Perhaps more than all else, the moral aspects of the slavery question thrust themselves into a foremost place in his religious thinking. We need not trouble ourselves overmuch about the accuracy of John Hanks's story that when Lincoln saw slaves sold in the market in New Orleans he vowed to "hit that institution and hit it hard"; part of that story may have originated in John's fertile imagination. But the story is not an unworthy one, and we know from Lincoln's own declaration that on that very occasion he was smitten with a sense of the iniquity of slavery, and that on its moral rather than its political side. That he freed the slaves as a war measure, and that he must thus justify the action as an extra-constitutional prerogative, need not lessen in our mind the moral aspects of the decision. The evidence is incontestable, and we shall quote it later, that to him it was a solemn obligation, the fulfillment of a vow which he had made to God. We are presently to go into a detailed examination of the available evidence concerning Lincoln's religious life. We are here considering his environment in the successive stages of his career, and his visible reaction to it. But even if we were to go no further, we should find ourselves compelled to believe in the reality of Lincoln's religion. We might not be able accurately to define it, and we may not be able to do so to our complete satisfaction after we have finished; we might even question, and we may still question, whether he himself ever fully defined it. But we are assured that his religion was real and genuine, and that it grew more vital as he faced more completely the moral and spiritual aspects of the work to which, as he honestly believed, he was divinely called. When General Lee surrendered his armies on April 9, 1865, Mr. Stanton, Secretary of War, though not a very religious man in his profession, felt with the whole nation the Providence of God in the result. He surrounded the dome of the Capitol with a transparency, reading, "This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes." He believed it; the nation believed it; Abraham Lincoln believed it. That conviction that the hand of God had been in it all had but lately been expressed in his Second Inaugural. That faith was warm in his heart, and its expression fresh upon his lips, when on April 14, 1865, he was shot and killed. So ended the earthly life of Abraham Lincoln; and with that end came the beginning of the discussion of his religion. To the history of that discussion, and the critical consideration of the evidence which it adduced, we are now to address ourselves. PART II: AN ANALYSIS OF THE EVIDENCE CHAPTER VII THE RULES OF EVIDENCE