Page:Samuel Scoville -Abraham Lincoln, His Story.djvu/79



Moses, Luther, and Washington, Lincoln became a great leader of men only when he surrendered himself to God. His mother, Nancy Hanks, was a Christian woman. Of her he said: "I remember her prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life."

As a boy he read his Bible and attended church when he could. In those days he learned the hymns which were his favorites throughout life, "Am I a Soldier of the Cross?" and "There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood." During his early manhood he drifted into a temporary indifference toward religious matters. Yet even through this time he read and reread his Bible, and his later life showed what it did for him.

Lincoln wrote to a skeptical friend.

Another great war president of our own time has borne testimony about this Book of books, which Lincoln would have echoed in the last years of his life: