In October 1863, Lincoln prepared two versions of remarks to the Baltimore Presbyterian Synod. In the first, though not the second, he remarked: “I have often wished that I was a more devout man than I am.” His meaning is obscure. It could have been a statement of humility, refusing to claim for himself the mantle of faith, or it could just as likely have meant Lincoln was not devout. But two points are salient. One is that Lincoln's writings from his earliest days to his final speeches are shot through with Biblical references—from the “house divided” to, replying to a speech by the mayor of Philadelphia when he was en route to his inauguration, saying “may my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I ever prove false to [the teachings of the Declaration]”—and his meditations on divinity grew as the crisis of the Civil War mounted. The second is that he “wished” he was “more” devout, which is to say he felt some devotion and, significantly, wished to feel more. The presence of this devotion was evident the next month in the Gettysburg Address, in which Lincoln appeared extemporaneously to have added the qualification “under God” to the phrase “this nation.”
Several commentators, including David Lowenthal and Richard Brookhiser, have concluded that Lincoln may have been an atheist. Some of Lincoln's contemporaries suspected the same. In his 1846 campaign for Congress, he was compelled to deny being a “scoffer at religion.” He suggested he had repudiated his early belief in the Doctrine of Necessity, the belief that undermined free will by holding, as Lincoln put it, “that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control….” Lincoln said he could not support an “open enemy” of religion, if only because such cynicism would “insult the feelings, and injure the morals, of the community in which he may live.”
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