Brilliant.
Best commentary on Lincoln I have ever read.
Thanks for posting this.
Excellent essay. I remember reading that analysis of Lincoln’s religion in First Things, and that was well worth reading too.
My only quibble is that Spengler is somewhat too facile in identifying Lincoln’s view of Divine Providence as Calvinist. Any devout Catholic or Protestant would agree that God works in mysterious ways, and that Divine Providence is not something that anyone can anticipate. Nothing specifically Calvinist about that.
ph
....shows that it is willfully fuzzy-minded to portray Lincoln as the political equivalent of Lil' Abner's Shmoo, which tasted like whatever one wanted it to eat.
If Lincoln could come to the future and visit us for a week and watch Maxine Waters and her CBC, Obama and his mess, Affirmative action, Rap Music, visit Harlem ,Watts ,and Anacostia, and Food Stamps, he would go back and join the Confederacy.
They did not want to be a Chosen People held accountable for their transgressions. Instead they wanted a reticent God who withheld his wrath while they set out to make the world amenable to their own purposes.
Two massive world wars, plus many other great and fearsome wars and tragedies later we should have learned our lesson. God is the center and we must do His bidding or the price has and will be paid in great pain, sorrow and bloodshed. Now it's looks like the price is heading towards gruesome slavery in a communistic style dictatorship. I wonder if there is still time to repent; possibly a sliver.
Good post.
You can’t understand Lincoln or the Civil War itself without understanding the religious milieu from which they sprang.
Its sometimes worthwhile to remember that the GOP itself was born when Christians abandoned the Whigs out of frustration with the Whig Party’s unwillingness to take a stand against slavery. When they did so, the Whigs vanished.
And a decade later slavery was done.
Just something for the GOP itself to remember. The day Christians abandon it, it will likewise vanish.
His other essays about Lincoln are quite good as well
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FB10Aa03.html
February 12 is the birthday of a grim-handed killer who inflicted more casualties on his foes than anything the Russians did in Chechnya. Of course I refer to Abraham Lincoln, whom the Americans have reinvented as a kindly national paterfamilias. War ranks among the strangest forms of willful self-destruction, and America’s Civil War of 1861-65 in turn ranks among the strangest of wars. Three-quarters of Southern military age men served in the Confederate ranks, and of these almost 40 percent fell. What prompted these men to cast away their lives with such abandon, and what motivated their enemies to slaughter them?