"The discipline and character of the national forces should not suffer, nor the cause they defend be imperiled by the profanation of the day or name of the Most High. 'At this time of public distress'--adopting the words of Washington in 1776--'men may find enough to do in the service of God and their Country without abandoning themselves to vice and immorality.' The first general order issued by the Father of his Country, after the Declaration of Independence, indicates the spirit in which our institutions were founded and should ever be defended. 'The General hopes and trusts that every officer and man will endeavor to live and act as becomes a Christian soldier defending the dearest rights and liberties of his country.' "The date of this remarkable order leaves no possibility for the insinuation that it sprang from any political purposes or intention. Mr. Lincoln had just been re-elected by an overwhelming majority; his own personal popularity was unbounded; there was no temptation for hypocrisy or deceit. There is no explanation of the order except that it was the offspring of sincere convictions. "But if it may be said that this was, after all, an exoteric utterance springing from those relations of religion and good government which the wisest rulers have always recognized in their intercourse with the people, we will give another document of which nothing of the sort can be said. It is a paper which Mr. Lincoln wrote in September, 1862, while his mind was burdened with the weightiest question of his life,--the weightiest with which this country has had to grapple. Wearied with all the considerations of law and of expediency with which he had been struggling for two years, he retired within himself and tried to bring some order into his thoughts by rising above the wrangling of men and parties, and pondering the relations of human government to the Divine. In this frame of mind, absolutely detached from any earthly considerations, he wrote this meditation. It has never been published. It was not written to be seen of men. It was penned in the awful sincerity of a perfectly honest soul trying to bring himself into closer communion with its Maker. Meditation on the Divine will, September [30], 1862: