In a letter to his old friend, Judge Wakefield, written after Willie's death, he declared that his earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation, and the human origin of the Scriptures, had become clearer and stronger with advancing years, and he did not think he should ever change them. After his assassination Mrs. Lincoln said: "Mr. Lincoln had no hope and no faith in the usual acceptance of these words." His lifelong friend and executor, Judge David Davis, affirmed the same: "He had no faith in the Christian sense of the term." His biographer, Colonel Lamon, intimately acquainted with him in Illinois, and with him during all the years that he lived in Washington, says: "Never in all that time did he let fall from his lips or his pen an expression which remotely implied the slightest faith in Jesus as the son of God and the Savior of men." Why do the statements of these witnesses, Smith, Edwards, and Brooks, not agree respecting the date of Lincoln's conversion? When their testimony was given, Smith was in Scotland, Edwards was in Illinois, and Brooks was in New York. If he was converted, why was the fact not revealed before his death? Why did these men wait until he died to make these statements to the world? Simply because the dead can make no reply. Had Lincoln been converted, the news would have been wafted on the wings of lightning from one end of the continent to the other. It would have been published in every newspaper; it would have been proclaimed from every pulpit; it would have been a topic of conversation at every fireside. When Henry Wilson, a man of far less note than Lincoln, was converted to Christianity, the fact was heralded all over the land. Lincoln's home was twice visited by death during his lifetime, and both occasions have been seized upon to assert that he experienced a change of heart. The death of a beloved child is no common sorrow, and the womanly tenderness of Lincoln's heart made it doubly poignant to him. "When death entered his household," says his friend, George W. Julian, "his sorrow was so consuming that it could only be measured by the singular depth and intensity of his love." That Mr. Edwards and Mr. Brooks did each observe a change in the demeanor of the grief-stricken father, following the sad events referred to, is not improbable. But a manifestation of sorrow is no proof of a theological change. Three of Reed's witnesses remain--three clergymen--Dr. Sunderland, Dr. Miner, and Dr. Gurley. Dr. Sunderland is a man of distinction. He has had the honor of praying for the United States Senate and officiating at the marriage of a President. Yet, distinction is not always the badge of honesty. W. H. Burr, a literary gentleman, of Washington, writing to a Boston paper in 1880, paid the following tribute to Dr. Sunderland's veracity: "He can probably put more falsehood and calumny in a page of foolscap than any priest out of prison."