15. "The truth of the Christian religion" is a favorite phrase with Reed, occurring three times in his lecture. This phrase also occurs three times in these letters—once in the Edwards letter, and twice in the Stuart letter.
16. Reed has much to say about Lincoln's "life and religious sentiments;" in fact, his lecture is entitled, "The Later Life and Religious Sentiments of Abraham Lincoln." In the Matheny letter, too, we find "Mr. Lincoln's life and religious sentiments."
17. The words "earlier" and "later" are frequently used by Reed in connection with Lincoln's life. The same words are used in the Stuart and Matheny letters, and in the same connection.
18. The Stuart letter is, for the most part, devoted to the narration of "some facts" which Mr. Stuart is said to have presented to Mr. Herndon, beginning with this: "That Eddie, a child of Mr. Lincoln, died in 1848 or 1849," etc. Now, Mr. Stuart well knew that, during all this time, Mr. Herndon was the intimate associate of Lincoln and thoroughly familiar with every event in his history. The "facts" given in this letter are not such as Mr. Stuart would have communicated to Mr. Herndon, but they are such as Mr. Reed would naturally desire to place before the public.
19. Nothing in Dr. Reed's career has excited his vanity more than the fact that he was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Springfield—the church which Lincoln once attended. Consequently, the "First Presbyterian Church" is a conspicuous object in his lecture, and nowhere is it more conspicuous than in these letters. In the Stuart letter it appears three times, and the writer never fails to state that it was the "First Presbyterian Church"—the church of which Dr. Reed was pastor.
20. According to the principle of accretion, if two articles or letters are written on the same subject, the second will usually be longer than the first. This is true of these letters. The Lewis letter, relating to Smith's reputed conversion of Lincoln, was written after the Edwards letter relative to the same subject, and is longer. The Stuart disclaimer, which is the longer of the two, was written after the Matheny disclaimer.
From the foregoing, is it not clearly evident that these four letters were all written by the same person? If so, then knowing that Dr. Reed wrote one of them, the Matheny letter, does it not necessarily follow that he wrote them all?
In the Gurley testimony, such expressions as "the Christian religion" and "the truth of the Christian religion," together with the Reed story concerning Lincoln's intention of making a profession of religion, reveal the authorship of this testimony also.