he still went
and took his boys to Presbyterian public worship--their mother was an
Episcopalian and his own parents had been Baptists. He loved the Bible
and knew it intimately--he is said also by the way to have stored in
his memory a large number of hymns. In the year before his death he
wrote to Speed: "I am profitably engaged in reading the Bible. Take
all of this book upon reason that you can and the balance upon faith
and you will live and die a better man." It was not so much the Old
Testament as the New Testament and what he called "the true spirit of
Christ" that he loved especially, and took with all possible
seriousness as the rule of life. His theology, in the narrower sense,
may be said to have been limited to an intense belief in a vast and
over-ruling Providence--the lighter forms of superstitious feelings
which he is known to have had in common with most frontiersmen were
apparently of no importance in his life. And this Providence, darkly
spoken of, was certainly conceived by him as intimately and kindly
related to his own life. In his Presidential candidature, when he
owned to some one that the opposition of clergymen hurt him deeply, he
is said to have confessed to being no Christian and to have continued,
"I know that there is a God and that He hates injustice and slavery. I
see the storm coming and I know that His hand is in it. If He has a
place and work for me, and I think He has, I believe I am ready. I am
nothing, but truth is everything; I know I am right because I know that
liberty is right, for Christ teaches it, and Christ is God. I have
told them that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and Christ
and reason say the same, and they will find it so." When old
acquaintances said that he had no religion they based their opinion on
such remarks as that the God, of whom he had just been speaking
solemnly, was "not a person." It would be unprofitable to enquire what
he, and many others, meant by this expression, but, later at any rate,
this "impersonal" power was one with which he could hold commune. His
robust intellect, impatient of unproved assertion, was unlikely to rest
in the common assumption that things dimly seen may be treated as not
being there. So humorous a man was also unlikely to be too conceited
to say his prayers. At any rate he said them; said them intently;
valued the fact that others prayed for him and for the nation; and, as
in official Proclamations (