If any man desires to probe and understand the thoughtfulness of Lincoln's piety, let him place this doubly-pondered document and the last inaugural side by side, remembering discerningly the date of each, detecting how each conveys Lincoln's well-digested judgment of unparalleled events, and not forgetting that Lincoln foresaw how both those documents would be reviewed in generations to come. Here are signs assuredly that Lincoln's lowliness and reverence, his prayerfulness and trust, his steadfastness and gratitude towards God had been balanced and illumined beneath the livelong cogitations of an even, piercing eye. Pursuing and comparing every way the tangled, complex facts of history; the endless strifes of men; the broken lights in minds most sage; and the awful evidence, as the centuries evolve, that greed and scorn and hate and falsity lead to woe; his patient mind grows poised and clear in faith that a good and righteous God is sovereign eternally. The truth he grasped transcended centuries. His grasping faith transcends change. But Lincoln's piety was not alone deep-rooted and deliberate, the ripened growth of mixed and manifold experience. It was heroic. It was the mainspring and the inspiration of a splendid bravery. This is finely shown in the early autumn of 1864. On September 4 of that year he wrote a letter to Mrs. Gurney, a Quakeress. This letter bears a most curious and intimate resemblance to the central substance of the last inaugural. It witnesses to his earnest research after the hidden ways of God. Within this search he sees some settled certainties. He sees that he and all men are prone to fail, when they strive to perceive what God intends. Into such an error touching the period of the war all had fallen. God's rule had overborne men's hopes. God's wisdom and men's error therein would yet be acknowledged by all. Men, though prone to err, if they but earnestly work and humbly trust in deference to God, will therein still conduce to God's great ends. So with the war. It was a commotion transcending any power of men to make or stay. But in God's design it contained some noble boon. And then he closes, as he began, with a tender intimation of his reverent trust in prayer. The whole is comprehended within this single central sentence, a sentence which involves and comprehends as well the total measure of the last inaugural:--"The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance."