One Man’s Faith

Tom Barnard

ike others before him, and since, he was born in obscurity. The home of his early childhood would not pass any building code in America today. Modesty was a characteristic that followed him all the days of his life. When his mother died—and there was no church within thirty miles of his rural home—he helped his father construct a rough-wood coffin for his mother’s body, “and they laid it in the earth among the trees radiant with autumn colors,” as biographer Richard Paul Graebel wrote.

Abraham Lincoln was “country”—through and through. In his early years, his family lived on Knob-creek, “on the road from Bardstown, Kentucky to Nashville, Tennessee, at a point three, or three and a half miles south or south-west of Atherton’s ferry on the Rolling Fork,” as Lincoln himself described it.

No one questions Lincoln’s familiarity with the scriptures. It seems clear from what he said that Lincoln lived “in the daily consciousness of God.” It was rumored (and later substantiated by fact) that Lincoln carried a pocket testament with him wherever he went and read it daily.

Lincoln’s faith did not blossom during his childhood and youth, but in fact it developed over a period of years, reaching its maturity during the dark days of the Civil War. Historians agree that he never joined a church, even though he “rented pew number 20” at the First Presbyterian Church of Springfield. No church has a record about Lincoln making a profession of faith there. Lincoln was once asked why he did not join a church, and he reportedly said,

“When any church will inscribe over its altars, as its sole qualification for membership, the Saviour’s statement for 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 thy heart and soul.”  

On March 2, 1863, Senator James Harlan of Iowa introduced a resolution asking President Lincoln to proclaim a national day of prayer and fasting. It was adopted on March 3. Here is how the resolution to President Lincoln read. He signed in on March 30.

“It is the duty of nations as well as men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, and to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in Holy Scriptures, and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.”

As to his personal faith in God, what could be clearer than this statement in a letter he wrote to General Dan Sickles, a participant in the battle of Gettysburg, on July 5, 1863:

“Well, I will tell you how it was. In the pinch of the campaign up there (at Gettysburg) when everybody seemed panic stricken and nobody could tell what was going to happen…I went to my room one day and locked the door and got down on my knees before Almighty God and prayed to Him mightily for victory at Gettysburg. I told Him that this war was His war, and our cause His cause, but we could not stand another Fredericksburg or Chancellorsville…And after that, I don’t know how it was, and I cannot explain it, but soon a sweet comfort crept into my soul….”  

America faces international challenges today that equal or surpass the challenges that faced our nation in 1863. Presidential candidates will soon debate how they will solve the oil crisis, global terrorism, wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the falling value of the dollar, the economy, and other issues great and small.