December 25, 1860 (Tuesday)

                                             Merry Christmas!  Joy and Peace to you....

"Was Lincoln one of those praying Americans?...he kept his counsel.  Certainly, he knew his bible...often, he dropped a full sentence from the Bible into a speech...for someone who refused to follow religious norms, he spent a lot of time trying to understand divine will.  Nowhere did he better assert the frailty of human wisdom than in a scrap of paper that has come to be known as the Meditation on Divine Will.  

The will of God prevails.  In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God.  Both may be, and one must be, wrong.  God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.  In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party--and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose.  I am almost ready to say that this is probably true--that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.  By his mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest.  Yet the contest began.  And having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day.  Yet the contest proceeds.

There is one final clue to his thoughts on that last Christmas before the war came.  At some point in the 1850's, Lincoln acquired a small devotional book, 'The Believer's Daily Treasure; or, Texts of Scripture, arranged for every day in the year.'  Lincoln must have valued the book, for he signed his name inside, which he did not often do.  On Dec. 25, the entry spoke to a reader preparing to lead an almost impossibly diverse nation through one fiery trial after another, toward apotheosis:

December 25

Saints Shall be Honored as Victors

I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no
man could number, of all nations, and
kindreds, and people, and tongues,
stood before the throne, and before the Lamb,
clothed with white robes, and palms in their
hands.  Rev. vii. 9

A mere four years later, General Sherman would write him, 'I beg to present you as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah.'  But that was a world away, and unfathomable miseries ahead."

(Christmas with Lincoln by Ted Widmer, New York Times narrative,
December 24, 2010)