We are enabled to see, therefore, in the light of this revelation, of what "trustworthy materials" this book is composed; how much Mr. Lamon's "names and dates and authorities, by which he strengthens his testimony," are to be depended upon; and what reason unsuspecting or sympathizing critics and journalists have for arriving at the sage conclusion that Mr. Lincoln "was, in his habit of thought, heterodox in the extreme to the close of his life, and a very different man from what he was supposed to be." The evidence of this book, so far as the prominent witnesses are concerned, and so far as it relates to the later years of Mr. Lincoln's life, is not only utterly untrustworthy, but even an ingenious and romantic invention. Having shown what claims Mr. Lamon's book has to being the "only fair and reliable history" of Mr. Lincoln's life and views, and of what "trustworthy materials" it is composed, I shall now give the testimony I have collected to establish what has ever been the public impression, that Mr. Lincoln was in his later life, and at the time of his death, a firm believer in the truth of the Christian religion. The infidelity of his earlier life is not so much to be wondered at, when we consider the poverty of his early religious instruction and the peculiar influences by which he was surrounded. Gideon Welles, formerly Secretary of the Navy, in a recent article in the _Galaxy_, in accounting for the late and peculiar manifestation of faith which Mr. Lincoln exhibited, says: "It was doubtless to be attributed in a great measure to the absence of early religious culture--a want of educational advantages in his youthful frontier life." This, together with the fact that his youth and early manhood were spent chiefly among a rough, illiterate and skeptical class of people, is amply confirmed by Mr. Lamon's narrative. On the same authority it appears that Mr. Lincoln had in his former life read but few books, and that everything he had read, of an intellectual character, bearing on the truth of the Bible, was of an infidel sort. It does not appear that he had ever seen, much less read, a work on the evidences of Christianity till his interview with Rev. Dr. Smith in 1848. We hear of him as reading Paine, Voltaire and Theodore Parker, but nothing on the other side. The men by whom he was surrounded in his earlier life, it seems, kept him well supplied with their kind of literature. He was familiar with some of the master spirits of infidelity and theism, but had never grappled with the evidences of Christianity as presented by the great defenders of the Christian faith.