It has often been affirmed that "'Lincoln knew his Bible better than any minister," and large claims have been made concerning his use of it in public addresses. Mr. Lincoln did know and use the Bible, and his style is saturated with it; but it would be easy to exaggerate both his knowledge and use of it. Prof. Daniel Kilham Dodge of the University of Illinois examined twenty-five of Lincoln's extended and carefully prepared addresses with this result:[61] In five speeches from 1839 to 1852 he found six Biblical quotations, of which four were in his temperance address. In his reply to Douglas in 1852 there were two Biblical quotations, both from the Old Testament. In 1856 he found one, and that most notable of all--the "house divided against itself." In his "lost speech" at Bloomington, as recorded by Whitney, there were six Biblical quotations, four from the Old Testament and two from the New--the largest number in any single speech. In his ten speeches in the Lincoln and Douglas debates there were two Biblical references, besides a number of allusions to the "house divided against itself." There were no Biblical quotations in the Cooper Union address or in the First Inaugural or in the Gettysburg address; none in the two messages to Congress in 1861. His Second Inaugural was itself a kind of leaf out of the books of the prophets. In the whole of the twenty-five speeches, there were found twenty-two Biblical references, eight in the Old Testament and fourteen in the New. This notwithstanding the impression of many who knew him that Lincoln preferred the Old Testament to the New, as recorded by Noah Brooks. But this rather meager use of direct quotations and allusions need not disappoint us. Nor does it militate against the essentially Biblical substratum of his style. When we come to the study of Lincoln's literary and oratorical method, we find more striking contradictions and evolutions than we have here. Lincoln's oratory was not of the same style at all periods of his career, nor were his methods uniform at any one period. He was a ready stump-speaker, yet he became so cautious while in the White House that he was timid about responding even to a serenade without having first written out his address, and on occasion could appear rude in declining to utter even a simple word of greeting and appreciation, as on the night before his address in Gettysburg, when he was very abrupt to the company that serenaded him. He had been accustomed to large use of gesture, swinging his great arms, and sometimes, even in the Douglas debates, bending his knees till they almost touched the platform, and then rising suddenly almost with a whoop, but he became very quiet and self-restrained in his oratory.