On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln took office for the second time as President of the United.  States.  There was one new and striking feature in the simple ceremonial, the presence of a battalion of negro troops in his escort.  This time, though he would say no sanguine word, it cannot have been a long continuance of war that filled his thoughts, but the scarcely less difficult though far happier task of restoring the fabric of peaceful society in the conquered South.  His difficulties were now likely to come from the North no less than the South.  Tentative proposals which he had once or twice made suggest the spirit in which he would have felt his way along this new path.  In the Inaugural address which he now delivered that spirit is none the less perceptible because he spoke of the past.  The little speech at Gettysburg, with its singular perfection of form, and the “Second Inaugural” are the chief outstanding examples of his peculiar oratorical power.  The comparative rank of his oratory need not be discussed, for at any rate it was individual and unlike that of most other great speakers in history, though perhaps more like that of some great speeches in drama.

But there is a point of some moment in which the Second Inaugural does invite a comment, and a comment which should be quite explicit.  Probably no other speech of a modern statesman uses so unreservedly the language of intense religious feeling.  The occasion made it natural; neither the thought nor the words are in any way conventional; no sensible reader now could entertain a suspicion that the orator spoke to the heart of the people but did not speak from his own heart.  But an old Illinois attorney, who thought he knew the real Lincoln behind the President, might have wondered whether the real Lincoln spoke here.  For Lincoln’s religion, like everything else in his character, became, when he was famous, a stock subject of discussion among his old associates.  Many said “he was a Christian but did not know it.”  Some hinted, with an air of great sagacity, that “so far from his being a Christian or a religious man, the less said about it the better.”  In early manhood he broke away for ever from the scheme of Christian theology which was probably more or less common to the very various Churches which surrounded him.  He had avowed this sweeping denial with a freedom which pained some friends, perhaps rather by its rashness than by its impiety, and he was apt to regard the procedure of theologians as a blasphemous twisting of the words of Christ.  He rejected that belief in miracles and in the literally inspired accuracy of the Bible narrative which was no doubt held as fundamental by all these Churches.  He rejected no less any attempt to substitute for this foundation the belief in any priestly authority or in the authority of any formal and earthly society called the Church.  With this total independence of the expressed creeds of his neighbours he still