"According to this version, which has had considerable currency, he carried a New Testament in his bosom, carefully hidden from his intimate associates: he believed that Christ was God; yet his friends understood him to deny the verity of the gospel: he based his political doctrines on the teachings of the Bible; yet before all men, except Mr. Bateman, he habitually acted the part of an unbeliever and reprobate, because he was 'obliged to appear different to them.' How obliged? What compulsion required him to deny that Christ was God if he really believed Him to be divine? Or did he put his political necessities above the obligations of truth, and oppose Christianity against his convictions, that he might win the favor of its enemies? It may be that his mere silence was sometimes misunderstood; but he never made an express avowal of any religious opinion which he did not entertain. He did not 'appear different' at one time from what he was at another, and certainly he never put on infidelity as a mere mask to conceal his Christian character from the world. There is no dealing with Mr. Bateman, except by a flat contradiction. Perhaps his memory was treacherous, or his imagination led him astray, or, peradventure, he thought a fraud no harm if it gratified the strong desire of the public for proofs of Mr. Lincoln's orthodoxy. It is nothing to the purpose that Mr. Lincoln said once or twice that he thought this or that portion of the Scripture was the product of divine inspiration; for he was one of the class who hold that all truth is inspired, and that every human being with a mind and a conscience is a prophet. He would have agreed much more readily with one who taught that Newton's discoveries, or Bacon's philosophy, or one of his own speeches, were the works of men divinely inspired above their fellows. But he never told anyone that he accepted Jesus Christ, or performed a single one of the acts which necessarily follow upon such a conviction. At Springfield and at Washington he was beset on the one hand by political priests, and on the other by honest and prayerful Christians. He despised the former, respected the latter, and had use for both. He said with characteristic irreverence, that he would not undertake 'to run the churches by military authority'; but he was, nevertheless, alive to the importance of letting the churches 'run themselves in the interest of his party.' Indefinite expressions about 'Divine Providence,' the 'justice of God,' 'the favor of the Most High,' were easy, and not inconsistent with his religious notion. In this, accordingly, he indulged freely; but never in all that time did he let fall from his lips or his pen an expression which remotely implied the slightest faith in Jesus as the Son of God and the Saviour of men."--LAMON: _Life of Lincoln_, pp. 499-502.