Two charges were brought against Lincoln: that he was an infidel,
and that he was--of all things in the world!--an aristocrat. On these
charges the campaign was fought. The small matter of what he would do at
Washington, or would not do, was brushed aside. Personal politics with
a vengeance! The second charge Lincoln humorously and abundantly
disproved; the first, he met with silence.

Remembering Lincoln's unfailing truthfulness, remembering also his
restless ambition, only one conclusion can be drawn from this silence.
He could not categorically deny Cartwright's accusation and at the same
time satisfy his own unsparing conception of honesty. That there was
no real truth in the charge of irreligion, the allusions in the Speed
letters abundantly prove. The tone is too sincere to be doubted;
nevertheless, they give no clue to his theology. And for men like
Cartwright, religion was tied up hand and foot in theology. Here was
where Lincoln had parted company from his mother's world, and from its
derivatives. Though he held tenaciously to all that was mystical in
her bequest to him, he rejected early its formulations. The evidence of
later years reaffirms this double fact. The sense of a spiritual world
behind, beyond the world of phenomena, grew on him with the years; the
power to explain, to formulate that world was denied him. He had no
bent for dogma. Ethically, mystically, he was always a Christian;
dogmatically he knew not what he was. Therefore, to the challenge to
prove himself a Christian on purely dogmatic grounds, he had no reply.
To attempt to explain what separated him from his accusers, to show how
from his point of view they were all Christian--although, remembering
their point of view, he hesitated to say so--to draw the line between
mysticism and emotionalism, would have resulted only in a worse
confusion. Lincoln, the tentative mystic, the child of the starlit