tes, that in a
letter to Judge Joseph Gillespie, he said: "I have read on my knees
the story of Gethsemane, where the Son of God prayed in vain that the
cup of bitterness might pass from Him. I am in the garden of
Gethsemane now, and my cup of bitterness is full and overflowing."

From this it is clear that he believed the Jesus of the Gospels to be
"the Son of God." And what a sense of responsibility he must at the
time of writing this letter have experienced to cause him to declare,
"I am in the garden of Gethsemane now, and my cup of bitterness is
full and overflowing!" Only a superlatively good man, only a man of
genuine piety, could use honestly such language as this. These words
do not indicate unbelief or agnosticism. If ever a man in public life
in these United States was removed the distance of the antipodes from
the coldness and bleakness of agnosticism, that man was Abraham
Lincoln. This confession of faith, incidentally made in a brief letter
to a dear friend, is not only orthodox according to the accepted
standards of orthodoxy, but, better, it is evangelical. To him the
hero of the Gospel histories was none other than "the Son of God." By
the use of these words did Lincoln characterize Jesus of Nazareth.

Herndon has said in his life of Abraham Lincoln that he never read the
Bible, but Alexander Williamson, who was employed as a tutor in
President Lincoln's family in Washington, said that "Mr. Lincoln very
frequently studied the Bible, with the aid of Cruden's Concordance,
which lay on his table." If Lincoln was not a reader and student of
the inspired literature which we call the Bible, what explanation can
be made of his language just quoted, addressed to Judge Gillespie, "I
have read on my knees the story of Gethsemane, where the Son of God
prayed in vain that the cup of bitterness might pass from Him"?

I have admitted that in Lincoln's experience there was a time when his
faith faltered. It is interesting to know in what manner he came to
have the faith which in the maturity of his royal manhood and in the
zenith of his intellectual powers he expressed. One of his
pastors--for he sat under the ministry of James Smith, has told in
what way Lincoln came to be an intelligent believer in the Bible, in
Jesus as the Son of God, and in Christianity as Divine in its origin,
and a mighty moral and spiritual power for the regeneration of men and
of the race. Mr. Smith placed before him, he says, the arguments