He did not believe in the freedom of the will. An observation which he repeatedly made was the following:
"No man has a freedom of mind" (Testimony of W. H. Herndon).
His fatalistic notions are confirmed by his own words: "I have all my life been a fatalist. What is to be will be; or, rather, I have found all my life, as Hamlet says:
'There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.'"
(Every-Day Life of Lincoln, p. 198).
The following was a favorite maxim with him:
"What is to be will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree" (Statement of Mrs. Lincoln).
In a speech on Kansas, delivered in 1856, he used the following words in regard to Providence: "Friends, I agree with you in Providence; but I believe in the Providence of the most men, the largest purse, and the longest cannon" (Lincoln's Speeches, p. 140).
The writer has in his possession, among others of Lincoln's papers, a leaf from his copybook, tattered and yellow from age, on which, seventy years ago, Lincoln, a school-boy of fourteen, wrote the following characteristic lines:
"Abraham Lincoln, his hand and pen;
He will be good, but God knows when."
If by good he meant pious, the prophecy was never fulfilled.