"I made a solemn vow before God, that if General Lee was driven back from Pennsylvania, I would crown the result by the declaration of freedom for the slaves."--_Six Months in the White House_, pp. 89, 90.
In this threefold attestation we have irrefutable testimony that the determining motive of President Lincoln in his issue of the Emancipation Proclamation was the keeping of his solemn covenant with God.
It is all but impossible to exaggerate the significance of this incident. The essential fact is as fully proved as human testimony can possibly prove a fact. When we remember the extreme reticence of Abraham Lincoln on all such matters, and the fact of which he must have been painfully conscious that his Cabinet was not very favorably disposed toward the thing that he proposed to do, his quiet, outspoken, and repeated declaration that he had promised this thing to God is sufficient in itself to settle forever the essentially religious character of Abraham Lincoln. If we had no other word from his lips touching on the subject of religion but this one, we should be assured of his unfaltering belief in God, in a profound sense of his own personal responsibility to God, in prayer, and a personal relation with God.
This was no platitude uttered to meet the expectation of the religious people of the United States; it was no evasive generality intended to fit whatever religious desire might lie in the minds of those who heard him. It was no play to the gallery; it was no masquerade; every motive of pretense or hypocrisy or duplicity was absent. It was the sincere expression of the abiding faith of Abraham Lincoln in God, and prayer, and duty.
Lincoln was a believer in the immortality of the soul.[71] Herndon affirms this and declares that any attempt to deny it would imply that Lincoln was a dishonest man. He believed in the preservation of identity beyond the grave so that we shall be conscious of our own identity and be able to recognize our loved ones.
He believed in future punishment, but not in endless punishment. Punishment seemed to him so inevitable a part of an inexorable divine law that he sometimes objected to the preaching of the doctrine of forgiveness as being subversive of the fact of law, which he held must continue its sway in this world and in every world; but in eternal punishment he did not believe. His old neighbors in New Salem, his friends in Springfield, and those who knew him in Washington agree in this. We have already quoted from the letter of Isaac Cogdal to Mr. B. F. Irwin, April 10, 1874, who tells of a conversation he had with Mr. Lincoln in the latter's office in Springfield about 1859, concerning Mr. Lincoln's religious faith. Mr. Herndon was present. He says: