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.

Abraham Lincoln

The Will of God Prevails

Topic: Justice, Vision, & Leadership

In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either part…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.

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was an American statesman and lawyer who served as the 16th President of the United States from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. Wikipedia
Born: February 12, 1809, Hodgenville, KY
Height: 6′ 4″
Assassinated: April 15, 1865, Petersen House, Washington, D.C.

(1809-1865) American Civil Religion
Meditation on the Divine Will

Lincoln, Abraham. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Edited by Roy P. Basler, University Press Rutgers, 1955, [President Abraham Lincoln, Meditation on the Divine Will, Washington, D.C., September 2, 1862].

Abraham Lincoln

Theme: A Vision of America

John Hay, Abraham Lincoln’s Meditation on the Divine Will

This fragment was found and preserved by John Hay, one of President Lincoln’s White House secretaries, who said it was “not written to be seen of men.” Some of the thoughts expressed here, written after discouraging days of personal sorrow and military defeats, also appear in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address of 1865. Hay said that in this writing:

“Mr. Lincoln admits us into the most secret recesses of his soul… Perplexed and afflicted beyond the power of human help, by the disasters of war, the wrangling of parties, and the inexorable and constraining logic of his own mind, he shut out the world one day, and tried to put into form his double sense of responsibility to human duty and Divine Power; and this was the result. It shows the awful sincerity of a perfectly honest soul, trying to bring itself into closer communion with its Maker.”

–John Hay [Lincoln’s private meditation on the Divine Will, September 2, 1862].

Russell Kirk, Abraham Lincoln’s Respect for Providential Order

“In Lincoln there was no presumption; much, he knew, must be left to Providence. To an enthusiastic clergyman who assured him that God was on “our side,” Lincoln replied with a stern dignity that he knew nothing of the sort; he only hoped that “we might be on His.” Man’s order, Lincoln was saying, is subordinate to a providential order…”

–Russell Kirk, [The Roots of American Order, (Chapter XII)] p. 456.

An Additional Abraham Lincoln Quote

“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.

It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.”

―Lincoln, Abraham. “Proclamation 97—Appointing a Day of National Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer.” 30 Mar. 1863, The American Presidency Project, edited by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/203143. [Accessed 11/22/23.]

The Will of God Prevails

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