n's origin and the
loftiness of his thought--he felt that by so doing he was merely
rendering his subject in its most brilliant aspect, giving to it the
largest degree of significance. A third consideration is Herndon's
enthusiasm for the agnostic deism that was rampant in America in his
day. Perhaps this causes his romanticism to slip a cog, to run at times
on a side-track, to become the servant of his religious partisanship.
In three words the faults of Herndon are exaggeration, literalness and
exploitiveness.

But all these are faults of degree which the careful student can allow
for. By "checking up" all the parts of Herndon that it is possible to
check up one can arrive at a pretty confident belief that one knows how
to divest the image he creates of its occasional unrealities. When one
does so, the strongest argument for relying cautiously, watchfully,
upon Herndon appears. The Lincoln thus revealed, though only a character
sketch, is coherent. And it stands the test of comparison in detail with
the Lincolns of other, less romantic, observers. That is to say, with
all his faults, Herndon has the inner something that will enable
the diverse impressions of Lincoln, always threatening to become
irreconcilable, to hang together and out of their very incongruity to
invoke a person that is not incongruous. And herein, in this touchstone
so to speak is Herndon's value.

8. Herndon, 265.

9. Lamon, 51.

10. Lincoln, I, 35-SO.

11. The reader who would know the argument against Herndon (436-446) and
Lamon (486-502) on the subject of Lincoln's early religion is referred
to The Soul of Abraham Lincoln, by William Eleazer Barton. It is to
be observed that the present study is never dogmatic about Lincoln's
religion in its early phases. And when Herndon and Lamon generalize
about his religious life, it must be remembered that they are thinking
of him as they knew him in Illinois. Herndon had no familiarity with
him after he went to Washington. Lamon could not have seen very much of
him--no one but his secretaries and his wife did. And his taciturnity
must be borne in mind. Nicolay has recorded that he did not know what
Lincoln believed. Lamon, 492. That Lincoln was vaguely a deist in the
'forties--so far as he had any theology at all--may be true. But it is a
rash leap to a conclusion to assume that his state of mind even then was
the same thing as the impression it made on so practical, bard-headed,
unpoetical a charac