In five speeches from 1839 to 1852 he found six Biblical quotations, of which four were in his temperance address.
In his reply to Douglas in 1852 there were two Biblical quotations, both from the Old Testament.
In 1856 he found one, and that most notable of all—the "house divided against itself."
In his "lost speech" at Bloomington, as recorded by Whitney, there were six Biblical quotations, four from the Old Testament and two from the New—the largest number in any single speech.
In his ten speeches in the Lincoln and Douglas debates there were two Biblical references, besides a number of allusions to the "house divided against itself."
There were no Biblical quotations in the Cooper Union address or in the First Inaugural or in the Gettysburg address; none in the two messages to Congress in 1861.
His Second Inaugural was itself a kind of leaf out of the books of the prophets.
In the whole of the twenty-five speeches, there were found twenty-two Biblical references, eight in the Old Testament and fourteen in the New. This notwithstanding the impression of many who knew him that Lincoln preferred the Old Testament to the New, as recorded by Noah Brooks.
But this rather meager use of direct quotations and allusions need not disappoint us. Nor does it militate against the essentially Biblical substratum of his style. When we come to the study of Lincoln's literary and oratorical method, we find more striking contradictions and evolutions than we have here. Lincoln's oratory was not of the same style at all periods of his career, nor were his methods uniform at any one period.