"'I am not controverting your position,' I said. 'Your confidence interests me beyond expression. I wish I knew how to acquire it. Even now, must it not all depend on our faith in the Bible?' "'No. There is the element of personal experience,' he said. 'If it did, the character of the Bible is easily established, at least to my satisfaction. We have to believe many things which we do not comprehend. The Bible is the only one that claims to be God's Book--to comprise His law--His history. It contains an immense amount of evidence of its own authenticity. It describes a governor omnipotent enough to operate this great machine, and declares that He made it. It states other facts which we do not fully comprehend, but which we cannot account for. What shall we do with them? "'Now let us treat the Bible fairly. If we had a witness on the stand whose general story we knew was true, we would believe him when he asserted facts of which we had no other evidence. We ought to treat the Bible with equal fairness. I decided a long time ago that it was less difficult to believe that the Bible was what it claimed to be than to disbelieve it. It is a good book for us to obey--it contains the ten commandments, the golden rule, and many other rules which ought to be followed. No man was ever the worse for living according to the directions of the Bible.' "'If your views are correct, the Almighty is on our side, and we ought to win without so many losses----' "He promptly interrupted me and said, 'We have no right to criticize or complain. He is on our side, and so is the Bible, and so are churches and Christian societies and organizations--all of them, so far as I know, almost without an exception. It makes me strong and more confident to know that all the Christians in the loyal States are praying for our success, that all their influences are working to the same end. Thousands of them are fighting for us, and no one will say that an officer or a private is less brave because he is a praying soldier. At first, when we had such long spells of bad luck, I used to lose heart sometimes. Now I seem to know that Providence has protected and will protect us against any fatal defeat. All we have to do is to trust the Almighty and keep right on obeying His orders and executing His will.' "I could not press inquiry further. I knew that Mr. Lincoln was no hypocrite. There was an air of such sincerity in his manner of speaking, and especially in his references to the Almighty, that no one could have doubted his faith unless the doubter believed him dishonest. It scarcely needed his repeated statements that 'whatever shall appear to be God's will, that will I do,' his special gratitude to God for victories, or his numerous expressions of his firm faith that God willed our final triumph, to convince the American people that he was not and could not be an atheist or an infidel.