In another negative way his basal part asserted itself.  Just as in all his official relations he was careless of ritual, so in religion he was not drawn to its ritualistic forms.  Again, the forest temper surviving, changed, into such different conditions!  Real and subtle as is the ritualistic element, not only in religion but in life generally, one may doubt whether it counts for much among those who have been formed mainly by the influences of nature.  It implies more distance between the emotion and its source, more need of stimulus to arouse and organize emotion, than the children of the forest are apt to be aware of.  To invoke a philosophical distinction, illumination rather than ritualism, the tense but variable concentration on a result, not the ordered mode of an approach, is what distinguishes such characters as Lincoln.  It was this that made him careless &f form in all the departments of life.  It was one reason why McClellan, born ritualist of the pomp of war, could never overcome a certain dislike, or at least a doubt, of him.

Putting together his habit of thinking only in essentials and his predisposition to neglect form, it is not strange that he 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 altar, 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 with all my soul."(5)

But it must not be supposed that his religion was mere ethics.  It had three cardinal possessions.  The sense of God is through all his later life.  It appears incidentally in his state papers, clothed with language which, in so deeply sincere a man, must be taken literally.  He believed in prayer, in the reality of communion with the Divine.  His third article was immortality.

At Washington, Lincoln was a regular attendant, though not a communicant, of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church.  With the Pastor, the Reverend P. D. Gurley, he formed a close friendship.  Many hours they passed in intimate talk upon religious subjects, especially upon the question of immortality.(6) To another pious visitor he said earnestly, “I hope I am a Christian."(7) Could anything but the most secure faith have written this “Meditation on the Divine Will” which he set down in the autumn of 1862 for no eye but his own:  “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 can not be for and against the same thing at the same time.  In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose