If it were asked, where in such a system as his he found a place for the forgiveness of sins, the answer would be first that he had no system, and secondly that he found no place for the doctrine; but it would then be necessary to add that he found the doctrine, nevertheless. He had no system. He thought without logical method. But his thinking was in right lines. He followed simple paths, "blazed" through technicalities and in quite thorough disregard of them. As his office desk was in confusion, and he kept a package marked, "When you don't find it anywhere else, look here," so he had in his thinking a parcel of unassorted first principles to which he recurred when he needed them. Forgiveness and law were to him two unreconciled postulates; but law he had to assume, even though he denied forgiveness. But if he did not admit belief in forgiveness, he did believe in mercy, for he himself was merciful, and he believed that he would be merciful to God if he were God and God were man. Stanton could argue him down as to the necessity for shooting a soldier who slept on duty, but Lincoln injected an intuitive, and from Stanton's point of view, an unreasonable and a certainly unarticulated, element of mercy that forbade the killing of this particular boy. His theory of governmental forgiveness was as irreconcilable with his theory of military discipline as his theory of divine mercy was with his system of inexorable law. He did not harmonize the contradictions: he was merciful, and let his system take the consequences, and he believed in a divine mercy while holding a theory with which the exercise of mercy was irreconcilable. To such a mind as that of Abraham Lincoln, it was not necessary to prove the fact of immortality. If God possessed immortality and intended it for man, then God would make His decree effective in man. Adam's fall could not hopelessly lose to man what God designed; and, whether he accepted for himself or not the theory of the fall and of redemption, he accepted both in meeting an argument which by reason of the fall could have deprived man of his birthright of immortality. He believed in the immortality of the soul. Did he harmonize that doctrine with the rest of his creed? Probably not. He was no theologian, in the strict and formal sense, no logician. He reasoned on the basis of very simple and elementary principles, whose lines of direction were determined by the early Calvinistic preaching to which he listened, the rationalistic method which he learned from Paine, and his simple sense of justice and right. His was not wholly an optimistic faith. He knew that man was sinful and sad and that "the spirit of mortal" had little occasion for pride; but he believed in an eternal justice and an unconquerable goodness, regnant above the perplexities and contradictions of this life, and triumphant in the life everlasting.