PopeWatch has been reading a chapter from the Old Testament and a chapter from the New since December 25, 1970. Another fan of the Bible (language advisory):
The spiritual benefits of reading the Bible are obvious. The intellectual feast of reading these texts composed over a thousand years is remarkable. No one can consider themselves educated without becoming familiar with the Book of Books.
“As I entered the room, near night, he was sitting near a window intently reading his Bible,” Speed recalled. Even though Lincoln often mined the scriptures for literary references in his speeches and writing, he never officially joined a church and Speed had never known him to be particularly devout. “He was a skeptic,” Speed wrote. “He had tried hard to be a believer, but his reason could not grasp and solve the great problem of redemption as taught.” On this occasion, however, Lincoln turned the pages of the Bible slowly, as if to wring the last drop of wisdom and solace out of each passage.
Speed was uncertain what to make of Lincoln’s reverie, and so he said half-flippantly: “I am glad to see you so profitably engaged.” There was nothing at all flippant in Lincoln’s reply. “Yes,” he told his old friend. “I am profitably engaged.”
“Well,” said Speed, “if you have recovered from your skepticism, I am sorry to say that I have not.” Lincoln’s response was resolute. “Looking me earnestly in the face, and placing his hand on my shoulder, he said, ‘You are wrong, Speed. Take all of this book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier and better man.”
Great story about Lincoln.
Speaking which, I just acquired an affordable version of Burlingame’s Lincoln in hardcover. Your thoughts?
So far, I like the rich amount of data, but he leans harder on psychology than I generally prefer, even of some of the insights are helpful.
I read both his volumes. It was exhaustive and I appreciated his scholarship, but it didn’t give me a sense of the man as Sandburg did for example. I will give him credit for uncovering factoids about Lincoln that were new to me. Lincoln is a hard man to see just from the cold record. He almost never wrote or spoke about himself and there are parts of his life, his relationship with Ann Rutledge for example, that are still mysterious. Where historians fail, time to call on poets:
Lincoln, six feet one in his stocking feet,
The lank man, knotty and tough as a hickory rail,
Whose hands were always too big for white-kid gloves,
Whose wit was a coonskin sack of dry, tall tales,
Whose weathered face was homely as a plowed field–
Abraham Lincoln, who padded up and down
The sacred White House in nightshirt and carpet-slippers,
And yet could strike young hero-worshipping Hay
As dignified past any neat, balanced, fine
Plutarchan sentences carved in a Latin bronze;
The low clown out of the prairies, the ape-buffoon,
The small-town lawyer, the crude small-time politician,
State-character but comparative failure at forty
In spite of ambition enough for twenty Caesars,
Honesty rare as a man without self-pity,
Kindness as large and plain as a prairie wind,
And a self-confidence like an iron bar:
This Lincoln, President now by the grace of luck,
Disunion, politics, Douglas and a few speeches
Which make the monumental booming of Webster
Sound empty as the belly of a burst drum,
Lincoln shambled in to the Cabinet meeting
And sat, ungainly and awkward. Seated so
He did not seem so tall nor quite so strange
Though he was strange enough. His new broadcloth suit
Felt tight and formal across his big shoulders still
And his new shiny top-hat was not yet battered
To the bulging shape of the old familiar hat
He’d worn at Springfield, stuffed with its hoard of papers.
He was pretty tired. All week the office-seekers
Had plagued him as the flies in fly-time plague
A gaunt-headed, patient horse. The children weren’t well
And Mollie was worried about them so sharp with her tongue.
But he knew Mollie and tried to let it go by.
Men tracked dirt in the house and women liked carpets.
Each had a piece of the right, that was all most people could
stand.
Look at his Cabinet here. There were Seward and Chase,
Both of them good men, couldn’t afford to lose them,
But Chase hates Seward like poison and Seward hates Chase
And both of ’em think they ought to be President
Instead of me. When Seward wrote me that letter
The other day, he practically told me so.
I suppose a man who was touchy about his pride
Would send them both to the dickens when he found out,
But I can’t do that as long as they do their work.
The Union’s too big a horse to keep changing the saddle
Each time it pinches you. As long as you’re sure
The saddle fits, you’re bound to put up with the pinches
And not keep fussing the horse.
When I was a boy
I remember figuring out when I went to town
That if I had just one pumpkin to bump in a sack
It was hard to carry, but once you could get two pumpkins,
One in each end of the sack, it balanced things up.
Seward and Chase’ll do for my pair of pumpkins.
And as for me–if anyone else comes by
Who shows me that he can manage this job of mine
Better than I can–well, he can have the job.
It’s harder sweating than driving six cross mules,
But I haven’t run into that other fellow yet
And till or supposing I meet him, the job’s my job
And nobody else’s.
Seward and Chase don’t know that.
They’ll learn it, in time.
Wonder how Jefferson Davis
Feels, down there in Montgomery, about Sumter.
He must be thinking pretty hard and fast,
For he’s an able man, no doubt of that.
We were born less than forty miles apart,
Less than a year apart–he got the start
Of me in age, and raising too, I guess,
In fact, from all you hear about the man,
If you set out to pick one of us two
For President, by birth and folks and schooling,
General raising, training up in office,
I guess you’d pick him, nine times out of ten
And yet, somehow, I’ve got to last him out.
These thoughts passed through the mind in a moment’s flash,
Then that mind turned to business.
It was the calling
Of seventy-five thousand volunteers.