15,000 books have been written about Abraham Lincoln, born this day in 1809. Time tempts us to forget how raw partisan feelings were when he was assassinated on April 15, 1865.
Historian Jill Lepore reviews “Mourning Lincoln,” a new work by Martha Hodes of New York University. “Reading thousands of diaries and letters written by ordinary Americans in the days and weeks after Lincoln’s death, she (Hodes) finds little evidence of national unity in the face of tragedy; instead, she finds shock, jubilation, confusion and, above all, disagreement. In Washington, secessionists draped their houses in black crepe, not out of grief over Lincoln’s death, but out of fear. ‘Hurrah!’ one 17-year-old South Carolina girl wrote in her diary. ‘Old Abe Lincoln has been assassinated!’ In Virginia, a 5- or 6-year-old freed boy asked, when he heard the news, ‘Have I got to go back to massas?’” (New York Times, February 8; Book Review)
In the same way non-historians can romanticize the past, Christians can be naïve to the cost of following Jesus in an alluring world of sinful, self-willed people. “When tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. And others…hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful” (Mark 4:17-19).
“Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Ecclesiastes 12:12). Indeed, historians recall us to the weary fact that the soul of humanity isn’t evolving into something better. We’re still so sinful. The One Book calls us to carry the cross of the Suffering Servant into the world the way it really is on this side of eternity.
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