as possible the contrasts of his subject—­such as the contrast between the sordidness of Lincoln’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 character as Lamon; or on so combatively imaginative but wholly unmystical a mind as Herndon’s.  Neither of them seems to have any understanding of those agonies of spirit through which Lincoln subsequently passed which will appear in the account of the year 1862.  See also Miss Nicolay, 384-386.  There is a multitude of pronouncements on Lincoln’s religion, most of them superficial.