Written about a week after Lincoln won a seat in Congress, this letter responds to a charge by Lincoln’s opponent in the race, Democrat Peter Cartwright, that he was an “open scoffer at Christianity.” Cartwright had spread the accusation most successfully in Woodruff and Marshall counties where this letter’s recipient, Allen N. Ford, published the Illinois Gazette. Lincoln’s letter urges Ford not to believe or reprint the accusation. To that end, Lincoln includes a short notice presenting his response to the charge, which he asks Ford to print in the next issue. That “handbill” is one of Lincoln’s few public statements on his own religious views. It concedes that early in life he believed and sometimes argued for “the ‘Doctrine of Necessity’ — that is, that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control,” but says that as an adult he had ceased arguing for this or any other views contrary to Christian doctrine.