Wisdom for the Ages

I read the most amazing article in the Atlantic Magazine entitled Lincoln's Great Depression. The article chronicled Lincoln's life long fight living with clinical depression (which wasn't recognized at the time as as something clinical, just personal melancholy). That depression, if he were alive today, would have been treated as a "character issue" in the political reality we live in. The article asserts that his condition was in fact a profound character issue. It was the thing that allowed him to save our nation and preserve it's soul. Here is a quote from the article's author Joshua Wolf Shenk. "'Everything came to him in its precise shape and color,' Lincoln's law partner observed. Such keen vision brought Lincoln pain; being able to look troubling reality straight in the eye also proved a great strength"

The part of the article that stood out to me so much was towards the end. Shenk looked at how Lincoln's theology was influenced by his outlook on life.

"Lincoln's peculiar vision of the sacred led him to defy the conventions of his day. For centuries settlers in the New World had assured themselves that they were special in God's eyes. They were a "City upon a Hill," in John Winthrop's phrase, decidedly chosen,. like the Israelites of old. Lincoln turned this on its head when he said, "I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle." the country, Lincoln said. was almost chosen. Out of that phrase emerged a crucial strain of Lincoln's thinking. As others invoked the favor of God in both the North and the South, Lincoln opened a space between mortal works and divine intention. Among his papers, after his death, his secretaries found this undated statement."

"Meditation on the 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.

It's Lincoln's wisdom that is stunning to me, both in his insight and how applicable his words are today in the political and theological worlds we live in.