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 (concerning days of national religious observance) he could wield, like no other modern writer, the language of the Prayer Book, so he would speak of prayer without the smallest embarrassment in talk with a general or a statesman.  It is possible that this was a development of later years.  Lincoln did not, like most of us, arrest his growth.  To Mrs. Lincoln it seemed that with the death of their child, Willie, a change came over his whole religious outlook.  It well might; and since that grief, which came while his troubles were beginning, much else had come to