Excerpts from the book by Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life. I hope you find them interesting and go out to get the book from a library or bookstore...

From Chapter One:
We are all pebbles dropped in the sea of history, where the splash strikes one way and the big tides run another, and though what we feel is the splash, the splash takes place only within those tides. In almost every case, the incoming current drowns the splash; once in a while the drop of the pebble changes the way the ocean runs. On February 12, 1809, two baby boys were born within a few hours of each other on either side of the Atlantic. One entered life in a comfortable family home, nicely called the Mount, that still stands in the leafy English countryside of Shrewsbury, Shropshire; the other opened his eyes for the first time in a nameless long-lost log cabin in the Kentucky woods. Charles Darwin was the fifth of six children, born into comfort but to a family that was far from "safe," with a long history of freethinking and radical beliefs. He came into a world of learning and money-one grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, had made a fortune in ceramic plates. Abraham Lincoln was the second of three, born to a dirt- poor farmer, Thomas Lincoln, who, when he wrote his name at all, wrote it (his son recalled) "bunglingly."

From Pages 128-131:
Though lit by Calvinist fatalism and frontier evangelical enthusiasm, Lincoln's view of divinity and providence was original. Lincoln, contemplating the scale of death, and the evil of slavery, and sensing the hand of God in both, came to the realization that "since it all happened as described... one can only yield to the enigma of having such a God at all. It is clear that the terrible was has overwhelmed the Lincoln who identified himself as the man of reason. It has brought him to his knees, so to speak, in heartbreaking awareness of the restrictions imposed by a mystery so encompassing it can only be called 'God.' Lincoln could find no other word for it." For Karzin, Lincoln's God is neither the God of confident Christendom nor the punishing God of the Calvinist imagination but the God of Job and John Donne, the God who is the stenographic name for the absolute mystery of being alive and watching men suffer while still holding in mind ideals that ennoble the suffering in some strange way make sense of it. As Donne wrote, "Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, not current money in the use of it."
(A sense of the other side's view of the same issue, expressed with considerable asperity and irony, comes from General Edward Porter Alexander, the Confederate chief of ordnance at the Seven Days. Lincoln, he tells us, was right; the South did think that God was on its side. "It is customary to say the 'Providence did not intend that we should win,'...[but] Providence did not care a row of pins about it...it was a serious incubus upon us that during the whole war[Jefferson Davis] & many of our generals really & actually believed that there was this mysterious Providence always hovering over the field.")

The second inaugural is the most famous instance, and the key statement of Lincoln's mature vision and of the style he had invented to articulate it. Crowded by his own conditionals—his great speech at Gettysburg and the second inaugural are sequences of if clauses: "if one accepts the proposition that..." —in the second inaugural too, he begins, as he had done so often as a younger man, with dry, polite talk—"The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured: —only to turn to monosyllables as he explains his history of what happened in the past four years: "But one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came."
And the war came. It's a sentence that Harold Ross would not have allowed in the old New Yorker (because it isn't exactly a sentence and begins with and, a false connective). But it is as precise a gesture as could ever have, with a biblical inflection, and does the work of making the war's arrival seem providential, natural, rather than causal—with the effect of deflecting responsibility from one side or another while making it a great catastrophe from which all sides must recover together. (Maddeningly so, for both the Southern slavery nits like Booth who were listening and the Northern abolitionists, who knew the war hadn't come but was made.) It is a lot of work for four monosyllables, but it did the job.
He then enters into an argument essentially legal in its form—as he had at Gettysburg and as he always had since 1838—not an exhortation of principle but a close-made argument of conditionals. If this is so, then this must be so; stipulate this premise, and this conclusion follows. The argument of the second inaugural—which, like the argument at Gettysburg, feels so familiar that it is hard for us to grasp how complicated it is—it that if we accept what God knew to be the evil of slavery in tot the world, and into America, for some mysterious purpose but with a definite lease, intending to end it, and if God made the war so horrible in order to punish those who brought the evil into the country (notwithstanding that God deliberately failed to prevent them from doing it in the first place), then does this strange equation make us believe less in a God capable of acting so bizarrely? Well, no, Lincoln says, even if that were so, "still it must be said 'the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'" This is Job's language, the language of mystical resignation: it makes no sense; it has happened; there must be a purpose for it because without it all would be senseless slaughter—so there must be a God. It is not the neat argument that God balances all but that nothing is balanced and yet God, somehow, remains. Lincoln isn't simply saying that the war is the national payment for the sin of slavery, which will end as slavery ends. He is saying that the war is willed by fate for reasons that we cannot fully know but that must have something to do with the balancing scales of long historical time.
For atheists, like the young Lincoln, this was not a challenge; necessity moved all. For the older Lincoln, overwhelmed by the core experience of grief, of death in the family, and the common experience of so much death in war, the idea of a universe moved only by necessity was too painful—the absence of a God had become so intolerable that one had to be evoked even as his purposes were seen as enigmatic. That is why we find the insistence that "if God will that...[the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's tow hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"
This is a darker vision of Providence, and of God, than is quite compatible with any kind of ordinary Protestantism. In a review of James Tackach's Lincoln's Moral Vision, Lucas E. Morel writes, "Lincoln's perplexing piety comprised a fiercely independent admixture of Enlightenment rationalism and Calvinist fatalism." His faith was rooted mainly in a kind of mystical inner sense of predestination, not so far from that youthful doctrine of necessity. He found no serenity in the idea that he was doing God's work. His point in the second inaugural is not that he is doing God's will but that God's will is going to be done, no matter what Lincoln does. He thought not that God was on his side or the other but that God had determined on this conflict, perhaps as a collective punishment for the sin of slavery, perhaps for reasons permanently mysterious to men.
He came increasingly to believe in Providence, but it was a Providence that acted mercilessly through history, not one that regularly interceded with compassion. That was left to men, and presidents. His idea is unmistakably "spiritual," the conception of someone who believes in a shaping power, a divine power, but not in an interceding divinity, a good Father. It is Chamber's doctrine that the universe moves forward turned into a belief that battles make men better.

From Pages 140/141:
Lincoln's spiritual state by the end of the war was very much like that of a Shakespearean tragic hero: resigned to a deadly fate that he did not will but would not avoid. Shakespeare's continuing appeal to liberal societies, despite his feudal settings, is in may ways strange. Shakespeare's beliefs are wide, but they always turn on questions of hierarchy, degree, legitimacy, and on medieval virtues, too: charity, mercy, laughter—all of the things that redeem and lubricate and soften a hierarchical system. He is a skeptic, like Montaigne. But he is not in any sense modern; skepticism is the liberalism of the powerless. It gives one the right to doubt the perfection of the king without doubting his necessity.
But there's another sense in which Shakespeare's people and their poetry anticipated the modern condition. His stories are of ordinary ambition, admirable in itself, turned in against itself after being bathed in blood. Bolingbroke is a better man for king than Richard II, bu Richard's killing leads Henry to his long night; even Othello, innocent victim of the malignant Iago, and Lear, innocent victim of his own cruel children, have put themselves into false positions, raised above their place or abdicating too soon. The little engines of ambition in Shakespeare almost always crash, and then they find their way to their destination, as Henry IV does, they end up crashing anyway. Shakespeare's people pass from ambition to amorality to evil in one long gradient of gray; only a moral idiot would be sure that his gray days were not part of the same sad declining curve. Part of Shakespeare's genius lies in his ability to create characters who intend no harm and end up covered with blood. And so Shakespeare suits liberal violence, with its corrupted currents, admirable ambition, and casual slaughters—and what makes Lincoln and Truman admirable, if not heroic, is that they knew it.

From Pages 156-159:
that all human beings belong to a single family, and that all have the same kinds of roots and the same kind of mind. At a time when religious bigots are trying to undermine the teaching of evolutionary biology in America by calling Darwin a racist, this cannot be said loudly enough, or often enough, or clearly enough.
Darwin argues, in The Descent of Man, against Archbishop Whately, a leading theologian whose "On the Origin of Civilization" had embraced the view that the lower races had "fallen away" from God. "It may be doubted," Darwin writes, "whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant. Savages, even within the limits of the same tribe, are not nearly so uniform in character, as has been often said... The most weighty of all the arguments against treating the races of man as distinct species, is that they graduate into each other, independently in many cases, as far as we can judge, of their having intercrossed." (That is, they descended from the same fathers even if they haven't all slept in the same bed.)
Again in The Descent, he writes, "Although the existing races of man differ in many respects, as in colour, hair, shape of skull, proportions of the body...yet if their whole oranisation be taken into consideration they are found to resemble each other closely in a multitude of points."... People are different, in Darwin's view—he thought there were savages, primitives, at one end and civilized people at another—but what knit them together was the habit of sympathy, which could be extended wherever, and as far as, we chose to place it. "As man advances in civilisation, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races."
We would not judge the past by the standards of the present. Darwin wrote about "savages"; we wouldn't. (But then, we use words that our great-grandchildren will be shocked by, too—though which ones: wife? veal chops? But we should not judge the past by the standards of the past either—if we did that, we'd smile politely as some of our ancestors burned witches (and some of us wold be nodding as both our ancestors and their books got burned). We should judge the past by the standards of the best voices that were heard within it. Shakespeare's anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice, ugly as it is, occurred in a time when no one had a clear idea of what Jews were, and of what anti-Semitism actually was. Jews were about as real to Elizabethans as Orcs. The modern anti-Semitism of the great by flawed genius G. K. Chesterton, on the other hand, can't be defended by saying that "everyone thought that way then" because not everyone did. (By 1920, the only people who did were anti-Semites like him, and a chorus of he decent was there to tell him, loudly and at length, that is was shameful. It was his choice not to listen.)
At every crucial turn, Darwin listened to the highest—that is the kindest and most humane—voices of his time, and was usually publicly numbered among the. In 1865, just after the American Civil War, the British governor of Jamaica massacred several hundred "natives" in order to end what he imagined was an incipient rebellion. In England, indignant citizens formed a "Jamaica Committee," intending to have the governor tried for murder. John Stuart MIll was the man who chaired the committee and pushed the point, but Darwin and Huxley were both on the committee (as was the geologist Charles Lyell), and their evolutionary views were assumed to be the source of their indignation. (The Pall Mall Gazette sneered: "It would be curious also [to] know how far Sir Charles Lyell's and Mr. Huxley's peculiar views on the development of species have influenced them in bestowing on the negro that sympathetic recognition which they are willing to extend even to the ape as 'a man and a brother.'")...
Bad men often think big thoughts. Darwin might have been a racist and still have been right; that residual racism would have to be extracted from his ideas on evolutionary biology. But, as a matter of fact, he wasn't. And the connection that existed in the mind of his time was that his theory, tending toward proving the oneness of creation, naturally tended to prove the equality of men. Racism, in any form that would have been familiar in his time or would be familiar in our, had not place either in Darwin's life or in Darwin's logic. Modern racism rests on the simple premise that races exist, and then that some are smarter or higher or purer than others. It begins in the belief that kinds of men are as different as species...Variation, not conformity, is the Darwinian rule. Darwin's great and repeated theme was not the short-term success of certain races, but the permanent nonexistence of any.

From Pages 194/195:
If by religion we mean belief in a force in the universe that nonetheless seems to shine inside us with a power that is inexplicable but real to all who witness it, and gives meaning and serenity to life, then, yes, religion is completely compatible with Darwinism, which is a claim about history, not about everything that is.
Ot even if we mean by religion what most people have actually meant by it since the beginning of time—an encompassing practice of irrational beliefs that can't be justified but only experienced, and give order and continuity to life—then, yes, of course, religion is compatible with Darwinism...
when we talk of souls and spirits, we are not talking nonsense any more than we are when we talk of love and courage and faith in some cause. Those ideas may not have a fixed material existence. But the most compelling things never do. The "fact-value" distinction that is so much a part of the modern philosophy of science—the rule that our values are not naturally determined but chosen—is mot intended to belittle values; it is intended to diminish the tyranny of facts. It is a way of saying not that physical truths imply no morality but that morality is made irrespective of mere physical truths...
We make our values in the face of facts. And so the values are ours. We can't outsource them upward. The judgment that some act is right, rather than demonic, can only be our own. We can turn to faith for meaning, but not for morality. As everyone since Plato has recognized, our idea of good has to be independent of our idea of God...

From Page 200:
That, again, is one central point of Darwinism. The habit of nature is regularity, but the rule of life is variation. No one had looked more grimly into the face of mass death than Abraham Lincoln, who grasped the awful arithmetic of modern war. But he could never detach himself from all that death, or find hep in apprehension of the aggregate when death touched his own core. Darwin knew better than anyone that the wedge of death was inexorable, cleaving the quick from the lifeless without purpose or plan. But his knowledge didn't ease his grief when Annie died. Masterly knowledge of the common experience brought no understanding or consolation. All the attentions of his adult life had been devoted to this subject: the propagation and blind culling, the winnowing of each species' young on the threshing floor of death. No one understood this better than Charles Darwin; no one else understood it at that time except Charles Darwin. And it made no difference at all.

"And Now It's Happening to Me!"—it could be the title of an allegory of modern life. The space between the two kinds of experience has become the irony of our condition. The error of the scientifically minded is to think that objective truths about the common experience can temper the irrationalities brought on by the core experience; the error of the religionist is to think that the intensity of the core experience can negate objective truths about the common fate. Science lets us think big, but we still feel small. No cosmologist has ever felt more serenely about his tenure case by contemplating the vastness of the universe. We get the big picture, but it's not where we live.

Hope you enjoyed these excerpts... Thanks Mr. Gopnik, enjoyed the read.