Judge David Davis, his life-long friend and his executor, says: "He [Lincoln] had no faith, in the Christian sense of the term." Lincoln did not believe in a personal God. His law partner, W. H. Herndon, relates the following in proof of this: In 1854 he asked me to erase the word _God_ from a speech which I had written and read to him for criticism, because my language indicated a personal God, whereas he insisted that no such personality ever existed."--_Lamon's Life of Lincoln, p. 445._ The Gettysburg address, as delivered by Lincoln, contained no mention of Deity. The phrase "under God" was inserted afterward, with Lincoln's consent, at the earnest solicitation of a friend. The recognition of God in the Emancipation Proclamation was inserted at the urgent request of Secretary Chase. The pious phrases to be found in his state papers are mostly the work of his cabinet ministers and secretaries. Thirty years ago Judge James M. Nelson, a son of Thomas Pope Nelson, a distinguished statesman of Kentucky, and a great-grandson of Thomas Nelson, Jr., signer of the Declaration of Independence, who was intimately acquainted with Lincoln, both in Illinois and at Washington, published in the Louisville _Times_ his "Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln." Concerning Lincoln's religious belief Judge Nelson says: "In religion Mr. Lincoln was of about the same belief as Colonel Ingersoll, and there is no account of his ever having changed. He went to church a few times with his family while he was President, but so far as I have been able to find he remained an unbeliever.... I asked him once about his fervent Thanksgiving Message and twitted him with being an unbeliever in what was published. 'Oh,' said he, '_that is some of Seward's nonsense, and it pleases the fools!_" Col. Amos C. Babcock, for many years chairman of the Illinois State Republican Committee, and one of Lincoln's confidential agents during the war, in an article published in the Peoria _Journal_, says: "Lincoln was an Agnostic. During the war he sometimes talked religiously, but it was mere statecraft. He knew that everything depended upon his having the support of the religious people,... but he was for all that an utter disbeliever in the Christian religion."