For July 29th, the entry is a verse from the Gospel according to Saint John, chapter 15, verse 11. “These things I have spoken unto you, that my joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full.”

This quotation is found in “The Believer’s Daily Treasure; or Texts of Scripture arranged for every day in the year.”  This little book was published in 1852 by the Religious Tract Society of London. Later the book came to be known as “Lincoln’s Devotional”  and appeared in print under that title in 1957.

The poet Carl Sandburg,  who also has been the  most popular biographer of Abraham Lincoln, wrote an introduction to the devotional. In it he acknowledges that no one knows the circumstances of Lincoln receiving the book. He speculates that it may have been a gift from his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, to whom Lincoln himself had given a large family Bible.

On the inside cover,”  using his characteristic abbreviation, he signed his name “A. Lincoln.  About this action, Sandburg writes: “From this we can surmise that either the volume itself or the person who presented it to him was held in deep regard, for throughout his life Lincoln was sparing in the number of books in which he wrote his name.”

In addition to verses from the Bible, each day’s entry adds verses from poems or hymns. For July 29th, these lines go as follows:

Art thou not mine, my living Lord?
And can my hope, my comfort die,
Fix’d on thine everlasting word-
The word that built the earth and sky.

Abraham Lincoln’s faith has drawn much discussion from biographers and critics through the years. It is clear that he never formally joined a church. However, he turned to religion for consolation, especially after the death of his two sons. After Eddie’s death in 1850, Sandburg tells us, Lincoln became friendly with the pastor of the Presbyterian church in Springfield, Illinois, and Mrs. Lincoln joined that church.

After 1860, when his son Willie died in the White House, Lincoln used God’s name more frequently. According to David Herbert Donald’s1995 biography, “Before 1860 Lincoln rarely invoked the deity in his letters or speeches, but after he began to feel the burdens of the presidency, he frequently asked for God’s aid.”

Even then he did not join a church, though the Lincolns rented a pew in the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington. About becoming a member he is reported to have said:  “When any church will inscribe over its altars, as its sole qualification for membership, the Savior’s condensed statement 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 soul.’”

Despite being unchurched, Lincoln, as is well known, was a man of deep spirituality. He did not accept doctrine or creed but he had drawn into himself the language of the Bible and this from boyhood on. In his speeches, he often used biblical words and phrases as, for instance, in his famous statement that “a house divided cannot stand.” And he used to say, “Judge not, that ye not be judged.”

In a letter to Mrs. Lydia Bixby, who was thought to have lost five sons (actually only two) in the war between the states, Lincoln memorably expressed both his faith in God and lack of certitude about an afterlife in heaven. “I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement,”  he wrote, “and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.”

Going back to the Devotional then, one can imagine Lincoln reading its verses, contemplating them, and drawing inspiration from them. Discovery of the book that had been lost for many years provides further support for seeing Lincoln as suffused with the biblical culture. Carl Sandburg summarizes the matter: “This daily devotional, unseen for many years, takes us no farther toward placing Lincoln within creed or denomination; but it is new testimony that he was a man of profound faith.”

Richard Griffin