As he rose in the sphere of statecraft with such apparent suddenness out of the doubt,hesitation,self-distrust of the spring of 1862and 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.
