The Soul of Abraham Lincoln
9781465636645
211 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Of no other American have so many biographies been written as of Abraham Lincoln. No other question concerning his life has evoked more interest than that of his religious faith and experience. What Abraham Lincoln believed has been told by many who knew him and whose varied relations to him during his lifetime rendered it not unreasonable to suppose that they could give some assured answer to the question of his belief. The answers are not only varied, but hopelessly contradictory. It is stated on apparently good authority that in his young manhood he read Volney's Ruins and Paine's Age of Reason, and it is affirmed that he accepted their conclusions, and himself wrote what might have been a book or pamphlet denying the essential doctrines of the Christian faith as he understood them. Friends of his who knew him well enough to forbid the throwing of their testimony out of court have affirmed that he continued to hold these convictions; and that, while he became more cautious in the matter of their expression, he carried them through life and that they never underwent any radical change. On the other hand, there are declarations, made by those who also knew Lincoln well, that these views became modified essentially, and that Lincoln accepted practically the whole content of orthodox Christian theology as it was then understood; that he observed daily family worship in his home; that he carried a Bible habitually upon his person; and that he was in short in every essential a professed Christian, though never a member of a Christian church. There is more than a conflict of testimony; there is positive chaos. Every recent biographer has felt the inherent difficulties involved in it. One or two of them have passed it over with practically no mention; others have become fierce partisans of the one extreme or the other. Besides the formal biographies, a literature of this special topic has grown up. Entire books and many pamphlets and magazine articles have been written on this one question. The Chicago Historical Society and the Chicago Public Library have each devoted a principal division in the Lincoln material to the literature relating to his religion. It has been the writer's privilege to examine in both these libraries and in several others the whole known body of literature of the subject. In this investigation the writer came face to face with utterly contradictory testimony from men who had known Abraham Lincoln intimately.
