Mr. Bateman was, indeed, in an uncomfortable position and any one of the three ways out of it seemed likely to make it still more uncomfortable. He continued to maintain a profound silence. Years afterward when Arnold was preparing his _Life of Lincoln_ for the press and Arnold asked him concerning the truth of the incident as recorded by Holland, he replied with extreme brevity that it was "substantially correct." (Arnold: Life of Lincoln, p. 179). The only portion of Bateman's admission to Herndon which Bateman finally, and with great reluctance, consented to have published, was one which covered the alleged utterance "Christ is God." It was a letter written in 1867, and marked "Confidential." In this letter Bateman said: "He [Lincoln] was applying the principles of moral and religious truth to the duties of the hour, the condition of the country, and the conduct of public men--ministers of the gospel. I had no thought of orthodoxy or heterodoxy, Unitarianism, Trinitarianism, or any other ism, during the whole conversation, and I don't suppose or believe he had." This is a guarded letter, but it is sufficiently specific for our purposes. If the conversation between Bateman and Lincoln was of this character, with nothing to distinguish the view of Lincoln as Unitarian or Trinitarian, Lincoln certainly did not say: "I know I am right because I know that liberty is right, for Christ teaches it, and Christ is God." It is evident that Bateman, crowded by Herndon in repeated cross-examination, came as near to repudiating those parts of the interview to which Herndon objected as he could do without raising publicly the issue of veracity between himself and Holland. The attitude of Dr. Bateman in this matter forbids us to believe that the story as it stands in Holland's book can be true. Bateman is not mentioned in the index of Nicolay and Hay's _Life of Lincoln_, and it is practically certain that they did not credit the incident. What, under these circumstances, shall be our judgment concerning this most hotly contested of all incidents concerning the religious life of Abraham Lincoln?