When Lamon's work appeared, Holland, backed by the Christian element generally, fell upon it like a savage and sought, as far as possible, to suppress it. Lamon had committed an unpardonable offense. He had declared to the world that Lincoln had died a disbeliever, and, what was worse, he had proved it. Holland's attack was made in an eight-column review of Lamon's "Life," which was published in _Scribner's Monthly_, for August, 1872. In order to give an air of candor and judicial fairness to his venomous criticisms, he opens with this flattering recognition of its merits: "It is not difficult to see how Colonel Lamon, who during Mr. Lincoln's Presidency held an office in the District of Columbia, which must have brought him into somewhat frequent intercourse with the President, and who, indeed, had come with him from Springfield to the Capital, should feel that there rested on him a certain biographical duty. And certainly he was in possession of a mass of material so voluminous, so original, and so fresh that in this respect at least his fitness for the work was remarkably complete. Moreover, Mr. W. H. Herndon, who was Mr. Lincoln's partner in the practice of the law at Springfield, and was, of course, closely intimate with his partner in a business way,... added to Colonel Lamon's material the valuable documents which he had himself collected, and the memoranda which, with painstaking and lawyer-like ability, he had recorded from the oral testimony of living witnesses. "As far as the story of Mr. Lincoln's childhood and early life is concerned, down to the time when his political life began, it has never been told so fully, with such spirit and zest, and with such evident accuracy, as by Colonel Lamon." Nearly the entire review is devoted to a denunciation of Lamon's exposition of Lincoln's religious opinions. He repeatedly pronounces this "an outrage on decency," and characterizes Lincoln's Free-thought companions as "heathen," "barbarians," and "savages." The review concludes as follows: "The violent and reckless prejudice, and the utter want of delicacy and even of decency by which the book is characterized, in such instances as this, will more than counterbalance the value of its new material, its fresh and vigorous pictures of Western life and manners, and its familiar knowledge of the 'inside politics' of Mr. Lincoln's administration, and will even make its publication (by the famous publishers whose imprint imparts to it a prestige and authority which its authorship would fail to give) something like a national misfortune. In some quarters it will be readily received as the standard life of the good President. It is all the more desirable that the criticism upon it should be prompt and unsparing."