Free Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power by Richard J. Carwardine Page A

frontier revivalism, and was more likely to parody and deride the physical and mental gymnastics of uneducated hellfire preachers than to respect them. There was a typical mix of irony and humor in his remark, “when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees!” 51
    At the same time, Lincoln held on to much of what he had learned in his early experience of religion. Not least, Lincoln’s commonly noted fatalism, which he never shed, reflects the continuing legacy of his high Calvinist upbringing. Equally influential were the handful of books that he read over and over. These included such standards of the English Nonconformist tradition as Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
and Watts’s hymns, works whose simplicity and strength of language effected an unmeasurable but undoubted influence on Lincoln’s own prose, at its best spare and taut. Above all, he encountered the King James Bible. Through his mother’s teaching and his own study he acquired a command of the Scriptures which would continue to impress observers and inform his rhetoric throughout his life. His stepmother, seeking to puncture overblown claims about Lincoln’s early piety, noted that “Abe read the bible some, though not as much as said: he sought more congenial books.” But the habit of Scripture-reading was established and thereafter not lost. Allied to his formidable memory (“My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to scratch anything on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it out,” he once explained), his close acquaintance with the Bible gave him a potent weapon for use on audiences steeped in the Scriptures, whether in set-piece speeches or on informal occasions. 52 An Illinois minister, seeing Lincoln in the street regaling a gathering of citizens with a sequence of anecdotes, remarked as he passed, “Where the great ones are there will the people be.” Quickly Lincoln replied, “Ho! Parson a little more Scriptural; ‘Where the carcass is there will the eagles be gathered together.’ ” 53
    To know the Bible well is not necessarily to consider it inspired. Dennis Hanks, a cousin who lived with the family in the Indiana years, questioned whether Lincoln really believed in it, and there is barely any doubt that during the 1830s, as a young man in New Salem and Springfield, Lincoln openly contested its authority. Like others in his circle, he read Tom Paine’s
Age of Reason
and Constantin de Volney’s
Ruins,
and found in their critique of Christianity and the Scriptures, and in their pursuit of a rational theology, much to satisfy his logical, inquiring mind. As an aspiring lawyer, he clearly warmed to their testing of the Bible by the rules of evidence, and to their use of reason and ridicule to expose its contradictions. At the same time he evinced a strong partiality for the caustic, witty poetry of another religious skeptic, Robert Burns, and delighted in his mocking satire on Calvinist self-righteousness, “Holy Willie’s Prayer.” 54
    Amongst his circle in New Salem, and then in Springfield as the junior partner of John Stuart, Lincoln had a reputation as “an infidel.” We need not dismiss as unfounded (as have some of his champions) the claim that Lincoln wrote an essay questioning the Bible as divine revelation but that New Salem friends made him burn it to prevent damage to his public career: the story is of a piece with what else we know of his views at this time and was later conceded by several of his circle. James Matheny recalled that his father, a Methodist preacher, though “loving Lincoln with all his soul[,] hated to vote for him” in the mid-1830s because of the taint of unbelief. Matheny himself, friendly with Lincoln in the Springfield office, told how he had heard Lincoln “call Christ a bastard,” how he “would talk about Religion—pick up the Bible—read a passage—and then Comment on it—show its falsity—and its follies on the grounds of