There is no good reason to doubt that Lincoln during this period read Volney and Paine, and that having read them he rushed rather quickly to paper and set down his immature thoughts in argumentative fashion. It would divert us from our present purpose of portraying the environment if we were to consider in detail at this point the story of Lincoln's burnt book. The reader will do well to remember, however, that Herndon, though truthful, was not infallible nor on this point free from bias; that neither Herndon nor anyone else then living was known to have seen, much less to have read, the book alleged to have been burned thirty-two years before; and that there was abundant opportunity not only for exaggeration but even for a complete misunderstanding concerning the actual content of this book.
Indeed, this incident has been allowed to pass with too little criticism or challenge. Those who did not believe Lincoln to have been a man of faith were glad to accept the story; those who believed that he later was a man of faith were not wholly unwilling to believe that he had once been an infidel and later had undergone a marked change of opinion. There seemed no good reason to dispute Herndon, and no one else was supposed to know more about the subject than he. But we shall discover that Herndon may not have learned the whole truth. There is more than a possibility that the manuscript that was burned was a document of quite another sort.
If Lincoln was regarded as an infidel, and if he ever was tempted to think himself one, we should not be justified in accepting that judgment as final until we knew and considered what was required in that time and place to constitute a man an infidel.
In the mind of most if not all of the Baptist preachers whom Lincoln heard while he was at New Salem, a belief that the earth was round was sufficient to brand a man as an infidel. The Methodists, as a rule, would have admitted that the earth was round, but Peter Cartwright would probably have considered a man an infidel who believed that the earth was not created in seven literal days. At Vandalia, Lincoln heard some ministers of wider vision, such as Edward Beecher and Julian M. Sturtevant, who were occasionally there, and John Mason Peck; but these experiences were rare. His association with Methodists was largely in the political arena, where he crossed swords three times with Peter Cartwright. That doughty hero of the Cross was born in Virginia on September 1, 1786, and exerted a mighty influence for good in early Illinois. With a nominal salary of $80 a year, and an actual salary of $30 or $40, he rode thousands of miles through deep mud, baptized 8,000 children and 4,000 adults, conducted camp-meetings and political campaigns, and sang and shouted and in his own language whipped the devil round the stump and hit him a crack at every jump until his death at Pleasant Plains, Illinois, September 25, 1872. He defeated Lincoln for the Legislature, and was defeated by him for Congress in 1846. So far as we know, Lincoln left no record of his feeling toward Cartwright and the Methodists. He could not have failed to respect such men, but it is not altogether certain that he was tempted to love them.