Lincoln was still poor. The debts contracted in New Salem were not yet cleared away. But his political position as a local leader in the Whig Party was now well established. A change in law partners had created the firm of Logan and Lincoln (1841), the senior member of which was one of the most distinguished law yers of the State. In 1843 the junior member felt he had a chance for Congress. The failure of his effort to secure the nomi nation was explained in a letter which he wrote soon after : "There was, too, the strangest combination of church influence against me. . . . It was everywhere contended that no Christian ought to go for me because I belonged to no church, was suspected of being a deist, and had talked about fighting a duel." Attitude to Religion.—The report that he was a deist may be taken as evidence that he had talked rashly upon the subject of religion or, more exactly, upon sceptism. His rashness of speech politically in these early years appears to have been par alleled in other connections. On Washington's birthday, 1842, he had made an address before the Washingtonian Temperance So ciety which, while it expressed the most unconditional disapproval of intemperance, held a brief for sympathy with the drunkard as an individual, for putting aside all condescension with regard to him. Views of this sort were not likely to be popular in a frontier community where one was expected to be heartily one thing or another. But doubtless the real cause of his momentary unpopu larity lay in sceptical books that had fallen into his hands, par ticularly Volney's Ruins of Time, about which he appears to have talked too freely for his own good. That these books really affected him may be doubted. Far more plausible is the assump tion that the year 1843 marks a general change in his attitude to the rest of the world, and that just as he put a stop to his political sarcasm so also he pulled himself together and put aside a corre sponding early impulse for religious banter.
It is hard to believe that Lincoln was at any time a genuine sceptic. His temper was essentially religious. The letters to Speed give clear evidence of a mood of faith which reappeared long afterward in his Fast Day Proclamations and in certain frag ments that are among his most extraordinary writings. His pecu liar mysticism would not let him escape from that community of wonder which made all the frontier people, if they thought at all about unseen things, one spiritual kindred. His belief in dreams is again in point. When he called himself superstitious he prob ably meant to acknowledge belief in the supernatural but at the same time to evade all attempt to define his belief. Here is one of his main characteristics. He both is and is not of the world that produced him. So far as wonder, awe, the sense of mystery go, he is one with his mother, with strange and vehement revival ists who reamed the frontier country and gave ghostly ministra tion to souls athirst for ecstasy. But on all points of dogma he has nothing in common with them. While still a boy he is re ported to have made mock of revivals. Certain it is that the fury, the vindicative theology, the hell-fire creed of those religious primitives deeply offended him. With such theology and such ethics he stood in strong contrast through his amazing power to be, at the same time, passionless in temper while unfaltering in conviction. His religious attitude was put into words in the latter
part of his life when he said, "I have never united myself to any church because I have found difficulty in giving my assent, with out mental reservations, 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 Master's con densed 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 neighbour as thyself' that church will I join with all my heart and with all my soul." It must not be supposed that the change about 1843 was obvi ous and unconditional. It was merely a facing in a new direction.
Thereafter sarcasm and rash banter—the impulse to play with other men's ideas—steadily ebb, though once in a while they sud denly flood back, as in some of the savage passages of the de bates with Douglas in 1858. As a party speaker and debater Lin coln had formed bad mental habits, of which he may not have been aware, which did not wholly disappear until many years had passed. For one thing the humour in his political speeches was crude to a degree. It was the conventional humour of his time. Almost the only deliberate instance that has survived is a speech which was made when at last he had succeeded in getting into Congress. His aim was to ridicule Lewis Cass; the way he did it, like so much American humour of that day, suggests Dickens at his worst.
In Congress, where he served a single term, 1847-49, Lincoln was a staunch party man doing the routine business of the Whig organization with conventional faithfulness. Like all the rest of the Whigs, he tried to carry water on both shoulders with regard to the Mexican War, voting army supplies, posing as the soldiers' friend, but denouncing the president for having forced them into a position where they could not patriotically do anything else. Certain resolutions introduced by Lincoln and dubbed "the spot resolutions" obtained notoriety. They called upon the president to indicate the precise spot where previous to his declaration of war American blood had been shed on Mexican soil. Lincoln's one congressional action that revealed an individual point of view was a bill for emancipating slaves in the District of Colum bia. Long since he had become a hater of slavery. But he had had no toleration for the Abolitionists. As far back as 1837, at the end of a session of the legislature when all its serious business was out of the way, he had introduced resolutions asserting "that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy; but that the promulgation of abolition doctrines tends rather to increase than to abate its evils"; asserting also that Congress had power to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, but "that the power ought not to be exercised unless at the re quest of the people of the District." During 12 years he had held to this serene and unemotional attitude while the storm of Abolition swept over the country, and in 1849 he restated his views of 1837. His bill provided for emancipation in the District with consent of the voters and with compensation to the owners.