Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States, is dead! Suddenly and without a moment’s warning, he had fallen, by the hand of an assassin! The morning of the 14th of April 1865 rose upon him full of hope; and all that anxious day his head and his heart were busy and strong, in what he fondly thought would bring speedy peace and rest to our disturbed and weary people; and the evening found him, amid the gay and joyous throng of hearts beating free with a sense of mighty national agonies endured and ended, and lending the welcome of his presence to the happy signs of returning peace. But in a moment how all is changed! The deadly bullet enters the brain, so busy with the future fate of this mighty nation, and it is paralyzed forever! Soon the heart grows still, and the man of all eyes—for whose words thirty millions of people were waiting in hushed breath and with fondest hope,—whose single mind held the secrets that nations were trembling to hear, and upon whose fiat the fortunes of agriculture and manufactures, and commerce and even civil liberty seemed to hang,—he from whose lips we were waiting to hear the potent spell of peace sound over the troubled waves of our stormy sea, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, lies dead, and powerless to speak to us for good or for ill—as though he had never been. He is dead and another ruleth in his stead

In his groundbreaking book on the spiritual life of Ronald Reagan, Professor Paul Kengor describes Reagan as having “faith [that] was not shallow, as his evident appetite for apologetics . . . demonstrates” (128-29). One way in which Reagan manifested this “appetite” for apologetics was in reading the books of former British atheist and apologist C. S. Lewis and assimilating and internalizing Lewis’ defense of the Christian faith.