"I desire to see your new Life win. Your first Life is nearly suppressed--is suppressed or will be by rings--bears, and like. Lamon's first Life of Lincoln is the truest Life that was ever written of a man, as I think. I do not agree to all it says, and yet it is the most truthful Life of Lincoln written, or to be written probably, except your second Life. . . . Why, Lamon, if you and I had not told the exact truth about Lincoln, he would have been a myth in a hundred years after 1865. We knew him--loved him--had ideas and had the courage of our convictions. We told the world what Lincoln was and were terribly abused for it."--(_World's Work_, February, 1911, p. 14044). One of the chief things which Lamon set out to do was to refute Holland's estimate of Lincoln's faith, particularly as it appeared in Holland's account of the Bateman story. Lamon held that any impression which people got that Lincoln possessed substantial Christian faith, was due to the fact that Lincoln was a wily politician, who saw the power and appreciated the prejudices of the churches and was determined not to suffer from their hostility. He not only grew more cautious as he grew older, but actually dissembled. His religious references were made as vague and general as possible, and he permitted himself to be misunderstood and misrepresented by ministers and others because of "his morbid ambition, coupled with a mortal fear that his popularity would suffer by an open avowal of his deistic convictions" (Lamon, _Life of Lincoln_, p. 498). His estimate of Lincoln is that "On the whole, he was an honest, although a shrewd, and by no means unselfish politician." He attributes Lincoln's melancholy definitely to his utter lack of faith.