The solemn responsibilities of his office, the daily contemplation of death as it menaced him and came into the homes of the people of his country, the profound conviction that God was working His infinite purpose through the war, and through the human agency of Lincoln himself, took hold of the deepest impulses of his nature, and became the controlling forces of his policy. Lincoln was no theologian, but I do not find any authority for the statement of Mr. Binns that Lincoln said, "the more a man knew of theology, the farther he got away from the Spirit of Christ." It is possible, of course, for a man to learn theology as an intellectual system and to have little religion as a spiritual experience, and to lose that little in the process of his logical subtleties: but Lincoln was too just a man to make so sweeping and unjust an affirmation of something of which he would certainly have admitted he knew very little. The rock-bottom foundation of Abraham Lincoln's religious faith was the ultra-Calvinism of his boyhood. He was reared a Predestinarian Baptist; and while he never became a Baptist he never ceased to be a Predestinarian. To this he added a strong rationalistic tendency, inherent in his nature, and strengthened by his study of Paine and Volney. This also he never wholly outgrew. As a lawyer who was not well read, pleading before juries that cared little for the letter of the law, he was accustomed to reduce his cases to simple principles of elementary justice, and to rest all upon these principles. This habit of thought and practice he applied also to his theology. His early recollection of the epitaph of Johnny Kongapod was nothing less than the application of the Golden Rule to theology--the assurance of an eternal justice throned in heaven and intelligible on earth. Thus, when he argued in favor of universal salvation he did it upon the basis of the old Calvinistic theology with which he had been familiar all his life. If God was, indeed, absolute sovereign, and as good as He was great, and willed not that any should perish, then no one could finally perish. Universal salvation became logically and ethically compulsory. The Christ who tasted death for every man, did so as the necessary means to the efficiency of a plan of salvation whereby the curse of the fall was fully offset by the sacrifice of Christ, at the instance of the sovereign will of God. As in Adam all died, even so in Christ were all made alive. His theory of universal salvation was the logical expression of his determinism, influenced by his rationalism and confirmed by his appeal to a justice that would not accept a fall more universal than the atonement of Christ. This was not because Lincoln approached the theme from the direction of the grace of Christ, but of the irresistibility of a divine decree. He profoundly believed himself an instrument of the divine will, believing that will to be right, and creation's final law.