"Religion is always a kind of poetry. Faith is kin to imagination; both faith and imagination look upon the unseen and refuse to base life merely upon the senses or upon mathematical formularies like the law of the inverse squares. This poetry is often quite dissociated from philosophy, or is even inconsistent with the philosophy which the individual entertains. But Mr. Lincoln's early philosophy prepared for his later religious experience. Mr. Herndon reports him as saying: 'There are no accidents in my philosophy. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future. All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the Infinite to the finite.' With this philosophy of fatalism was a profound faith in justice, a profound reverence for it, and an uncompromising obedience to it. At first he did not put this philosophy and this faith together. He who does put them together, that is, he who infuses this philosophy in an overruling cause with this faith, which is a 'kind of poetry,' in the supremacy of righteousness, comes to a faith in a righteous God, who deserves our reverence, not because he is great, but because he is good. "When Abraham Lincoln began to feel the burden of the nation resting upon him, and felt it too great a burden for him to carry unaided, he wanted the sympathy of all men and women in the country who with him believed in a Power directing the course of human history greater than the actors in it, and who also believed in eternal justice; and he asked their prayers. As the conflict went on and the burden grew heavier and heavier, his faith in righteousness more and more infused his belief in a superhuman power and transformed it into a belief in a righteous God; but it was, till the last, a belief in a God of justice rather than a Christ of pity, even as it phrased itself in that most religious utterance of his life, his second inaugural: 'Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."'