With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.--Second Inaugural, March 4, 1865. _Complete Works_, II, 657.
No one of the foregoing quotations is taken from a private conversation, nor copied from an unauthorized source. Some very pleasing selections might have been made from reasonably well-accredited sources, but all of the foregoing selections, without any exception, are taken from the authentic writings and addresses of Lincoln as compiled, edited, and authenticated by his private secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay.
We might go much farther and could find a considerable body of additional material, but this is sufficient and more than sufficient for our purpose. In these utterances may be found something of the determinism that was hammered into Lincoln by the early Baptist preachers and riveted by James Smith, along with some of the humanitarianism of Parker and Channing, and much which lay unstratified in Lincoln's own mind but flowed spontaneously from his pen or dropped from his lips because it was native to his thinking and had come to be a component part of his life. Anyone who cares to do so may piece these utterances together and test his success in making a creed out of them. They lend themselves somewhat readily to such an arrangement.
In the following arrangement no liberties have been taken except to change the past tense to the present, or the plural to the singular, and to add connectives, and preface the words "I believe." Except for changes such as these, which in no way modify the sense or natural force of the utterances, the creed which follows is wholly in the words of Abraham Lincoln. A very little tampering with the text would have made smoother reading, but this is not necessary. It has the simplicity and the rugged honesty of the man who said these words.
THE CREED OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN HIS OWN WORDS
I believe in God, the Almighty Ruler of Nations, our great and good and merciful Maker, our Father in Heaven, who notes the fall of a sparrow, and numbers the hairs of our heads.
I believe in His eternal truth and justice.
I recognize the sublime truth announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history that those nations only are blest whose God is the Lord.