“Just after the last Presidential election, he said: ‘Being only mortal, after all, I should have been a little mortified if I had been beaten in this canvass; but that sting would have been more than compensated by the thought that the people had notified me that all my official responsibilities were soon to be lifted off my back.’ In reply to the remark that in all these cares he was daily remembered by all who prayed, not to be heard of men, as no man had ever before been remembered, he caught at the homely phrase, and said, ‘Yes, I like that phrase, “not to be heard of men,” and, again, it is generally true as you say; at least I have been told so, and I have been a good deal helped by just that thought.’ Then he solemnly and slowly added: ‘I should be the most presumptuous blockhead upon this footstool, if I, for one day, thought that I could discharge the duties which have come upon me since I came into this place, without the aid and enlightenment of One who is stronger and wiser than all others.’” “At another time he said cheerfully, ‘I am very sure that if I do not go away from here a wise man, I shall go away a better man, for having learned here what a very poor sort of man I am.’ Afterward, referring to what he called a change of heart, he said he did not remember any precise time when he passed through any special change of purpose or heart; but he would say, that his own election to office, and the crisis immediately following, influentially determined him in what he called ‘a process of crystallization’ then going on in his mind. Reticent as he was, and shy of discoursing much of his own mental exercises, these few utterances now have a value with those who knew him, which his dying words would scarcely have possessed.” “On Thursday of a certain week, two ladies from Tennessee came before the President, asking the release of their husbands, held as prisoners of war at Johnson’s Island. They were put off until Friday, when they came again, and were again put off until Saturday. At each of the interviews one of the ladies urged that her husband was a religious man. On Saturday, when the President ordered the release of the prisoner, he said to this lady: ‘You say your husband is a religious man: tell him, when you meet him, that I say I am not much of a judge of religion, but that, in my opinion, the religion which sets men to rebel and fight against their Government, because, as they think, that Government does not sufficiently help _some_ men to eat their bread in the sweat of other men’s faces, is not the sort of religion upon which people can get to heaven.’”