"He has written of the Bible, that 'this great Book of God is the best gift which God has ever given to man,' and that 'all things desirable for man to know are contained in it.' His singular familiarity with its contents is even stronger evidence of the high place it held in his judgment. His second inaugural address shows how sensibly he appreciated the force and beauty of its passages, and constitutes an admirable application of its truths, only possible as the result of familiar use and thorough study. "Further comment cannot be necessary. Abraham Lincoln accepted the Bible as the inspired word of God--he believed and faithfully endeavored to live according to the fundamental principles and doctrines of the Christian faith. To doubt either proposition is to be untrue to his memory, a disloyalty of which no American should be guilty."--CHITTENDEN: _Recollections of President Lincoln and His Administration_, pp. 446-51. These two incidents call for no extended comment. That in each of them the literary style is more like that of the narrator than it is like the style of Mr. Lincoln is evident, and there is other apparent evidence that the incidents were colored by the imagination of the two men who related them. But neither of them was a lie. And, when we make due deductions, each contains a basis of fact in accord with what we might have expected Lincoln to say. For instance, the assurance which he expressed to Chittenden that God had called him to his work as President, and that he was fulfilling divine destiny, is fully in accord with the strong conviction of predestination which he had received in his youth, and which was so marked that his partners took it as a mark of selfish superiority. He did feel, and felt so strongly that he sometimes seemed to be oblivious to other and correlative truths, that God had called him to a great task, and that he would live till it was accomplished, plots or no plots. But he had a gloomy foreboding that he would not live much longer. His conviction of predestination had in it a compelling sense of destiny and almost of doom, a conviction of Divinity shaping his ends, even though he rough-hewed them. CHAPTER XVII THE BEECHER AND SICKLES INCIDENTS AMONG the many stories of President Lincoln's religious life, one of the most impressive concerns an alleged visit of the President to the home of Henry Ward Beecher and the spending of a night in prayer by these two men. The story is as follows: