Free Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power by Richard J. Carwardine Page B

Reason—would then show its own self made & self uttered Contradictions and would in the End—finally ridicule it.” Stuart, too, thought Lincoln’s unorthodoxy “bordered on atheism.” He “went further against Christian beliefs—& doctrines & principles than any man I ever heard: he shocked me— . . . Lincoln always denied that Jesus was the . . . son of God as understood and maintained by the Christian world.” 55
    Lincoln was in fact no more of an atheist than Paine, who, despite his popular reputation, had not launched an assault on all religion. Even in his New Salem period Lincoln believed in a creator. Isaac Cogdal, while conceding the existence of Lincoln’s essay denying the inspiration of Scripture, insisted that his friend “believed in God—and all the great substantial groundworks of Religion.” But this was not a quixotic God who would act on impulse or anger. Cogdal, claiming to have often discussed religion with Lincoln between 1834 and 1859, considered him “a Universalist tap root & all in faith and sentiment,” someone who could not subscribe to the orthodox Calvinist belief in hell and endless punishment. Corroborative evidence comes from Mentor Graham, who gave Lincoln some instruction at New Salem and who recalled reading a manuscript that Lincoln gave him in defense of universal salvation. Denying that “the God of the universe” would ever become “excited, mad, or angry,” Lincoln “took the passage, ‘As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive,’ ” to contradict the theory of eternal damnation. It is unlikely that Lincoln was here endorsing the Christian doctrine of atonement, but rather affirming the case for a creator who operated according to the maxims of justice and rationality in his dealings with humankind. 56
    Lincoln’s personal and religious circumstances in Springfield worked to refine and reshape his opinions. For the first time he belonged to a community that numbered educated, college-trained ministers, settled pastors capable of engaging intelligently with unorthodox opinion. Hesitant at first about attending any of the city’s fashionable churches, Lincoln, after his marriage to Mary Todd, became an occasional worshipper at the Episcopal church. When their three-year-old son, Eddie, died in 1850, the family switched their allegiance to the First Presbyterian church, whose Old School pastor, James Smith, had conducted the funeral ceremony. Mary entered into full membership, and the Lincolns rented a pew (though Lincoln himself would be by no means the most regular of attenders: he had, as one friendly commentator politely put it, “western and not puritan views” of Sabbath observance). Smith was an intellectual Scot familiar with the works of Paine, Volney, and other freethinkers. In
The Christian’s Defense,
a substantial work of theology, Smith deployed rational argument and the evidence of historical and natural sciences to plead the cause of orthodox Christianity. He gave a copy of his book to Lincoln, whose home on Eighth and Jackson he quite regularly visited, and who, Smith maintained, gave the arguments on both sides “a most patient, impartial and Searching investigation.” It was not Lincoln’s only reading on the issues of faith and reason. He gave a close examination to Robert Chambers’s
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
(1844), an analysis of Christianity and evolutionary science; Herndon and Jesse W. Fell, a Bloomington lawyer, lent him the writings of liberal theologians. 57
    In consequence, according to Smith, Lincoln avowed “his belief in the Divine Authority and the Inspiration of the Scriptures.” Ninian Edwards remembered Lincoln, his brother-in-law, declaring that thanks to his dialogues with his pastor “I am now convinced of the truth of the Christian religion.” Several of Lincoln’s acquaintances maintained that in the late 1850s he had professed his belief in the atonement of Christ for the