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’s tears, falling ever in the shadows at the backs of things—­this was the spiritual horizon from which he could not escape.  Out of the circle of that horizon he had to rise by spiritual apprehension in order to be consoled.  And there is no reason to doubt that at times, if not invariably, in his early days, he did rise; he found consolation.  But it was all without form.  It was a sentiment, a mood,—­philosophically bodiless.  This indefinite mysticism was the real heart of the forest world, closer than hands or feet, but elusive, incapable of formulation, a presence, not an idea.  Before the task of expressing it, the forest mystic stood helpless.  Just what it was that he felt impinging upon him from every side he did not know.  He was like a sensitive man, neither scientist nor poet, in the midst of a night of stars.  The reality of his experience gave him no power either to explain or to state it.