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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Guide Weather Subscribe Contact Us February 5, 2005 Lincoln saved his best, and most religious for last Scott Dalgarno It was a miserable day in Washington, D.C. on March 4, 1865. Journalist Noah Brooks, an eyewitness to Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural said that as the president rose to speak, "the sun, which had been obscured all day, burst forth in its unclouded meridian splendor, and flooded the spectacle with glory and with light." Brooks said Lincoln later told him, "Did you notice that sunburst? It made my heart jump." Lincoln had decided to use the occasion to do something no president has done before of since. He sought to articulate a theology of history. A tall order, it had to be something that would truly honor the horrible sacrifice of the previous four years. Why had those 364,511 boys died? Why had so many returned from battle without arms or legs? Early in his political career Lincoln's enemies had tried to derail him by calling him a "deist," but it would be more correct to call him what his wife Mary Todd called him "not [technically] a Christian." Lincoln was a man steeped in the Bible and the teachings of Jesus, but he was not someone who thought he had to subscribe to anybody's doctrine. Highly rational he said he took what he could from the Bible, left some of it to faith, and didn't let the rest of it handicap him. Lincoln's high-pitched voice carried clearly over the cast crowd as he delivered what Alfred Kazin describes as "the most remarkable inaugural address in our history - the only one that has ever reflected literary genius." It was also the most religious. It presumed an America whose citizens knew the Bible almost as well as he did. It also presumed what is called American "civil religion." That is to say that though the Constitution calls for separation of church and state as a way of protecting both institutions, the president still is meant to represent a religious and moral center as, unlike England, we combine the head of state and the ceremonial leader in the same person. The address lasted six minutes. It attributes the cause of the war to the evil of slavery and condemns the whole system of slavery more vehemently than had ever been done before. Yet he does not lay all the blame in the lap of the South. "Both [sides] read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men 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 prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes." Lincoln left the door open that God may be punishing both the North and the South for what he believed to be a long entrenched national sin. "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 bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." In short, he did not try to justify his cause nor to comfort his audience with assurances that their side had always been right. He was after something bigger, the reconciliation of a much-divided nation - "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right to as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations." Lincoln told one New York politico that he believed it was likely the best speech he had ever produced but that it wouldn't be popular in his day. "[People] are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and themselves." Said the journalist, Brooks, "Looking down into the faces of the people, illuminated by the bright rays of the sun, one could see moist eyes and even tearful faces." Lincoln would be dead in a month, killed on Good Friday. In death he became precisely the kind of religious object he specifically rejected. And yet we remember him today, one hundred and forty years on, for all the right reasons -- because of his wisdom, his vision, his willingness to speak directly to his times, his deep though unconventional faith, and because he exuded a moral beauty that endures to this day. Scott Dalgarno is pastor of Ashland's First Presbyterian Church. 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