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 1860to 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 1860was 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]
