The Mystical Statesman
Lincoln's final emergence was a deeper thing than merely the consolidation of a character, the transformation of a dreamer into a man of action. The fusion of the outer and the inner person was the result of a profound interior change. Those elements of mysticism which were in him from the first, which had gleamed darkly through such deep overshadowing, were at last established in their permanent form. The political tension had been matched by a spiritual tension with personal sorrow as the connecting link. In a word, he had found his religion.
Lincoln's instinctive reticence was especially guarded, as any one might expect, in the matter of his belief. Consequently, the precise nature of it has been much discussed. As we have seen, the earliest current report charged him with deism. The devoted Herndon, himself an agnostic, eagerly claims his hero as a member of the noble army of doubters. Elaborate arguments have been devised in rebuttal. The fault on both sides is in the attempt to base an impression on detached remarks and in the further error of treating all these fragments as of one time, or more truly, as of no time, as if his soul were a philosopher of the absolute, speaking oracularly out of a void. It is like the vicious reasoning that tortures systems of theology out of disconnected texts.
Lincoln's religious life reveals the same general divisions that are to be found in his active life: from the beginning to about the time of his election; from the close of 1860 to the middle of 1862; the remainder.
Of his religious experience in the first period, very little is definitely known. What glimpses we have of it both fulfill and contradict the forest religion that was about him in his youth. The superstition, the faith in dreams, the dim sense of another world surrounding this, the belief in communion between the two, these are the parts of him that are based unchangeably in the forest shadows. But those other things, the spiritual passions, the ecstacies, the vague sensing of the terribleness of the creative powers,--to them always he made no response. And the crude philosophizing of the forest theologians, their fiercely simple dualism--God and Satan, thunder and lightning, the eternal war in the heavens, the eternal lake of fire--it meant nothing to him. Like all the furious things of life, evil appeared to him as mere negation, a mysterious foolishness he could not explain. His aim was to forget it. Goodness and pity were the active elements that roused him to think of the other world; especially pity. The burden of men's tears, falling ever in the shadows at the backs of things--this was the spiritual horizon from which he could not escape. Out of the circle of that horizon he had to rise by spiritual apprehension in order to be consoled. And there is no reason to doubt that at times, if not invariably, in his early days, he did rise; he found consolation. But it was all without form. It was a sentiment, a mood,--philosophically bodiless. This indefinite mysticism was the real heart of the forest world, closer than hands or feet, but elusive, incapable of formulation, a presence, not an idea. Before the task of expressing it, the forest mystic stood helpless. Just what it was that he felt impinging upon him from every side he did not know. He was like a sensitive man, neither scientist nor poet, in the midst of a night of stars. The reality of his experience gave him no power either to explain or to state it.
There is little reason to suppose that Lincoln's religious experience previous to 1860 was more than a recurrent visitor in his daily life. He has said as much himself. He told his friend Noah Brooks "he did not remember any precise time when he passed through any special change of purpose, or of heart, but he would say that his own election to office and the crisis immediately following, influentially determined him in what he called 'a process of crystallization' then going on in his mind."[1]
It was the terrible sense of need--the humility, the fear that he might not be equal to the occasion--that searched his soul, that bred in him the craving for a spiritual up-holding which should be constant. And at this crucial moment came the death of his favorite son. "In the lonely grave of the little one lay buried Mr. Lincoln's fondest hopes, and strong as he was in the matter of self-control, he gave way to an overmastering grief which became at length a serious menace to his health."[2] Though firsthand accounts differ as to just how he struggled forth out of this darkness, all agree that the ordeal was very severe. Tradition makes the crisis a visit from the Reverend Francis Vinton, rector of Trinity Church, New York, and his eloquent assertion of the faith in immortality, his appeal to Lincoln to remember the sorrow of Jacob over the loss of Joseph, and to rise by faith out of his own sorrow even as the patriarch rose.[3]
Although Lincoln succeeded in putting his grief behind him, he never forgot it. Long afterward, he called the attention of Colonel Cannon to the lines in King John:
"And Father Cardinal, I have heard you say
That we shall see and know our friends in heaven;
If that be true, I shall see my boy again."
"Colonel," said he, "did you ever dream of a lost friend, and feel that you were holding sweet communion with that friend, and yet have a sad consciousness that it was not a reality? Just so, I dream of my boy, Willie." And he bent his head and burst into tears.[4]
As he rose in the sphere of statecraft with such apparent suddenness out of the doubt, hesitation, self-distrust of the spring of 1862 and in the summer found himself politically, so at the same time he found himself religiously. During his later life though the evidences are slight, they are convincing. And again, as always, it is not a violent change that takes place, but merely a better harmonization of the outer and less significant part of him with the inner and more significant. His religion continues to resist intellectual formulation. He never accepted any definite creed. To the problems of theology, he applied the same sort of reasoning that he applied to the problems of the law. He made a distinction, satisfactory to himself at least, between the essential and the incidental, and rejected everything that did not seem to him altogether essential.
In another negative way his basal part asserted itself. Just as in all his official relations he was careless of ritual, so in religion he was not drawn to its ritualistic forms. Again, the forest temper surviving, changed, into such different conditions! Real and subtle as is the ritualistic element, not only in religion but in life generally, one may doubt whether it counts for much among those who have been formed mainly by the influences of nature. It implies more distance between the emotion and its source, more need of stimulus to arouse and organize emotion, than the children of the forest are apt to be aware of. To invoke a philosophical distinction, illumination rather than ritualism, the tense but variable concentration on a result, not the ordered mode of an approach, is what distinguishes such characters as Lincoln. It was this that made him careless &f form in all the departments of life. It was one reason why McClellan, born ritualist of the pomp of war, could never overcome a certain dislike, or at least a doubt, of him.
Putting together his habit of thinking only in essentials and his predisposition to neglect form, it is not strange that he said: "I have never united myself to any church because I have found difficulty in giving my assent, without mental reservation, to the long, complicated statements of Christian doctrine which characterize their Articles of Belief and Confessions of Faith. When any church will inscribe over its altar, as its sole qualification for membership, the Savior's condensed statement of the substance of both 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 neighbor as thyself,' that church will I join with all my heart and with all my soul."[5]
But it must not be supposed that his religion was mere ethics. It had three cardinal possessions. The sense of God is through all his later life. It appears incidentally in his state papers, clothed with language which, in so deeply sincere a man, must be taken literally. He believed in prayer, in the reality of communion with the Divine. His third article was immortality.
At Washington, Lincoln was a regular attendant, though not a communicant, of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. With the Pastor, the Reverend P. D. Gurley, he formed a close friendship. Many hours they passed in intimate talk upon religious subjects, especially upon the question of immortality.[6] To another pious visitor he said earnestly, "I hope I am a Christian."[7] Could anything but the most secure faith have written this "Meditation on the Divine Will" which he set down in the autumn of 1862 for no eye but his own: "The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God can not be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true; that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By His mere great power on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun, He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds."[8]
His religion flowered in his later temper. It did not, to be sure, overcome his melancholy. That was too deeply laid. Furthermore, we fail to discover in the surviving evidences any certainty that it was a glad phase of religion. Neither the ecstatic joy of the wild women, which his mother had; nor the placid joy of the ritualist, which he did not understand; nor those other variants of the joy of faith, were included in his portion. It was a lofty but grave religion that matured in his final stage. Was it due to far-away Puritan ancestors? Had austere, reticent Iron-sides, sure of the Lord, but taking no liberties with their souls, at last found out their descendant? It may be. Cromwell, in some ways, was undeniably his spiritual kinsman. In both, the same aloofness of soul, the same indifference to the judgments of the world, the same courage, the same fatalism, the same encompassment by the shadow of the Most High. Cromwell, in his best mood, had he been gifted with Lincoln's literary power, could have written the Fast Day Proclamation of 1863 which is Lincoln's most distinctive religious fragment.
However, Lincoln's gloom had in it a correcting element which the old Puritan gloom appears to have lacked. It placed no veto upon mirth. Rather, it valued mirth as its only redeemer. And Lincoln's growth in the religious sense was not the cause of any diminution of his surface hilarity. He saved himself from what otherwise would have been intolerable melancholy by seizing, regardless of the connection, anything whatsoever that savored of the comic.
His religious security did not destroy his superstition. He continued to believe that he would die violently at the end of his career as President. But he carried that belief almost with gaiety. He refused to take precautions for his safety. Long lonely rides in the dead of night; night walks with a single companion, were constant anxieties to his intimates. To the President, their fears were childish. Although in the sensibilities he could suffer all he had ever suffered, and more; in the mind he had attained that high serenity in which there can be no flagging of effort because of the conviction that God has decreed one's work; no failure of confidence because of the twin conviction that somehow, somewhere, all things work together for good. "I am glad of this interview," he said in reply to a deputation of visitors, in September, 1862, "and glad to know that I have your sympathy and your prayers. . I happened 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 purpose. . . . I have sought His aid; but if after endeavoring to do my best in the light He affords me, I find my efforts fail, I must believe that for some purpose unknown to me He wills it otherwise. If I had my way, this war would never have commenced. If I had been allowed my way, this war would have been ended before this; but it still continues and we must believe that He permits it for some wise purpose of His own, mysterious and unknown to us; and though with our limited understandings we may not be able to comprehend it, yet we can not but believe that He who made the world still governs it."[9]