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‘‘Hail Fall of Fury! Reign of Reason, All Hail!’’ 193 of the secular ‘‘political religion’’ of his Lyceum Address than a firm move toward the ‘‘pure religion’’ of New Testament Christianity.47 As Lincoln begins the peroration of this address, he reveals that the Temperance revolution’s true greatness rests in the critical role it can play in guiding America to an idealized state of freedom. As Lincoln has just explained, the Temperance revolution helps break a different and ‘‘stronger bondage,’’ meaning the tyranny of alcohol addiction he considers both a ‘‘viler slavery’’ and ‘‘greater tyrant’’ than America suffered under King George. For Lincoln, alcohol addiction deprives one of a ‘‘moral freedom’’ no less significant than the ‘‘political freedom’’ established by the Revolution. This is not to suggest Lincoln would sacrifice political liberty for moral liberty alone. Both are essential; the one is ever a ‘‘noble ally’’ to the other. For Lincoln, ‘‘victory shall be complete’’ only when both the ‘‘moral freedom’’ of the Temperance revolution and the ‘‘political freedom’’ of the American Revolution are ‘‘nurtured to maturity .’’ Only then will Americans drink the ‘‘draughts of perfect liberty.’’ Of such a moment, Lincoln declaims, ‘‘Happy day, when all appetites controlled, all passions subdued, all matters subjected, mind, all conquering mind, shall live and move the monarch of the world. Glorious consummation! Hail fall of fury! Reign of Reason, all hail!’’ Certain Christian doctrines proclaim that true liberty is found in freedom from sin, or over immorality—the freedom to be good. Recall, this was Winthrop’s position in the ‘‘Little Speech’’ on liberty. But for Winthrop , such freedom was completely shaped and colored by a wide range of biblically revealed prohibitions and obligations. Lincoln’s position is different. First, his moral freedom is to work in tandem with a ‘‘civil liberty ’’ Winthrop would have found anathema in its nineteenth-century manifestation of broad democratic practice largely shorn of ecclesiastical direction. Plus, Lincoln’s own sense of moral freedom appears to be limited to a conquering of certain physical inclinations that are not wrong per se, but wrong so far as they overwhelm one thing, human rationality. In particular, he sees out-of-control ‘‘appetites’’ (like that for alcohol as discussed in the Temperance Address) and the unmanageable ‘‘passions’’ of ‘‘Fury’’ (as also mentioned here but discussed in more detail in the Lyceum Address) as conditions fundamentally at odds with the true ‘‘monarch of the world,’’ which is not the God of the Bible, but ‘‘mind, all conquering mind’’ and the ‘‘Reign of Reason.’’ Where human reason reigns and is worshipped (‘‘all hail’’), appetites will come under 194 Lincoln and the Refounding of America control, fury will fall, and a rich and complete fusion of moral and political freedom will prevail. Toward this grand end, Lincoln marshals a cultural force of religious dimensions. Though hardly a handmaiden to salvation and a life of righteousness before God, this force does employ biblical language, imagery, and ideals—especially ideals connected to love of neighbor: compassion over malice, communal attachment over individual isolation and apathy, justice tempered by mercy. But such language, imagery, and ideals are always in the service of human reason and to ends entirely earthly and civil. Just as in the Lyceum Address, Lincoln brings all this to a fine point in the Temperance Address by practically deifying America’s great earthly, civil hero of political freedom, constitutional order, and moral self-restraint: George Washington. Speaking on Washington’s birthday to a group bearing his name, Lincoln closes his address by saying: We are met to celebrate this day. Washington is the mightiest name of earth—long since the mightiest in the cause of civil liberty; still mightiest in moral reformation. On that name, a eulogy is expected. It cannot be. To add brightness to the sun, or glory to the name of Washington, is alike impossible. Let none attempt it. In solemn awe pronounce the name, and in its naked deathless splendor, leave it shining on. It does not appear that anytime after the Lyceum Address Lincoln actually ever again uttered the phrase ‘‘political religion.’’ But the Temperance Address clearly indicates that four years later, Lincoln is still practicing the concept, even if he has now expanded it to something not only aimed at political freedom but also a greater moral freedom without which political freedom cannot succeed. It is perhaps more accurate to say that what dominates Lincoln’s best early speeches is some notion of political or civil...

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