It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged.... The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses! For it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the Providence of God, must needs come, but which having continued through His appointed time, He now will remove and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those Divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him. Fondly do we hope--perfectly 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 and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still must it be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether." With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.--Second Inaugural, March 4, 1865. _Complete Works_, II, 657. No one of the foregoing quotations is taken from a private conversation, nor copied from an unauthorized source. Some very pleasing selections might have been made from reasonably well-accredited sources, but all of the foregoing selections, without any exception, are taken from the authentic writings and addresses of Lincoln as compiled, edited, and authenticated by his private secretaries, John G. Nicolay and John Hay. We might go much farther and could find a considerable body of additional material, but this is sufficient and more than sufficient for our purpose. In these utterances may be found something of the determinism that was hammered into Lincoln by the early Baptist preachers and riveted by James Smith, along with some of the humanitarianism of Parker and Channing, and much which lay unstratified in Lincoln's own mind but flowed spontaneously from his pen or dropped from his lips because it was native to his thinking and had come to be a component part of his life. Anyone who cares to do so may piece these utterances together and test his success in making a creed out of them. They lend themselves somewhat readily to such an arrangement.