its superstitions, its wickedness, into freedom and a higher righteousness, as they are often the most trusted and beloved persons among the neighbors who best know them; the men and women distinguished for doing good. I think the world has occasion to rejoice that a mind like Lincoln's, in those early years of eager grasping after every form of light upon the mystery of exist- ence, chanced to find some of the books, branded in conventional, church communities with odium, which have been the great emancipators of intelligence and conscience — books written by the Frenchmen, Vol- taire and Volney, and by the patriot of our American Revolution, Thomas Paine, books which contain much that is crude and useless or even offensive to reason today with our larger view of the universe, but which in their day and generation did an inestimable work in teaching men to think courageously, to speak hon- estly, and especially to be tolerant and sympathetic to- wards differences of judgment. Lincoln's professional line of study, as he became mature, was in the limited direction of law; he had THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LIN'COLX. 7 little opportunity to become a specialist in theology or philosophy, but to the end of his career he retained that early-manifested disposition to seek the reason- ableness, the humanity and morality of a doctrine in state or church, which resulted in his being to the end what you and I are accustomed to call a liberal or rationalist in matters of devout faith. All his legion of biographers, gleaning the ground wherever there is any suggestion of a trace of Lincoln's sayings or transactions, agree that the utmost conces- sion he ever made to acceptance of the popular creeds of Christendom was to express his assurance that a great wi>dnm and justice overruled and directed the affairs of men, a wisdom up was to Ik.' a single and imited country, or a sort 8 THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. of South American community, split into petty and mutually warring nationalities. This is a passage in which he seeks to interpret the meaning of this protracted anxiety : *'The Almighty has His own purposes. Woe unto the world because of offenses. It must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh. If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of these offenses which in the provi- dence of God must needs come, but which having con- tinued through His appointed time He now wills to remove * * --k >s= shall we discern there any de- parture from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it con- tinue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous al- together. With malice towards none, with charity for all, let us finish the work we are in, to bind up the Nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and orphans, to do all that may achieve and cherish a lasting place among ourselves and with all nations." In the old classification of the state of minds of men with regard to religion, people were divided into church members and those who belonged to no church. THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LIXCULX. 9 In the new classification, especially among liberals, the distinction is drawn between those who have no ideas or convictions about the unseen universe or moral responsibilities, and those who do think and feel upon such subjects whether or not they manifest their ideas by some form of public worship or union with a church organization. From this point of view the relij^nous man may and very often does refuse to call himself by one (jr another sectarian name. Under that old classification, Lincoln was shut out from the fold of the faithful. lie once expressed his feeling upon the subject, as reported by a painter who was busy for many weeks at the White House in mak- ing the President's portrait — Mr. Carpenter. "I have never joined any church, but whenever I can fin was in much the spirit with which manv of us who were bred in small villages of limited 10 THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. library opportunities read the Hebrew Scriptures, be- cause the volume was always accessible, was in many parts interesting as story and poetry, and became, the better we knew it, an attractive storehouse of the say- ings which are quoted abundantly in the literature of the English-speaking nations. It w^as located among the wisdom volumes of humanity, to be acquainted with which w^as a part of culture. Lincoln prized the Bible as literature, not as a body of dogma before which the mind must stand stupified ; it was to be tasted and digested by reason and imagination. And his writings and speeches showed how saturated he had become with this noble body of the great thoughts of Israel. But such considerations of what he rejected of or- thodox doctrine and the conventional notions of God and man are only on the surface of his religion. He was by nature, or it may be some defect of his physical constitution, a mystic, one who felt that the invisible world had secrets which were communicated now and then to especially-prepared minds through dreams and visions, and there are several stories of his being deeply stirred by premonitions of danger and of public crisis which were borne in upon him through some unaccountable influence w^hich he could not rea- son about. One dream, not in itself of any more definiteness than are most of our dreams, in which he felt himself floating into boundless space, recurred to him several times and seemed to be premonitory of some 'great bat- tle or of some disaster to himself, as it was repeated, just before his assassination. That attachment of val- ue to dreams, which rarely if ever have any signifi- THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LINXOLX. 11 cance, was a part of his heritag^e from the old credu- lous atmosphere of Indiana and IHinuis, when he spent his evenings in the village grocery listening to the small talk of the idlers. In othef ages men thus moved by a sense of some- thing wierd around them in the unseen forces, have become founders of religious brotherhoods or leaders of new religions. Controlled by his strong practical sense, Lincoln did not allow these occasional moods to lure him into any eccentric actions or state of mind. But he had a good deal of melancholy from which he was lifted mainly by his great fund of humor; his de- light in hearing and constructing stories of entertain- ment .ind rediculous occurrences. His jokes became a by-word of his times, sometimes expressed at moments w hen his hearers were not in any facetious mood. But a> he once told an accjuaintance who expressed some ini|)atience at what seemed a too light story in a grave National emergency, "If I did not have this vent of illustration I should die !" And as a rule with all men who are called to trying positions, it is the ability to see the ludicrous aspect of things which is their salvation from desperation. I have always been deeply impressed with the display of that lighter spirit in the case of a famous English scholar and statesman, Sir Thomas More, who was de- capitated on Tower Hill in London in L").')5 by King Henry \ TIL As he was climbing the somewhat di- lapidated stairway to the axe, he stumbled and was helped to rise by the executioner. "See me safe up; as for my coming down I will shift for myself.'' In 12 THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN- one aspect it was a dreadful moment for any playful- ness, but to More himself it was a chance to show his self-mastery above all foolish fear. Lincoln's jokes carried abroad the idea that he was a shallow, buffoonish man. As he has described it, his stories could be whole arguments in themselves, which need no farther explanation ; a touch of wit or humor illuminates like a flash of lightning across a path at midnight. At root, his was the disposition of a moral prophet. All the stories which have been gleaned from his young manhood coincide in describing him as one who stood ever for principle against policy and expediency. His foremost question as a citizen, a lawyer or a politician was, ''What is right?" And especially in the choice of sides in the important political discussions which were stirring the Nation, over the part which negro slavery in the Southern States should be permitted to hold in directing National action, Lincoln promptly and reso- lutely put himself upon the side which maintained that the natural order of things is human liberty, not the servitude of any man of any complexion to any other man. When in his early career as a boatman on the Mis- sissippi he saw in New Orleans a negro auction block with men and women set up for sale to the highest bidder, he exclaimed excitedly, ''If I ever get a chance I will hit that thing hard !" Undoubtedly he recalled that old throb of indignant wrath when in the autumn of 1862, under his authority as President and Com- mander-in-Chief of the National Armies, he pro- claimed that after the coming first of January all slaves THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LINXOLX. 13 held upon the soil of the United States should be their own masters and mistresses. In the course of a notable political debate in Illinois when he was before the people as a candidate for United States Senator against one of the most power- ful of politicians, Stephen Douglas, he scandalized most of his party associates who were of the mood of trimming to what was supposed to be the popular in- difference to the rights of the negro, by frankly declar- ing in one of his most important speeches that "Sla- very is founded in the selfishness of man's nature; opposition to it in his love of justice. Xear eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men were cre- ated ecjual. In our greedy chase to make profit of the negro let us beware how we cancel and tear to pieces even the white man's charter of freedom." And again he said. "A government cannot perma- nently endure half slave, half free. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved, but I do expect it will cease to be di- vided. It will become all one thing or all the other." It was his moral courage displayed at the outset of his ])ublic life in taking this unpopular side, which eventually carried him to the Presidential office, and which in the four years of his service at that post of honor in the most critical epoch of our X^ational life, made everybody who came in contact with him, whether lluy came to find fault or to approve, feel assured that at the Nation's head was an upright, disinterested l^atriot ; modest, simple, but sturdy of conviction, not t(^ be swerved from any course which he felt to be right. ( )ne of the most trying features of his office 14 THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. was the duty of passing judgment upon the sentence of soldiers convicted of desertion and doomed to be shot. Every Northern friend of such condemned de- serters who could get to Washington carried an appeal from the sentence of Mr. Lincoln, with the pretty toler- able assurance that if he would once hear the statement he would pardon the offender. The commanders of the Army were often deeply angry at this Presidential interference with discipline, upon the principle that the man who abandons his post of duty before an enemy exposes his companions in arms to disaster ; he is more than a coward, he is a betrayer of friends and allies. Nevertheless in a good many cases Lincoln's soft heart carried his sympathies with the convicted soldier, although, fortunately for the Army, only here and there one of the host of cowards could reach the Presi- dent with influence. But Lincoln possessed so much of the milk of human kindness that he would prefer to run the risk of doing some wrong, and especially of suffering some personal hurt, than to pass by an oppor- tunity to forgive an offender and give him another chance to do right. As one of his boyhood compan- ions testified, he was helpful to the women folk and the children and would n't let a bird's nest fall to the ground without tenderly picking up the nestlings. It is surprising that in that early frontier life where the minor vices of drinking and gambling are the habitual outlet of animal appetites, Lincoln shared none of them. He was to the end, abstemious, temperate, self-restrained. xAnd still he was upon cordial terms with all classes; that he did not care to take a drink did not separate him from the fellowship of his neighbors. THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LLXCOLX. 15 Such simple cjualities of courage, kindness, unflinch- ing^ intcL^rity, the instinct of always putting himself upon the side of the weaker party, are the minor phases of the higher life of the soul of a man: and especially is this shown in his determination throughout his career of pijlitics never to yield a moral principle to a demand of expediency, and his feeling that the man who does the right, as intelligence shows him the right, is on God's side. These are more important proofs of Lincoln's reli- gion than his discussions of the stock doctrines of Christian theolog)'. As I have said, tliere is perfect accord among his veracious biograi)hers that in no essential point, out- side of his trust in Providence and his assurance that the world is governed by righteousness, was he in har- mony with the po{)ular churches of Christendom, nor would he, under any old regime, have been admitted as a ])lain common man to membership in any of them. And yet. if he had taken any pains to investigate when he was saying U) Mr. Cari)enter that he should like to find a church whose creed was simply that of love to Ciod and to man, he could have found it near by in the Unitarian church, which in those days, if I remember correctly, was ministered to by one of my predecessors in this pulj)it, Wm. Henry Channing, whose creed was the simplest compound of righteous- ness, freedom and trust in truth wheresoever it leads. At the same time when, in all the gleanings of remi- niscences of all sorts of visitors to the White House, there appear reports of what Mr. Lincoln said about prayer, about his liible readings, about his admiration 16 THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. for church people and Christianity, which seem to show that he moved towards the last of his life to- wards the creeds of orthodoxy, we must recognize that in the amenities of conversation with good, well- meaning, public-spirited men and women, he would as- sent to phrases which were rather an echo of what he was accustomed to hear from the minister of his Washington and Springfield churches, and not the expression of his own careful conviction. His oldest intimate friend in Illinois, Jesse Fell, to whom Lincoln talked confidentially about his inmost beliefs, reports, "If I was called upon to designate an author whose views most clearly represented Mr. Lin- coln, I should say that author was Theodore Parker." Now, Theodore Parker, as some of you know, was a Boston Unitarian minister of advanced rationalistic ideas, mated with profound reverence and gentleness; a teacher who did not hold that religion of any type came to man by miraculous revelation, and who was one of the earliest scholars to introduce into our coun- try the advanced criticism of the Scriptures as the pro- duct of human intelligence. It has been surmised with much plausibility that Lincoln's often-quoted phrase, ''Government of the people, by the people, for the peo- ple," was derived from his reading of Theodore Par- ker's discourses, where it occurs in one of those strong discussions of political questions for which Parker's pulpit in Music Hall, Boston, was as noted as for his presentations of the religiousness of human nature. Dr. Wm. Ellery Channing, the Boston pioneer leader of our Unitarian Church in the beginning of the last century was also, according to Mr. Fell's testimony. THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LINXOLX. 17 one of Lincoln's well-known authors; Dr. Channing, among his still more important contributions to the moral uplifting of the world, being one of the earliest valiant advocates of negro emancipation, while yet such discussions were generally tabooed by conserva- tive citizens. The consideration of these potent influences upon Lincoln's mind in his search for religious belief is grateful lo those of us who hold that the most impor- tant service to the theolog)- of our country has been performed by a few of these emancii)atf lliem it might be written, as Leigh Hunt makes .\bou l-.en Adhem desire for his own final record, "Write me as one who loves his fellow men." The company of those who have loved greatly and endured much in behalf of their {principles in order 18 THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. that humanity might be helped, is a distinguished fel- lowship of prophets, saints, martyrs, sages, unfaith- ful often to the forms of belief; but loyal to the core to the essence of truth and righteousness. And in this company Abraham Lincoln has a place. DtG ^Y ^i^iU y. Ch S '12