"That Lincoln was an orthodox Christian nobody pretends to assert. But his friends and biographers differ as to how much of a Christian he was. If Lincoln had lived and died an obscure Springfield lawyer and politician, he would unquestionably have been classed by his neighbors among freethinkers. But as is customary with the Church, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, when Lincoln became one of the great of the world, an attempt was made to claim him.... The shrewd politician who has not an elastic conscience--and that was Lincoln's case--simply keeps mum on religious subjects, or, when he must touch on the subject, deals only in platitudes, and this is just what Lincoln did. Lincoln thought little on religious subjects, and read less. That, when left to himself, he was quite indifferent to religion, is frequently evident in the acts of his life."--_Open Court_, September 24, 1891, pp. 2962-63, quoting _Westminster Review_ of September, 1890. This statement was not sufficiently radical for one reader of the _Open Court_, who thought that Mr. Stanton had made Lincoln out to have been virtually an agnostic, and who wished to prove him an atheist. He wrote an article in which he said: "Free-thinker means anything or nothing.... Plain words are the best. That Lincoln was _A-theos_ connotes a definite attitude toward the great religious chimera, and really defines Mr. Lincoln's position more closely than any of Mr. Stanton's epithets [as, e.g., Agnostic]. It is positive, not negative, indicates what the man professedly was rather than what he was not or what he oppugned. We are in position to define his life-creed with all due measure of exactness."--"What Was Abraham Lincoln's Creed?" by George M. McCrie, _Open Court_, November 26, 1891. This writer then proceeded to define Mr. Lincoln's creed in terms of atheism. But his argument was based on a subjective scheme of philosophy, a kind of Hylo-Idealism derived from Hegel more than from Lincoln, and one which it is safe to affirm Lincoln would neither have admitted nor even understood. Some time after, the same journal had a third and very different article, which said: