Comes Wisdom to Us

Abraham Lincoln shows how suffering can be bound up with spiritual purpose. He sank so deeply into that suffering and came away with a felicitous blend of humility and determination. Whatever ship carried him on life’s rough waters, Lincoln came to believe that he was not the captain but merely a subject of the divine force—call it fate or God or the "Almighty Architect" of existence. Yet, however humble his station, Lincoln knew himself to be no idle passenger but a sailor on deck with a job to do. In his strange mix of deference to divine authority and willful exercise of his own meager power, Lincoln achieved transcendent wisdom, the delicate fruit of a lifetime of pain.

A revealing glimpse into his spiritual life came in the summer of 1863, when, as a president mired in Civil War, Lincoln faced fires burning all around him. In early July, costly military victories at Vicksburg, Mississippi and at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, opened an opportunity, Lincoln thought, to end the war. When the opportunity was lost, he described himself as “oppressed” and in “deep distress.” Around the same time, draft riots in New York City — which brought this jewel city of the North to its knees in bitter anti-black violence—accentuated the ongoing horror.

Amidst this intense pressure, a grieved Lincoln found peace by acknowledging his own powerlessness. According to General James F. Rusling, Lincoln said that during the fighting at Gettysburg he turned to prayer, felt the whole thing to be in God’s hands, and “somehow a sweet comfort crept into his soul.” In another revealing incident that summer, Elizabeth Keckly, Mary Lincoln’s dressmaker, watched the president drag himself into the room where she was fitting the First Lady. “His step was slow and heavy, and his face sad,” Keckly recalled. “Like a tired child he threw himself upon a sofa, and shaded his eyes with his hands. He was a complete picture of dejection.”

Lincoln announced that he had just returned from the War Department, he said, where the news was “dark, dark everywhere.” Then he took a small Bible from a stand near the sofa and began to read. “A quarter of an hour passed,” Keckly remembered, “and on glancing at the sofa the face of the President seemed more cheerful. The dejected look was gone, and the countenance was lighted up with new resolution and hope.” Wanting to see what he was reading, Keckly pretended she had dropped something and went behind where Lincoln was sitting so she could look over his shoulder. It was the Book of Job.

Throughout history, a glance to the divine has often been the first and last impulse for suffering people. “Man is born broken,” the playwright Eugene O’Neill has written. “He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue!” Many conversion narratives include spates of melancholy—the dark night of the soul. And many secular stories of depression end with a spiritual awakening, as does Leo Tolstoy’s memoir, “My Confession,” about how a crisis of spirit became a crisis of faith, which he resolved by turning to Christianity. Today the connection between spiritual and psychological well-being is often passed over by psychologists and psychiatrists, who consider themselves a branch of secular medicine and science. For most of Lincoln’s lifetime, scientists assumed there was some relationship between mental and spiritual life.

Lincoln saw this relationship, too. As a young man, he identified religion as a balm for life’s afflictions. His close friend Joshua Speed remembered Lincoln saying that the most ambitious man could see every hope fail, but the earnest Christian could never fail, because fulfillment lay beyond life on earth. “When I knew him,” Speed said, “in early life . . . he had tried hard to be a believer, but his reason could not grasp and solve the great problem of redemption as taught.”

Continued on page 2: Lincoln's fiery trials »