You can thank William Howard Taft, the leader of the statue effort. He wrote of Lincoln in a review of another work.. "People say who saw: "Lincoln often looked the Christ." This face is infinitely nearer an expression of our Christ character than all the conventional pictures of the "Son of God." That symbolic head, with its long hair parted in the middle and features that never lived, is the creation of artists, Lincoln's face the triumph of God through man and of man through God. One, fancy; the other, truth at labor. Lincoln, the song of democracy written by God. His face, the temple of his manhood, we have with us in the life mask.

The Olympian Zeus in its remoteness from the life of the people, the life that must be lived, is the antithesis of Lincoln's. In the latter all self-consciousness is effaced, there is no lurking hint that the spirit behind and within was disturbed by the temple it dwelt in. All its lines lead away from self-center. As I wrought at this face facade I was conscious of being gradually drawn back of the face and forever onward."

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David Upton