LINCOLN AND RELIGION

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 93, 14 January 1929, Page 11

LINCOLN AND RELIGION

Sir,—l enclose the following passage in support o£ “Omerion,” as eloquent defence of Lincoln's belief in religion and a God. It is an extract from his second inaugural speech as President, delivered on March 4, six weeks before his death, on April 15, 1865. The subject is the Civil War:

"Both (sides in the war) read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, and each invokes Ilis aid against the other. It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we'be not judged. The prayer of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. . . If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but ■which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern there any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet. if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsmen's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be. repaid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so, still it must be said that “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”—l am, etc., I.E. Wellington, January 11.