THUS far we have dealt primarily with the environments of Lincoln's religious life. We have not been able to escape the conviction that Lincoln's religious life was an evolution, influenced by his environment and experience. We have considered in these successive chapters some matters in detail which seemed to belong particularly to the respective periods of which those chapters have treated; but we have reserved, in general, the evidence that bears upon his religion as a whole for more critical examination. Particularly have we reserved those portions of the evidence which, first published after his death, belong to no one epoch of his life and have become the occasion of controversy. What kind of man he was religiously in 1865 we shall hope to know better; indeed, it is not unreasonable to hope that examination may show in part the processes by which his religion found its final form and expression. We know already that there had been a development. We know that the Abraham Lincoln who in 1834 delivered his political opinions in labored and florid style and with the logic current in stump oratory had undergone mental development and had emerged into the Lincoln who delivered his thoughts in translucent Anglo-Saxon at Gettysburg and the Second Inaugural. That there had been a moral and spiritual development also we have already been assured. Perhaps it was greater than he himself consciously understood. We shall now endeavor to ascertain what it had come to be. In this inquiry we have no easy task. The mass of evidence is great, and the contradictions are many. There were contradictions in the personality of the man himself, and many contradictions in the views which men, even honest and unprejudiced men, had of him; and not all the testimony is unprejudiced. Lincoln was a man of many moods. He reacted differently to different stimuli, and to the same stimulus at different times. His feelings ran the gamut from abysmal dejection to rollicking gaiety: and he never revealed his whole nature to any one man, nor showed the whole of his nature at any one time. He cannot be judged by the mechanical tests of a rigid consistency: for he was not that kind of man. When Dr. J. G. Holland went to Springfield immediately after the death of Lincoln to gather material for his biography he was surprised beyond measure to find how conflicting were the local judgments of Lincoln's character. Concerning this he wrote: "Such a nature and character seem full of contradictions; and a man who is subject to such transitions will always be a mystery to those who do not know him wholly. Thus no two men among his intimate friends will agree concerning him.