"Did Mr. Lincoln believe in prayer as a means of moving God? It is said to me by Christians, touching his religion: 'Did not he, in his parting speech in Springfield, in 1861, say, "I hope you, my friends, will pray that I may receive," etc.?' and to which I say, yes. In his last Inaugural he said: 'Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray.' These expressions are merely conventional. They do not prove that Mr. Lincoln believed that prayer is a means of moving God.... He believed, as I understood him, that human prayer did the prayer good; that prayer was but a drum beat--the taps of the spirit on the living human soul, arousing it to acts of repentance for bad deeds done, or to inspire it to a loftier and a higher effort for a nobler and a grander life." "Did Mr. Lincoln, in his said Inaugural, say: 'Both read the same _Word of God?_' No, because that would be admitting revelation. He said: 'Both read the same _Bible_' Did Mr. Lincoln say: 'Yet if God wills that it [the war] continue till all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid with another drawn by the sword, _as was said by God_ three thousand years ago?' He did not; he was cautious, and said: 'As was said_ three thousand years ago_.' Jove never nods." A little later Mr. Herndon wrote an article entitled, "Abraham Lincoln's Religious Belief," which appeared in the _Truth Seeker_ of New York. From this article I quote the following passages: "In 1842 I heard Mr. Lincoln deliver a speech before the Washingtonian Temperance Society, of this city.... He scored the Christians for the position they had taken. He said in that lecture this: 'If they [the Christians] believe, as they profess--that Omnipotence condescended to take on himself the form of sinful man,' etc. This was spoken with energy. He scornfully and contemptuously emphasized the words _as they profess_. The rebuke was as much in the manner of utterance as in the substance of what was said. I heard the criticisms of some of the Christians that night. They said the speech was an insult and an outrage." "It is my opinion that no man ever heard Mr. Lincoln pray, in the true evangelical sense of that word. His philosophy is against all human prayer, as a means of reversing God's decrees." "He has told me often that there was no freedom in the human will, and no punishment beyond this world. He denied God's higher law, and wrote on the margin of a newspaper to his friends in the Chicago convention in 1860, this: 'Lincoln agrees with Seward in his irrepressible-conflict idea; but he is opposed to Seward's _higher law_' This paper was handed to Judge Davis, Judge Logan, and other friends."