It matters not for our purpose that these lines were not strictly original with Johnny Kongapod. We meet them in George Macdonald's story "David Elginbrod," and they have been used doubtless in rural England for generations. But they involve a certain rude and noble faith that the Judge of all the earth will do right and that divine justice and human justice have a common measure. Lincoln never forgot that, and he learned it on Pigeon Creek. Herndon is our authority, if we needed any, that the Baptist preaching of Lincoln's boyhood made him a lifelong fatalist.[15] He emerged into manhood with the conviction that "whatever is to be will be," and Mrs. Lincoln declared that this was his answer to threats concerning his assassination; that it had been his lifelong creed and continued still to be the ruling dogma of his life. It would have gladdened the heart of Sarah Bush if her stepson, whom she loved with a tenderness almost surpassing that which she bestowed upon her own flesh and blood, had manifested in his youth some signs of that irresistible grace which was supposed to carry the assurance of conversion as an act not of man but of the Holy Spirit. He did not manifest that grace in the form in which she desired. She could not consistently blame him very much, for, according to her own creed and that of Thomas Lincoln, nothing that he could have done of his own volition would have mattered very much. Horace Bushnell's _Christian Nurture_ had not yet been written; and if it had there was not a preacher among the Baptists in southern Indiana who would not have denounced it as a creation of the devil. There were no Sunday schools in those churches, and when they began to appear they were vigorously opposed. There was no Christian nurture for the boy Abe Lincoln save the sincere but lethargic religion of his father and the motherly ministrations of his stepmother. But "Abe was a good boy." With tears in her eyes Sarah Bush could remember that he never gave her a cross word. He was unregenerate, but not unlovable; and he had more faith than perhaps he realized. CHAPTER IV THE ENVIRONMENTS OF LINCOLN'S YOUNG MANHOOD THE second period of Lincoln's religious life extends from his removal into Illinois in March of 1830 until the establishment of his residence in Springfield, April 15, 1837.