There is little reason to suppose that Lincoln’s religious experience previous to 1860 was more than a recurrent visitor in his daily life.  He has said as much himself.  He told his friend Noah Brooks “he did not remember any precise time when he passed through any special change of purpose, or of heart, but he would say that his own election to office and the crisis immediately following, influentially determined him in what he called ‘a process of crystallization’ then going on in his mind."(1)

It was the terrible sense of need—­the humility, the fear that he might not be equal to the occasion—­that searched his soul, that bred in him the craving for a spiritual up-holding which should be constant.  And at this crucial moment came the death of his favorite son.  “In the lonely grave of the little one lay buried Mr. Lincoln’s fondest hopes, and strong as he was in the matter of self-control, he gave way to an overmastering grief which became at length a serious menace to his health."(2) Though firsthand accounts differ as to just how he struggled forth out of this darkness, all agree that the ordeal was very severe.  Tradition makes the crisis a visit from the Reverend Francis Vinton, rector of Trinity Church, New York, and his eloquent assertion of the faith in immortality, his appeal to Lincoln to remember the sorrow of Jacob over the loss of Joseph, and to rise by faith out of his own sorrow even as the patriarch rose.(3)

Although Lincoln succeeded in putting his grief behind him, he never forgot it.  Long afterward, he called 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.