Such equivocation suggests a man grappling with the basic questions of matter and spirit — a journey, which continued after the death of Lincolns’ three-year-old child, Edward Baker Lincoln, in 1850. A minister in Springfield, the Reverend James Smith, conducted the boy’s funeral. Afterwards, Smith often visited the Lincoln home at the corner of Eighth and Jackson Streets.

Like Lincoln, Smith had been a sceptic, but after he converted to Christianity, he published a book, The Christian’s Defence, that aimed to draw other freethinkers into his flock. According to Smith, Lincoln read his book and found it convincing. “He examined the Arguments as a lawyer who is anxious to reach the truth investigates testimony,” Smith recounted.

Lincoln never made an unambiguous conversion. The Lincolns later rented a pew at Smith’s First Presbyterian Church which reserved them space for services but did not bind them to accept the church’s creed, as membership would. This arrangement, which the president repeated in Washington, nicely represented his relationship with traditional religion in his mature years. He visited, but he didn’t move in.

Indeed, the power of Lincoln’s spiritual story is all the greater for his insistence on independence. Rather than accept the protestations of any single sect, let alone any single preacher, Lincoln struggled to arrive at his own distinct theology. — Beliefnet.com