Newt on Lincoln

The context of this quote is a speech given recently by Newt Gingerich (view the speech here or view a transcript here; it runs at least 20 minutes but it is good stuff!) just after the announcement of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate, on the Left's Religious Bias. This piece on Abraham Lincoln is great.

And then maybe by middle school, we could have them actually read Lincoln’s second inaugural, which while you are here in town, if you get a chance, go to the Lincoln Memorial, stand there, and read out loud – it is only 703 words, the shortest – actually it is not the shortest. It is the second shortest inaugural address. March of 1865, Lincoln, who has been in the pressure cooker of the Civil War, has seen a war which killed 620,000 young Americans in a country of only 50-some million people. And in 703 words, Lincoln refers to God 14 times and quotes the Bible twice.

And I challenge any college in America and any high school in America to figure out how you are going to explain Abraham Lincoln without having people read that and understand this man read the Bible every afternoon in agony because he knew what he was doing was causing enormous human suffering. And he believed desperately that he had to find a justification and a cause which would bring the country together, and which to this day we remember from things like the Gettysburg Address. But read that sometime and ask yourself, how can you possibly describe the American Civil War and not encounter the real Abraham Lincoln?