One who has had much experience with funerals and with attempts to make dead men appear better than the same men living actually were or appeared to be, knows that these efforts are not usually the result of deliberate falsehood. They grow out of generous impulses and an easy tendency to exaggeration. But some people do actually lie, and this fact also is not wholly to be forgotten.
With these reminders of human frailty and human generosity and of the uncertainty of all things human, we proceed to examine in some detail the vast and contradictory mass of evidence which after the death of Abraham Lincoln was published concerning his faith or the lack of it.
What is in some respects the foremost example of platform and pulpit oratory concerning Lincoln is the oration of Bishop Charles Henry Fowler, deceased, of the Methodist Episcopal Church. It illustrates at once the excellency and the defects of works of this character. The oration had its beginning in a eulogy delivered in Chicago on May 4, 1865, the day of Lincoln's burial at Springfield. From time to time as years went by, Bishop Fowler had occasion to deliver other addresses on Lincoln, which, in 1904, he reshaped into something like the final form of the oration. First delivered in Minneapolis, it was repeated in many cities and before great audiences. It became the Bishop's best known and most popular address. It is the first and easily the greatest of the five that make up the volume of his Patriotic Orations, the others being on Grant, McKinley, Washington, and The Great Deeds of Great Men. Of that large book it fills more than a hundred pages. It was too long ever to be delivered at one time, but it was completely written, and fully committed to memory, so that he chose at each delivery what portions he would utter and what he would omit. Even with the omissions he rarely spoke less than two and one-half hours, and sometimes occupied three hours, his audiences hearing with sustained interest to the close. Of it his son says, that "through its delivery in various parts of the country, and by the natural process of accretion and attraction, new facts were added and others verified, until in 1906 it was put in this final form."