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impossible to regard them as in any sense either perfunctionary or partizan. While the President asks for public thanksgivings for the preservation of the "national existence against the insurgent rebels who have been waging a cruel war . . . for its overthrow;" while he asks prayers for the protection of "our brave soldiers and their leaders in the field; " for the comfort of their families and of the sick and wounded, and for the continued upholding of the Government against "all the efforts of public enemies and secret foes "-one feels instinctively that even towards these foes there is no malice or bitterness, but a loving kindness that, like God's sunshine or rain, embraces alike "the evil and the good." He prays for success, being convinced that success is in God's purpose for America, and yet convinced that it can only be achieved by national prayer; he prays for success, but there is no malediction in his heart.

It was on the 4th of September, the day after the Proclamation we have been quoting, that Lincoln wrote his well-known letter to Mrs Joseph John Gurney, a Quaker Correspondent, one of whose letters of earnest friendship was found upon his body after his assassination. Commencing by addressing her as "my esteemed friend," he refers to the solemn Sunday morning visit received from her and three other Quakers some two years before, immediately after the issue of the preliminary Proclamation of Emancipation, and to a more recent letter. These he has never forgotten.

He expresses his gratitude to her for her efforts to strengthen his reliance upon God. He acknowledges his failures to perceive in advance the purposes of the Almighty; and says, "we must work earnestly in the

best lights He gives us, trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends He ordains. Surely He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay."

That hope of "some great good to follow" must often have sustained him in hours of depression, as it now refreshed him almost within sight of the end. It was in his thoughts when he wrote a few weeks later, in another Proclamation of Thanksgiving: "He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage and resolution, sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions."

Another example of his feeling at this time is to be found in his letter to a Boston woman who had lost five sons in the war. "I feel how weak and fruitless," he wrote, "must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom."

We noted the influence, many years earlier, of a Bible given to him by Mrs Speed. His final opinion on that book, spoken some seven months before his

death, has apparently been overlooked by some of his biographers and critics. His large brave mind was not distorted by prejudices; it set the right value on great things. Speaking to a negro committee who had presented him with a copy of the Bible, he said simply and frankly, first of himself and then of the volume, "I have done all I could for the good of mankind generally. . . . In regard to this great Book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man."

While he said this with absolute candour, he did not pretend to regard the Bible as wholly different in kind from other great literature. And it should here be added that the whole of his religious attitude was based not at all upon authority, but always upon the evidence of experience. His belief in God, his belief in Prayer, his belief in the Bible, were all practical and experimental-the result of the free, courageous, unprejudiced exercise of his mind upon the evidences before him.

There are many passages all through his life which bear witness to his passionate belief in the efficacy of prayer, and even of prayer for definite results. Among the most striking of these is that narrated by General Sickles, who seems to have had a long conversation with him in a Washington Hospital on the Sunday after Gettysburg.

The President declared that amid the prevailing uncertainty, he had not been anxious about the result. For a little earlier he had gone to his room, locked himself in, "and prayed mightily for a victory." "I told God," he is reported as saying, "I told God that if we were to win the battle He must do it,

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