This is a very different story from that which Lamon tells, of a self-advertising preacher, ostentatiously preparing a tract to convert Mr. Lincoln, and thrusting it upon him uninvited and thereafter to be neglected.
That Mr. Lincoln was impressed by the book is as certain as human testimony can make it. He told Dr. Smith that he regarded its argument as "unanswerable," and Lamon's slighting remark will not stand against so emphatic a word.
Moreover, Hon. John T. Stuart, whom Lamon had quoted as saying, "The Rev. Dr. Smith, who wrote a letter, tried to convert Lincoln as late as 1858, and couldn't do it," repudiated that statement, declared he never had said it; and on the contrary affirmed that he understood from those who had reason to know that Dr. Smith's book had produced a change in the mind of Mr. Lincoln.
Ninian W. Edwards, Mr. Lincoln's brother-in-law, on December 24, 1872, entered the discussion with this emphatic statement:
"A short time after the Rev. Dr. Smith became pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in this city, Mr. Lincoln said to me, 'I have been reading a work of Dr. Smith on the evidences of Christianity, and have heard him preach and converse on the subject, and am now convinced of the truth of the Christian religion.'"
Just what doctrines he was convinced were true, we may not know. But we do know that he requested the book and declared it unanswerable, that he and his wife changed their church affiliation and he became a regular attendant, that Dr. Smith became his friend and was honored and recognized by him as long as Lincoln lived, and that those who knew Lincoln best were told by him that some change had come in his own belief.
Under these conditions, the word and work of Rev. James Smith are not to be thrown unceremoniously out of court. They have standing in any fair consideration of the question of Lincoln's religious faith.
I have looked through many Lives of Lincoln to discover whether any biographer of Lincoln had ever looked up this book, and thus far have not discovered any. I have inquired for the book at the Chicago Historical Library and the Illinois Historical Library, and neither of those libraries contains it, nor had it been thought of in connection with Lincoln. Mr. Oldroyd does not have it in his matchless collection, where I hoped I might find the veritable copy that Lincoln read, and he had never heard of it; nor does the matron of the Lincoln Home at Springfield know anything about it.[43]
I shall give in the Appendix of this book an outline of the contents of Dr. Smith's solid work, that the reader may judge for himself whether such a book, placed in the hands of Mr. Lincoln at such a time, may not have had upon his mind all the influence that Dr. Smith ever claimed for it.