"His flesh looked dry and leathery, tough and everlasting; his eyes were small and gray; head small and forehead receding; but when this great man was moved by some great and good feeling, by some idea of Liberty, or Justice, or Right, then he seemed an inspired man. It was just then that Lincoln's nature was beautiful, and in complete harmony with the laws of the Great Eternal. I have seen him in this inspired condition, and thought he was molded in the Spirit's best mold. Lincoln was a great man, a good man, and a pure man; and beneath his rough bodily exterior, Nature wove her fine network of nerve.... Lincoln was a gloomy man at one moment and a joyous man the next; he was conscious that a terrible fate awaited him. He said to me, 'I cannot help but believe that I shall meet with some terrible end.' This idea seized him and made him gloomy. At times his better nature would get the mastery of him, and he would be happy till the shadow of his fate flitted before him. In philosophy Lincoln was a fatalist.... In my poor opinion, Lincoln had not arrived, when he was assassinated, at the meridian of his intellectual power.... Were you to read his early speeches thoroughly you would see his then coarse nature. He gradually rose up, more spiritualistic. This is one of the reasons why I say that Lincoln was not fully developed in mind at the last. When a great Boston man said, 'Lincoln died at the right time,' he did not know what he was talking about." In these and like paragraphs Herndon testified to the mental and spiritual evolution of Lincoln; and he was probably correct when he opined that that evolution was still in process, and that Lincoln was, up to the very hour of his death, a growing man in all that meant most to America and the world. The religion of Abraham Lincoln was part and parcel of his life; and his life was an evolution whose successive stages can be measured with reasonable certainty. Not only did his religious convictions develop and broaden under the stimuli of Lincoln's constantly broadening intellectual and spiritual environment, but they broadened in the growth of his own personality.