A word may be said concerning the author's point of view and the experience which lies behind it. In his early manhood he had an experience of several years which he considers of value as affording a background for the interpretation of the Lincoln material. For several years the author taught school and afterward preached in the mountain region of Kentucky and Tennessee amid social conditions essentially parallel to those in which Mr. Lincoln was born and amid which he spent his manhood up to the time of his going to Washington. The same kind of preaching that Lincoln heard, not only in Kentucky but in the backwoods of Indiana and the pioneer villages of central and southern Illinois, the present author heard in his own young manhood as a teacher in district schools far back beyond the sound of the locomotive's whistle or the inroads of modern civilization. How that kind of preaching affected the inquiring mind of the young Lincoln, the author is sure he knows better than most of Lincoln's biographers have known. The fierce theological controversies that waged between the old-time Baptists and the itinerant Methodists, together with the emphatic dogmatism of the Southern type of Presbyterianism as it was held and preached in the Kentucky mountains forty years ago and in southern Illinois and Indiana eighty years ago are part of the vivid memory of the present writer. A young man who refused to accept this kind of teaching might be charged with being an infidel, and might easily suppose himself to be one; but whether that would be a just or fair classification depends upon conditions which some of the controversialists appear not to have known or to have been capable of appreciating through lack of experience of their own. This book attempts, therefore, to be a digest of all the available evidence concerning the religious faith of Abraham Lincoln. It undertakes also to weigh that evidence and to pass judgment, the author's own judgment, concerning it. If the reader's judgment agrees with the author's, the author will be glad; but if not at least the facts are here set forth in their full essential content. CHAPTER II WHY THE BIOGRAPHIES DIFFER THE many biographies of Abraham Lincoln differ widely in their estimate of his religious opinions and life, partly because the biographers approach the subject from widely differing angles, and some of them are seeking in advance the establishment of particular conclusions. But apart from that personal bias, from which no author can claim to be wholly free, the biographical study of Abraham Lincoln was itself an evolution whose main outlines and processes it will be profitable briefly to consider.