Bishop John H. Vandenberg, Part Three: Abraham Lincoln and a Private Exploration For the Mind of God

 For Part One, Part Two, Part Four, or Part Five, make your choice and click away.

We move on today to the next cultural quote from Bishop John H. Vandenberg's, talk, "Turn Heavenward Our Eyes", and we come to another long-venerated figure in American history, Abraham Lincoln:

 

The Quote

'Abraham Lincoln said: 

“I can see how it might be possible 

for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, 

but I cannot conceive 

how he could look up into the heavens 

and say there is no God.”'

We as a people love our homespun Lincoln quotes - Abraham Lincoln is up there with George Washington in the love and devotion people of the United States feel for him, mostly.

 

 

 

 However, it turns out this quote is another example of telephone tag through the ages - someone writes something, thinks that Lincoln might have said it somewhere, and forever after Lincoln said it.

But he didn't. At least, not that I could determine. I could be wrong, but I couldn't find this one. 

 

What DID Lincoln say about God?

It's very clear, from both his public proclamations and his private devotions that Lincoln did believe in God, although he didn't adhere to any particular faith tradition himself. 

In that respect, he was not so much different from the young Joseph Smith, the prophet who founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Joseph himself kept aloof from the many religions proselytizing for membership during the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s - unable to determine for himself which one was right.

Until he prayed by himself to know, and he found out.

 

Out of all the references to God that Abraham Lincoln made, the most poignant to me comes from a tiny fragment, discovered in his personal papers after his death.

It's preserved now as his Meditation on the Divine Will, in a moment when Lincoln himself turned heavenward his thoughts - 

 

Washington, D.C.
September, 1862

 

The will of God prevails. 

In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. 

Both may be, and one must be, wrong. 

God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. 

 

In the present civil war 

it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party -- 

and yet the human instrumentalities, 

working just as they do, 

are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. 

 

I am almost ready to say that this is probably true -- 

that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. 

By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, 

He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. 

 

Yet the contest began. 

And, having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. 

Yet the contest proceeds.

I feel that internal struggle he must have felt as he wrote this, that wrestling to understand. 

I've felt something similar myself, in a much smaller venue that he worked in. Trying to figure out the mind of God can be a real puzzle sometimes, as small as we are in comparison.

Yet, God keeps reaching out to us, sending us just enough to keep us going from day to day.  A sunbeam. A flower. A smile. A thought we didn't have before. A little here and a little there. 

That searching for meaning that Abraham Lincoln did, that Joseph Smith did, is common to all, and it continues today and tomorrow and maybe forever. Who knows?