mer into a man
of action. The fusion of the outer and the inner person was the result
of a profound interior change. Those elements of mysticism which were
in him from the first, which had gleamed darkly through such deep
overshadowing, were at last established in their permanent form. The
political tension had been matched by a spiritual tension with personal
sorrow as the connecting link. In a word, he had found his religion.

Lincoln's instinctive reticence was especially guarded, as any one might
expect, in the matter of his belief. Consequently, the precise nature of
it has been much discussed. As we have seen, the earliest current
report charged him with deism. The devoted Herndon, himself an agnostic,
eagerly claims his hero as a member of the noble army of doubters.
Elaborate arguments have been devised in rebuttal. The fault on both
sides is in the attempt to base an impression on detached remarks and
in the further error of treating all these fragments as of one time,
or more truly, as of no time, as if his soul were a philosopher of the
absolute, speaking oracularly out of a void. It is like the vicious
reasoning that tortures systems of theology out of disconnected texts.

Lincoln's religious life reveals the same general divisions that are to
be found in his active life: from the beginning to about the time of his
election; from the close of 1860 to the middle of 1862; the remainder.

Of his religious experience in the first period, very little is
definitely known. What glimpses we have of it both fulfill and
contradict the forest religion that was about him in his youth. The
superstition, the faith in dreams, the dim sense of another world
surrounding this, the belief in communion between the two, these are
the parts of him that are based unchangeably in the forest shadows. But
those other things, the spiritual passions, the ecstacies, the vague
sensing of the terribleness of the creative powers,--to them always
he made no response. And the crude philosophizing of the forest
theologians, their fiercely simple dualism--God and Satan, thunder and
lightning, the eternal war in the heavens, the eternal lake of fire--it
meant nothing to him. Like all the furious things of life, evil appeared
to him as mere negation, a mysterious foolishness he could not explain.
His aim was to forget it. Goodness and pity were the active elements
that roused him to think of the other world; especially pity. The burden
of men'