in Jacquess' presence and repeated the story at a reunion of the 73d Regiment of Illinois Infantry, September, 1897, in Springfield. Perhaps that is why Lincoln said in letting Jacquess go on his mission in 1864:

God selects His own instruments and sometimes they are queer ones; for instance, He chose me to steer the ship through a great crisis.

The test of man's belief in God is man's love for his fellows. "He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" Lincoln never had a more engaging friend than Edward D. Baker. Far back in the forties they had become friends in the politics of Illinois. Lincoln secured for Baker the nomination for Congress in 1844. Later Baker became United States Senator from the new State of Oregon and was one of the small group Lincoln called into intimate consultation at Springfield, after his nomination, for the Presidency. As Mr. Lincoln arose at the Inauguration exercises in 1860, his good friend, Senator Baker, introduced him to the throng.

In a little while Baker exchanged the Senatorship for a Colonelcy in the army, and on October 21, 1861, he was killed at Ball's Bluff. Charles

Carleton Coffin, who knew whereof he spoke, gave later his deliberate conviction that probably no other of "the many tragic events of President Lincoln's life ever stunned him like that unheralded message which came over the wires on that mournful evening of October 21, 1861." As Mr. Lincoln left the room his head was bowed, the tears rolled down his furrowed cheeks, his breast heaved with emotion. As he stepped into the street, it looked for a moment as though he would collapse. With both hands pressed to his heart, he staggered on, not even returning the salute of the sentinel before the White House door. He interpreted the friendship of God in terms of human friendship. To be on terms of close friendship with God and man alike is to be the kind of Christian He pictured who once said: "Greater love hath no man than this that he lay down his life for his friend."

CHAPTER XXV

SIFTING THE EVIDENCE

THE charges by Col. W. H. Layman and supported to some extent by Judge William H. Herndon, were that Lincoln was in fact an infidel, and that, "in his morbid ambition for popularity, he played a sharp game on the Christian community by adjusting his religious sentiments to his political interests."

In 1873, the Rev. J. A. Reed, pastor at the time of the First Presbyterian Church at Springfield, Illinois, prepared a lecture refuting the charges of Colonel Layman and Judge Herndon. This lecture was published substantially as delivered, and repeated hundreds of times. No one has ever been able to controvert the evidence adduced by Dr. Reed touching the religious faith and character of Abraham Lincoln. In preparing his lecture Mr. Reed took the pains to procure letters from men who were quite as intimate with Lincoln as were Layman and Herndon. The world is indebted to Mr. Reed for his original research, made

within the decade after Mr. Lincoln's death, when the facts were fresh in the minds of men then living.

Mr. Reed makes the point at the outset that even Layman admits that there did come a time in Mr. Lincoln's life at Springfield when, notwithstanding his alleged skepticism, he began to affiliate with Christian people and to give his personal presence and support to the church. Layman could account for this alleged change only by accusing Lincoln of double-dealing in regard to religion, a charge so at variance with Lincoln's well-known love of frankness and sincerity that it falls to the ground with its own weight of falsehood.

Layman and Herndon themselves are loud in their praise of Lincoln's singular conscientiousness and integrity. They seek to draw a line between the secular and the religious. They make him secularly a man almost perfect, yet capable of deceiving his friends by concealing from them his skepticism-which would have been hypocrisy. Judge Herndon writes:

Lincoln was justly entitled to the appellation "Honest Abe." Honesty was his pole star; conscience, the faculty that loves the just and right, was the second great quality and forte of Lincoln's character. He had a deep, broad, living conscience. His great

reason told him what was true and good, right and wrong, just and unjust, and his conscience echoed back the decision, and it was from this point he spoke, and wove his character and fame among us.

Layman shows that Lincoln scorned everything deceitful, that he would not even undertake to plead a bad case before a jury. Layman quotes Lincoln's fellow-lawyers as saying that, for a man who was for a quarter of a century both a lawyer and a politician, Lincoln was the most honest man they had ever known; that he could not reason falsely; that if he attempted he failed; that in politics he would never try to mislead; and that, at the bar, when he thought he was wrong he was the weakest lawyer they ever knew. Therefore, the allegations that Abraham Lincoln practised deception in regard to his religious views have but to be stated to suggest their own refutation and are in fact refuted out of the mouths of the men who make them.

Mr. Reed in his lecture shows that Lincoln, during his life in Springfield, attended church, delivered Sunday-School addresses, speeches before the Bible Society, and evinced in every way the conduct of a man who was leading a Christian life. He also showed that the principal persons whose testimony is given by Layman and Herndon to