No element of Mr. Lincoln’s character, declared his colleague Henry Whitney, was so marked, obvious and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy. His law partner William Herndon said, His m...
Indeed, nothing less than the understanding of God’s earth was in flux. For centuries, the church had censored scientific ideas that were contrary to Christian doctrine. When censorship ended, new que...
I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly they must not I am sure they will not be broken...
How true it is that ‘God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,’ or in other words, that He renders the worst of human conditions tolerable, while He permits the best, to be nothing better than tolerable...
From a young age, Lincoln experienced psychological pain and distress, to the point that he believed himself temperamentally inclined to suffer to an unusual degree. He learned how to articulate his s...
Desiring a woman he was not free to approach, bound to a woman he had decided he didn’t love—facing all the while the crack-up of his political career—Lincoln now faced a direct challenge to the one a...
The suffering he had endured lent him clarity, discipline, and faith in hard times—perhaps especially in hard times.
As decisively as Lincoln left the rural life, he left the Baptist church as well. In New Salem he became widely known as an infidel. He rejected eternal damnation, innate sin, the divinity of Jesus, a...
The Perspectives of Psychiatry, Paul R. McHugh and Phillip R. Slavney identify four approaches to a suffering person.
Suffering was not a punishment from beyond or a malevolent infestation of the soul. Like the earth turning on its axis or energy passing through a conductor, it was a part of the natural world, to be...
Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them.
In particular, he named three kinds of troubles that could beset a person with a nervous temperament: poor weather, isolation or idleness, and stressful events.
You, she said, are the ugliest man I ever saw. Sadly, the man answered, Perhaps so, but I can’t help that. No, the woman allowed, but you might stay at home.
As late as 1820, families made three quarters of all goods—food, clothing, tools—for their own use.