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.