Abraham Lincoln-Man of God CHAPTER I THE BACKGROUND THE prairies of the Great West were as vast seas in which the groves, God's first temples, were like islands. Their rolling waves of summer verdure, their sombre glow of autumn haze, their angry aspect when swept by raging storms, their billowing drifts of winter snows, impressed the pioneer mind with a sense of the infinite. The frontier communities were saturated with religious sentiment. Nearness to nature keyed their souls to spiritual influences. They saw God in the clouds, heard Him in the winds, read His providence in the upspringing of verdure, and in the recurrence of the seasons. Their hardships chastened them; their common dangers drew them closer together; their perils and helplessness taught them reliance upon a Higher Power. They drew their religious faith and fervour from the Puritans of New England, the Cavaliers of Maryland, the Scotch Presbyterians of the Carolinas, and from other types of Christians. Central among them was Methodism, which exerted a wide and deep influence in moulding the rugged religion of the pioneer. Fortunately, in the intimate association of the wilderness, sectarian and denominational differences lost their strong hold, and tolerance was practised from necessity as well as inclination. The people merged into a brotherhood of mutual helpfulness in spiritual as well as in material things. They met and exchanged ideas and experiences as freely as they exchanged the products of the soil and chase. As their mode of life brought health and strength, their religious life lent joyousness, instead of Puritanic gloom. Limited in the number of their "meeting houses," the rude school houses were often utilized for worship. The one big event of the year was the campmeeting. It attracted, from far and near, multitudes of all classes, the pious and impious, the reverent and profane. Believers and unbelievers found in the camp-meeting the only touch of cos mopolitan life that modified the loneliness of the frontier. The people made their way to these camps in vehicles of every description, farm wagons, ox carts, boats; while some went on horseback and hundreds travelled on foot. They talked over neighbourhood affairs, discussed the questions of the day, and gathered from each other the drift of national tendencies, the progress of settlement, and the spread of religious sentiment. Naturally these exchanges, however, centred in their exuberant religious life. One who passed his youth amidst such scenes wrote: It was a heterogeneous gathering,-humourists who were unconscious of their humour; mystics who did not understand their strange, far-reaching power; sentimental dreamers who did their best to live down their emotions; old timers and cosmopolitans with a wonderful admixture of sense and sentiment; political prophets who could foresee events by a sudden, illuminating flash and foretold them in a quick-spoken, pithy sentence; theologians educated on the frontier,— these met and prayed and wrestled in sharp verbal encounters that were as educational in their way as were the discussions in the academic groves of Athens.' It was an unusual people, living in a second Canaan, in an age of social change and upheaval, in a period of political and economic strife. There The Valley of the Shadow, Francis Grierson. |