"At one moment of his life I know that he was an Atheist. I was preparing a speech on Kansas, and in it, like nearly all reformers, I invoked _God_. He made me wipe out that word and substitute the word _Maker_, affirming that said Maker was a principle of the universe. When he went to Washington he did the same to a friend there." "Mr. Lincoln told me, over and over, that man has no freedom of will, or, as he termed it, 'No man has a freedom of mind.' He was in one sense a fatalist, and so died. He believed that he was under the thumb of Providence (which to him was but another name for fate). The longer he lived the more firmly he believed it, and hence his invocations of God. But these invocations are no evidence to a rational mind that he adopted the blasphemy that God seduced his own daughter, begat a son on purpose to have mankind kill him, in order that he, God, might become reconciled to his own mistakes, according to the Christian view." "Lincoln would wait patiently on the flow and logic of events. He believed that conditions make the man and not man the conditions. Under his own hand he says: 'I attempt no compliment to my own sagacity. I claim not to have controled events, but confess plainly that events have controled me.' He believed in the supreme reign of law. This law _fated_ things, as he would express it. Now, how could a man be a Christian--could believe that Jesus Christ was God--could believe in the efficacy of prayer--and entertain such a belief?" "He did not believe in the efficacy of prayer, although he used that conventional language. He said in Washington, 'God has his own purposes.' If God has his own purposes, then prayer will not change God's purposes." "I have often said to you, and now repeat it, that Lincoln was a scientific Materialist, i.e., that this was his tendency as opposed to the Spiritualistic idea. Lincoln always contended that general and universal laws ruled the universe--always did--do now--and ever will. He was an Agnostic generally, sometimes an Atheist." "That Mr. Lincoln was an Infidel from 1834 to 1861, I know, and that he remained one to the day of his death, I honestly believe. I always understood that he was an Infidel, sometimes bordering on Atheism. I never saw any change in the man, and the change could not have escaped my observation had it happened."