d the attention of Colonel Cannon to
the lines in King John:

"And Father Cardinal, I have heard you say That we shall see and know
our friends in heaven; If that be true, I shall see my boy again."

"Colonel," said he, "did you ever dream of a lost friend, and feel that
you were holding sweet communion with that friend, and yet have a sad
consciousness that it was not a reality? Just so, I dream of my boy,
Willie." And he bent his head and burst into tears.(4)

As he rose in the sphere of statecraft with such apparent suddenness out
of the doubt, hesitation, self-distrust of the spring of 1862 and in the
summer found himself politically, so at the same time he found himself
religiously. During his later life though the evidences are slight, they
are convincing. And again, as always, it is not a violent change that
takes place, but merely a better harmonization of the outer and less
significant part of him with the inner and more significant. His
religion continues to resist intellectual formulation. He never accepted
any definite creed. To the problems of theology, he applied the same
sort of reasoning that he applied to the problems of the law. He made a
distinction, satisfactory to himself at least, between the essential
and the incidental, and rejected everything that did not seem to him
altogether essential.

In another negative way his basal part asserted itself. Just as in all
his official relations he was careless of ritual, so in religion he was
not drawn to its ritualistic forms. Again, the forest temper surviving,
changed, into such different conditions! Real and subtle as is the
ritualistic element, not only in religion but in life generally, one may
doubt whether it counts for much among those who have been formed
mainly by the influences of nature. It implies more distance between
the emotion and its source, more need of stimulus to arouse and organize
emotion, than the children of the forest are apt to be aware of. To
invoke a philosophical distinction, illumination rather than ritualism,
the tense but variable concentration on a result, not the ordered mode
of an approach, is what distinguishes such characters as Lincoln. It was
this that made him careless &f form in all the departments of life. It
was one reason why McClellan, born ritualist of the pomp of war, could
never overcome a certain dislike, or at least a doubt, of him.

Putting together his habit of thinking only in essentials and his
pre