Yesterday was “Presidents Day” and I‘m still old enough to remember that before there was a generic day to honor our former Commanders in Chief, America celebrated Abraham Lincoln‘s birthday on February 12th and George Washington‘s ten days later with school cancelled on both dates. In 2009, on the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, Newsweek Magazine asked a number of leading scholars whom they considered to be more important to history- Lincoln or Charles Darwin, a man who interestingly enough was born on the very same day of the very same year as the 16th President. To my surprise, they concluded that Lincoln was. More books have been written about Abraham Lincoln than any other historical figure with the exception of Jesus Christ- close to 20,000 by common estimate. In fact, you might say that interest in him has never been higher as evidenced by all the television specials about him and the incredible popularity of the biopic by Steven Spielberg. Last week, another "Best Presidents" list was released by a group of prominent historians and to nobody‘s surprise, Lincoln's name reigned at the top of that list once again.

Lincoln has always been my personal hero, the one individual in all of American history I would most love to have dinner with if given the opportunity. When I was twelve years old, I could already appreciate the significance of this man. On the evening of April 14, 1965, the very last thing I thought about before turning out the lights and going to sleep was how Lincoln had been assassinated exactly 100 years ago that night by John Wilkes Booth. A couple of summers ago, I fulfilled a life-long dream when Rose and I traveled to Springfield, Illinois and enjoyed a couple of days exploring the town that Lincoln spent so many years in. We visited the Old State Capitol building where he served and later lay in state, walked through the rooms where he and his partner - William Herndon - had their law office, toured the house that he and his family lived in for seventeen years before leaving for Washington, and of course took in the new Lincoln Presidential Center- a state of the art museum with holographic figures and lots of Lincoln memorabilia on display. The high point of the trip, however, was the visit to his tomb at the local cemetery. The closest I have ever had to an experience like that was over thirty years ago when I visited the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem which many have speculated was the site where Christ was laid following his crucifixion. Our visit to Springfield was as close to a spiritual pilgrimage as any I have ever had.

Lincoln was never a Christian in the conventional sense, that is, as you and I may think of ourselves. He was never baptized, was never a member of any church, rarely, if ever, talked about Jesus Christ, and held most Christian denominations with all their creeds and dogmas with disdain. However, he had great respect for the Bible, one of the few books his parents possessed. Although he frequently attended the same Presbyterian churches in Springfield and in Washington that his wife was a member of, he is reported to have 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 altars 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 all my soul.

There seems to be little doubt that Lincoln was a believer. As he dealt with the deaths of his two sons and the pressure of the Presidency amid the Civil War, his understanding of how God works in the affairs of the world drove him to a deeper contemplation of God and of God's will. His writings and speeches were marinated in the scriptures and quoted extensively. While ministers on both sides of the conflict invoked the name of Jehovah to justify their own cause, Lincoln eventually rejected the idea of turning God into some kind of a tribal deity or religious prop to galvanize popular support and promise victory. Instead, he discovered great mystery insofar as the will of God was concerned and began to see that divine Providence ultimately worked its will through human tragedy. Instead of a domesticated deity, a kind of “house god” who is clearly on the side of America and the Union forces, he began to see God as the ruler of ALL nations, that God was never at the beck and call of any one people but rather the nation at GOD'S. When a minister from the North told the President he “hoped the Lord is on our side,” Lincoln responded, “I am not at all concerned about that...But it is my constant anxiety that I and this nation should be on the LORD‘S side.” Oh if that were only a prayer and a sentiment that all Presidents, in fact, ALL people of ALL faiths shared for if they did, there would undoubtedly be far fewer wars and far fewer persons in the world wanting to kill in the name of god or trying to impose their deity‘s will--which is actually their OWN will--upon everyone else!