Mentor Graham is a much better witness than either Mr. Herndon or Colonel Matheny,--better because equally honest, and a man of less violent prejudices and of more sober habits, and especially because he had direct personal knowledge of the facts. In his letter to Mr. Irwin, under date of March 17, 1874, Mentor Graham relates that when Lincoln was living in Graham's house in New Salem in 1833, studying English grammar and surveying under this good schoolmaster, Lincoln one morning said to him: "Graham, what do you think of the anger of the Lord?" Graham replied, "I believe the Lord never was angry or mad, and never will be; that His loving kindness endureth forever, and that He never changes." Lincoln said, "I have a little manuscript written which I will show you." The manuscript was written on foolscap paper, about a half-quire in size, and was written in a plain hand. Mentor read it. "It was a defense of universal salvation. The commencement of it was something about the God of the universe never being excited, mad, or angry. I had the manuscript in my possession some week or ten days. I have read many books on the subject, and I don't think in point of perspicacity and plainness of reasoning I ever read one to surpass it. I remember well his argument. He took the passage, 'As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive,' and followed with the proposition that whatever the breach or injury of Adam's transgression to the human race was, which no doubt was very great, was made right by the atonement of Christ." On this point, then, we have abundant witness. Lincoln argued from the fall of man to the redemptive work of Christ as the Baptist preachers were in the habit of doing, but instead of finding there the basis of an argument for individual election and particular salvation or damnation, found in it the basis of faith in universal salvation. How Lincoln can have reconciled this kind of reasoning with his readings from Thomas Paine can be understood by those who have read Paine--which most men who discuss him have not--and who know the form of argument of the backwoods preachers which Lincoln had known all his life and little else in the way of reasoned discourse in spiritual things. His line of argument was a not unnatural resultant of the forces at work in his mind. But what about the book which Hill burned? Here again we have the personal knowledge of Mentor Graham. He was not, indeed, actually present when the manuscript was burned. No one, probably, was present, except Hill and Lincoln. But Graham was very much nearer to the event in point both of time and distance than either Herndon or Matheny, from whom Herndon learned about it, and learned incorrectly.