Lincoln's literary style was an evolution.[65] His spread-eagle stump-speeches, with their florid rhetoric and grandiloquent figures of speech evolved into the calm, dignified, and forceful English of his maturer years.[66] An able monograph in which this evolution is traced is cited elsewhere in this volume.[67] That change of style was the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual as well as intellectual grace.
In like manner Lincoln's religion was an evolution, both in its intellectual and its spiritual qualities. Up to the time of his residence in New Salem he had heard only the dogmatic sectarianism of unlettered preachers, proclaiming a creed which furnished him certain lifelong tenets but which as a whole he could not accept. At New Salem he read the negative arguments which confuted the dogmas he had heard, and perhaps unwittingly made room for a more intelligent faith.
He was deeply impressed by the argument of Dr. Smith in his _The Christian's Defence_. It was the first time he had heard the Christian apologetic rationally presented, and it made a lasting impression upon him without, however, fully satisfying him. He was, however, a much more religious man when he left Springfield than he was when he came to it, whether he knew it or not.
The solemn responsibilities of his office, the daily contemplation of death as it menaced him and came into the homes of the people of his country, the profound conviction that God was working His infinite purpose through the war, and through the human agency of Lincoln himself, took hold of the deepest impulses of his nature, and became the controlling forces of his policy.
Lincoln was no theologian, but I do not find any authority for the statement of Mr. Binns that Lincoln said, "the more a man knew of theology, the farther he got away from the Spirit of Christ." It is possible, of course, for a man to learn theology as an intellectual system and to have little religion as a spiritual experience, and to lose that little in the process of his logical subtleties: but Lincoln was too just a man to make so sweeping and unjust an affirmation of something of which he would certainly have admitted he knew very little.