CHAPTER VI
THE CHRISTIAN
Like Moses, Luther, and Washington, Lincoln became a great leader of men only when he surrendered himself to God. His mother, Nancy Hanks, was a Christian woman. Of her he said: "I remember her prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life."
As a boy he read his Bible and attended church when he could. In those days he learned the hymns which were his favorites throughout life, "Am I a Soldier of the Cross?" and "There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood." During his early manhood he drifted into a temporary indifference toward religious matters. Yet even through this time he read and reread his Bible, and his later life showed what it did for him.
Take all of this book upon reason that you can and the balance on faith and you will live and die a happier man.
Lincoln wrote to a skeptical friend.
Another great war president of our own time has borne testimony about this Book of books, which Lincoln would have echoed in the last years of his life:
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