Free Upon the Altar of the Nation by Harry S. Stout Page B

later. But causing the war was not one of them: “Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.” The resulting collision was inevitable: “And the war came.”
    Why would the South make war on the Union? To protect and extend slavery: “All knew this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.”
    So far so good. Now that good had been separated from evil, it would be time to ask how to punish the miscreants. But again Lincoln headed in an unexpected direction. How could like-minded Christians come to such violently opposed answers to slavery and Union? Both, after all, “read the same Bible, and pray to the same God.” Each “invokes His aid against the other.” Yes, the audience nodded, but we know whose side God was really on. Wrong. Strange as it seemed to own slaves and call it charity, as Southern moralists did to the bitter end, “let us judge not that we be not judged.” What? Judgment, as any Northern minister could have told his congregation, was precisely what God required of his obedient servants.
    So what cannot be judged? Not what, but who. God cannot be judged or contained in human categories. “The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.” This was not the Puritans’ God or the abolitionists’ God. Their God answered the prayers of the righteous and granted them victory. They had the jeremiad to prove it. And God was bound by its rhetoric to deliver His chosen people.
    Lincoln, however, bowed to a different God. Lincoln’s God was more inscrutable. Quoting Jesus, Lincoln condemned both sides: “Woe unto the world because of offences!” Both sides offended God because both sides were implicated in the sin of slavery—a point Lincoln made repeatedly on other occasions. What if slavery was one of those offenses that required horrendous penalties for everyone? And what if God’s judgment fell equally on both sides, even though only one human agency actually caused the war? How could anyone in the South or the North complain? If God “gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?” Any self-respecting Christian knew that the answer to this was of course not. So in place of self-righteous assurance, the best Americans could do was hope:
    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 bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with 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.”
    Earlier, Lincoln had had little good to say about the black race, even as he had condemned slavery vociferously. But in this address, Lincoln’s jeremiad, only the blacks escaped the judgments of the Lord. They, after all, had already been judged by white Americans, North and South.
    Implicit in everything Lincoln said was the presumption that, as horrific as the war was, it would eventually cease, because this same inscrutable God had unmistakably destined America to be his last best hope. So, when that ecstatic moment came, how ought the victors to respond? This was the answer everyone was waiting for—the denouement of a short but incredibly powerful peroration. Here, on this most pressing issue, Lincoln offered up his greatest surprise. In place of pride and revenge, he could only say:
    With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we