knowing what step to take next, when a strange and irresistible impression moved him to order up his reserves. At daylight, he was ready to meet the Confederate advance. He had a similar experience the second night with a similar result.

What was the secret of the President? Why was he rightly directed when the destiny of the nation was at stake? Whence the light in those days of darkness by which he moved with unerring instinct to victory? Draw what conclusions we may, there is ever in the normal mind the vision of the prostrate figure of the great war President, lying on his face on the floor of the White House, crying out of the deep of his anxiety: "Save, Lord, or we perish!" And Lincoln, at least, believed God answered prayer.

CHAPTER XXX

LIVING HIS RELIGION

SOME men seem naturally good.

Lincoln has

Yet it was re

his proper place among all such. served for Christianity to lift him up above all other good men of his time, to put the final elevating touch of Jesus Christ upon him, and to make him in the Christian sense a man of God. We have already seen how with his penetrating and inclusive mind, he worked out before he died a Christian theology singularly consistent and complete. We come now to consider the expression of his Christian faith in terms of everyday existence.

He once said in his Springfield days, "Whenever any church will inscribe over its altar as a qualification for membership the Saviour's statement of the substance of the law and Gospel, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself,' that church will I join with all my heart and soul." In reply to a committee

I Curtis, 374.

from the Evangelical Lutheran, General Synod, Mr. Lincoln said: "You all may recollect that in taking up the sword, thus forced into our hands, this government appealed to the prayers of the pious and good and declared that it placed its whole dependence upon the favour of God. I now humbly and reverently, in your presence, reiterate the acknowledgment of that dependence."1

To the American Baptist Home Mission Society, he said: "I can only thank you for thus adding to the effective and almost unanimous support which the Christian communities are so zealously giving to the country and to liberty."2

In reply to an address from the Society of Friends, delivered to him at the White House, Sept. 28, 1862, he said: "I am glad to know I have your sympathy and prayers. In the very responsible position in which I happen to be placed, being a humble instrument in the hands of our Heavenly Father, as I am and as we all are to work out His great purposes, I have desired that all my works and acts may be according to His will and that it might be so, I have sought His aid."3

To a committee of sixty-five members of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in

Complete works of Abraham Lincoln. Nicolay and Hay. Ibid.

3 Ibid.

the United States of America, he said: "Relying as I do upon Almighty God and encouraged, as I am by the resolutions which you have just read, with the support which I receive from Christian men, I shall not hesitate to use all the means at my control to secure the termination of the rebellion and will hope for success.'

and

In a letter of reply to a deputation of ministers who presented to him resolutions adopted by the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, May 18, 1864, he said: "God bless the Methodist Church, bless all the Churches blessed be God who in this our great trial, giveth u the Churches.”2 He never was formally attached to any church, though he had a passion not merely for attending Sunday services but also midweek prayer meetings. Abraham Lincoln, however, won from those whose judgment we all value, tributes to his Christian character not usually paid church members, perhaps if taken in the large never paid before to any other soul save Jesus Christ. Surely that devoted youthful secretary, John Hay, who lived to be at last himself a model of high-minded statesmanship, spoke hon

3

'Complete works of Abraham Lincoln. Nicolay and Hay.

Ibid.

3 Lincoln the Christian, Johnson, p. 13.

estly when he called Lincoln "the greatest man since Christ." Theodore Roosevelt, a student till the last of Lincoln, said: "If ever there was a man who practically applied what is taught in our churches it was Abraham Lincoln." Dr. J. G. Holland, while the world was still aghast at Lincoln's untimely taking off, predicted that "Mr. Lincoln will always be remembered as eminently a Christian President." Tolstoy pictured Lincoln as "a miniature Christ." And it was a devout Roman Catholic Priest, Father Chiniquy, who "found him the most perfect type of Christian."

In his own heart Lincoln was ever building up the Church of Jesus Christ. He was in fact a member of the Church invisible and indivisible. While he was working out a Christian theology altogether satisfying, he was also giving proof in all of his relationships with men that he did love his neighbour as he loved himself; that beneath all differences of opinion he perceived the Christlike in his fellows; that no incidental error, no petty jealousy, no subtle ambition, no overweening arrogance, no actual unfaithfulness to himself could blind him to the good inherent in all men or make him for a moment overlook the necessity of bearing all things and enduring all things, however disagreeable, to insure his country's profiting by the