Hey… I had to read a biography of Lincoln for class. From this biography, he doesn’t seem to have been a particularly religious man, but I thought this passage was interesting:
Lincoln’s companions on the circuit also noticed his unpredictable moodiness. Henry Clay Whitney, who began traveling Judge Davis’ circuit after 1854, reported that Lincoln was afflicted by nightmares. One night, when they were sharing a room, Whitney woke to see his companion “sitting up in bed, his figure dimly visible by the ghostly firelight, and talking the wildest and most incoherent nonsense all to himself.”
“A stranger to Lincoln would have supposed he had suddenly gone insane,” Whitney added. Awakening suddenly, Lincoln jumped out of bed, “put some wood on the fire, and then sat in front of it, moodily, dejectedly, in a most sombre and gloomy spell, til the breakfast bell rang.”
Coming through the lens of a biographer who is working through the lens of a who-knows-how-biased onlooker, I just wonder what this scene was really about. Maybe he was just having a bad dream, but you never know. Anyhow, it grabbed my attention and I thought I’d share!
~ Bekah
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That makes me wonder if Mr Lincoln woke up that night speaking in tongues. Maybe not, but I know it is possible. A lot of people receive the Spirit and do not know what they have received. I have heard a number of stories over the years of people like that. Paul said that “we receive the Spirit through faith,” not by knowledge. For one example, while I was in the seminary, I spoke with a brother in Roanoke, VA, who met a man in the same town whose family had took him to a mental institution for examination after he began to speak in tongues while watching Ernest Angelely heal people on his television program.
It is going to be a sad day for those who grow weak and forsake the truth because they think so few people have the Spirit, when they see just how many people have actually received God’s Spirit.
jdc