“As I see it, that idee grew in him. You know how he hated war. Seemed as if he couldn’t stand it sometimes, but there ain’t no doubt that more and more he looked at it as God’s doin’--His way of punishin’ men for their sin in allowin’ slavery. He said that more’n once to the country. Remember what he wrote in his call for a fast-day in the spring of ’63? No? Well, I’ve got it here--just let me read it to you.” Billy rose, and after lingering long enough at the window to remark that the “storm wa’n’t lettin’ up any,” went to a scratched and worn desk, a companion piece to “Mr. Lincoln’s chair,” and took from the drawer where he kept his precious relics a bundle of faded yellow newspapers and selected a copy of the New York _Tribune_ of March 31, 1863. “Now you listen,” said Billy, “and see if I ain’t right that his idee when he talked to Newt had takin’ hold of him deep.” So Billy read sonorously the sentences which seemed to him to demonstrate his point: “‘Insomuch as we know that by His divine law nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world, may we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be but a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people.’ “Isn’t that just what he said to Newt Bateman,” Billy stopped long enough to remark. “‘We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven. We have been preserved, these many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth, and power as no other nation has ever grown; but we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. “‘It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the offended Power, to confess our national sins, and to pray for clemency and forgiveness.’ * * * * * “The longer the war went on, the more and more sure he was that God was workin’ out something, and hard as it was for him, the more and more reconciled he got to God’s Government. Seems to me that’s clear from what he said in his last Inaugural. You remember: