Strangely enough, however, Colonel Lamon and his companion in authorship not only praise Mr. Lincoln's greatness, but laud his singular conscientiousness and integrity of motive almost to perfection. Says Mr. Herndon, "He was justly entitled to the appellation, Honest Abe"; "honesty was his pole star; conscience, the faculty that loves the just and the right, was the second great quality and _forte_ of Mr. Lincoln's character." "He had a deep, broad, living conscience. His great reason told him what was true and good, right and wrong, just or unjust, and his conscience echoed back the decision, and it was from this point he spoke and wove his character and fame among us. His conscience ruled his heart." [See Herndon's letter in Carpenter's _Life of Lincoln_.]
In confirmation of this, Mr. Lamon goes on to show that Mr. Lincoln scorned everything like hypocrisy or deceit. In fact he makes his hero to be such a paragon of honesty and conscious integrity of motive that he would not undertake to plead a bad cause before a jury if he could possibly shift the responsibility over on to some other lawyer, whose conscience was not quite so tender. He brings in the testimony of a most reputable lawyer of another place in confirmation of this, who states: "That for a man who was for a quarter of a century both a lawyer and a politician, Mr. Lincoln was the most honest man I ever knew. He was not only morally honest but intellectually so. He could not reason falsely; if he attempted it he failed. In politics he never would try to mislead. At the bar, when he thought he was wrong, he was the weakest lawyer I ever saw." "In a closely contested case where Mr. Lincoln had proved an account for a client, who was, though he knew it not, a very slippery fellow, the opposing attorney afterward proved a receipt clearly covering the entire case. By the time he was through Mr. Lincoln was missing. The court sent for him to the hotel. 'Tell the judge,' said Mr. Lincoln, 'that I can't come; my hands are dirty and I came over to clean them.'"
Page after page is thus taken to show Mr. Lincoln's singular conscientiousness and honesty, his incapability of hypocrisy or deceit, as a lawyer, a politician and a gentleman. And yet these consistent biographers go back on all this testimony of their own mouths when they come to explain the admitted change in his life when he began to lean toward the church, and the "aggressive deists" parted company with him. Then they find it convenient to call him a "wily politician," who is "playing a sharp game with the Christians"; "the cautious pretender who does not disdain to regulate his religious manifestations with reference to his political interests." They saddle upon him the vilest hypocrisy and deceit, and make him "act the liar's part," in order to send him down to posterity an infidel. On one page they reason that Mr. Lincoln could not have made any such admissions of his belief in the Christian religion as have been maintained, as such admissions would be contrary to his well-known character; on the next page they affirm that Mr. Lincoln could not act the hypocrite; and on a third they do not hesitate to attribute to him the very grossest duplicity, in their zeal to fasten on him the charge of permanent skepticism. They go back on their own logic, eat their own argument, and give the lie to the very charge they are laboring with such considerable pains to establish.