disposition to neglect form, it is not strange that he said: "I have
never united myself to any church because I have found difficulty in
giving my assent, without mental reservation, to the long, complicated
statements of Christian doctrine which characterize their Articles of
Belief and Confessions of Faith. When any church will inscribe over its
altar, as its sole qualification for membership, the Savior's condensed
statement of the substance of both Law and Gospel, 'Thou shalt love the
Lord thy God, with all thy heart and with all thy soul, and with all thy
mind, and thy neighbor as thyself,' that church will I join with all my
heart and with all my soul."(5)

But it must not be supposed that his religion was mere ethics. It had
three cardinal possessions. The sense of God is through all his later
life. It appears incidentally in his state papers, clothed with language
which, in so deeply sincere a man, must be taken literally. He believed
in prayer, in the reality of communion with the Divine. His third
article was immortality.

At Washington, Lincoln was a regular attendant, though not a
communicant, of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. With the
Pastor, the Reverend P. D. Gurley, he formed a close friendship. Many
hours they passed in intimate talk upon religious subjects, especially
upon the question of immortality.(6) To another pious visitor he said
earnestly, "I hope I am a Christian."(7) Could anything but the most
secure faith have written this "Meditation on the Divine Will" which he
set down in the autumn of 1862 for no eye but his own: "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 can not 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."(8)

His religion flowered in his later temper. It did no