Reverend Carey's sermon proclaimed what he recognized as the increasing Christian victory as he saw the Union coming closer to prevailing in the war, which he identified as a fight over the moral issue of slavery. This sermon printed by the Freeport Weekly Journal included the story of how Abraham Lincoln consecrated himself to Christ.
[Finding the witness of the conversion testimony from The Chronicle from November 3, 1864, which came from a Massachusetts Sunday School Teachers Convention, which you can read on the blog entry on February 18, 2019, I now think Reverend Carey learned of this witness from the reporting of that Massachusetts Sunday School Teachers Convention!]
After research to track down this particular Freeport Weekly Journal, I learned it was on microfilm at the Hewes Library at Monmouth College. A librarian there, Rose Dillard, copied it to paper for me. When it arrived at the Colorado Christian University library, I was ecstatic. Mrs. Dillard told me the microfilm is so old she could only make a sub-par copy. There is bleeding of some print, especially from some advertisement logos from the other newspaper page. And the print is super small. Yet the bottom line is that most of the print is readable. And the Christian testimony of Abraham Lincoln is embedded right in it. I was elated.
[When I first wrote this, I needed to question the integrity of Isaac Carey. Not so now, since record of an earlier source of the testimony, and probably the source used by Reverend Carey, has been found in The Chronicle from November 3, 1864. Yet I think information about Rev. Carey is still interesting.] In doing some research in the summer of 2009, I found some possible background information for this Presbyterian minister. I learned from the Beloit College Archives and Special Collections that Beloit had a professor named Isaac E. Carey during a time period that would fit this Isaac E. Carey. Now it could be a different person, since the name was common, but considering the middle initial fits, the evidence weighs towards the fact it is the same man. You can read this on Beloit College's website:
Franklin W. Fisk was the valedictorian of the Yale class of 1849, of
which the salutatorian was Timothy Dwight, now the president of Yale
University; and Joseph Hurlbut who was for two years an instructor at Beloit,
ranked with them, and Isaac E. Carey, who is also on the roll of our teachers,
was close to them.[1]
I consider it a privilege to have the opportunity to post this piece today on the 150th anniversary of this sermon, all thanks to one little piece of microfilm in the library at Monmouth College which I tracked down in the summer of 2009.
[This piece was edited on 2/18/19.]
Hunter Irvine
[1] Joseph Emerson, “The
Early Faculty of Beloit College,” Semi-Centennial
Anniversary Beloit College (1897; repr.,
Beloit College Archives and Special Collections), https://www.beloit.edu/archives/documents/archival_documents/early_faculty/ (accessed November 24, 2014).
