In Swaney's school he probably learned that the earth was round. A classmate, Katy Roby, afterward Mrs. Allen Gentry, between whom and Abraham a boy-and-girl attachment appears to have existed, and who at the time was fifteen and Abe seventeen, is authority for the statement that as they were sitting together on the bank of the Ohio River near Gentry's landing, wetting their bare feet in the flowing water and watching the sun go down, he told her that it was the revolution of the earth which made the moon and sun appear to rise and set. He exhibited what to her appeared a profound knowledge of astronomy (Herndon, I, 39; Lamon's Life, p. 70).
It is not necessary for us to assume that Abraham knew very much more about astronomy than the little which he told to Katy Roby; but it is worth while to note in passing that when Abraham Lincoln learned that the earth was round, he probably learned something which his father did not know and which would have been admitted by no minister whom Abraham had heard preach up to this time.
We are ready now to consider the character of the preaching which Abraham Lincoln heard in his boyhood. Direct testimony is fragmentary of necessity; but it is of such character that we are able without difficulty to make a consistent mental picture of the kind of religious service with which he was familiar.
A recent author has said that Lincoln never lived in a community having a church building until he went to the legislature in Vandalia in 1834 (Johnson, Lincoln the Christian, p. 31). This is probably true if we insist upon its meaning a house of worship owned exclusively by one denomination, but the same author reminds us that there was a log meeting-house[3] within three miles of Lincoln's childhood home in Kentucky (p. 22).
Dr. Peters says:
"The prayers that Parson Elkin said above the mound of Nancy Hanks were the first public prayers to which Abraham ever listened"—Abraham Lincoln's Religion, p. 24.
This is absurdly incorrect. Abraham Lincoln almost certainly heard public prayers at intervals, probably from the time he was three months old.
Abraham Lincoln was born in February, or his mother probably would have taken him to church earlier; but by May or June, when there was monthly preaching at the log meeting-house three miles away, she mounted a horse and Thomas Lincoln another, he with Sarah sitting before him at the saddlebow and she with Abraham in her arms, and they rode to meeting. If they had had but one horse instead of two they would have gone just the same. She would have sat behind Thomas with Abraham in her arms and Thomas would have had Sarah on the horse before him. Thomas Lincoln was too shiftless to have a horse-block, but Nancy could mount her horse from any one of the numerous stumps in the vicinity of the home. She and every other young mother in the neighborhood knew how to ride and carry a baby, and having once learned the art, the young mother was not permitted to forget it for several years.
Arrived at the log meeting-house, they hitched their horses to swinging limbs, where the animals could fight flies without breaking the bridle-reins. Nancy went inside immediately and took her seat on the left side of the room; Thomas remained outside gossiping with his neighbors concerning "craps" and politics, and maybe swapping a horse before the service had gotten fairly under way. After a while he heard the preacher in stentorian tones lining and singing the opening hymn, the thin, high voices of the women joining him feebly at first but growing a little more confident as the hymn proceeded. Then Thomas and his neighbors straggled in and sat on the right side of the house. The floor was puncheon and so were the seats; they were rudely split slabs, roughly hewn, and the second sitting from either end had an added element of discomfort in the projection of the two legs that had been driven in from the under side and were not sawed off flush with the surface of the slab. There were no glass windows. On either side of the house one section of a log may have been sawed out about four feet from the floor; but most of the light of the interior came in through the open door in mild weather, or was afforded by the fireplace in cold weather.
On the rude pulpit lay the preacher's Bible and hymn book, if he had a hymn book—no one else had one; and beside these were a bucket of water and a gourd. There was no time in the service when Thomas Lincoln did not feel free to walk up to the pulpit and drink a gourd of water, and the same was true of every other member of the congregation, the preacher included. As for Nancy, she spread her riding-skirt on the seat under her and when her baby grew hungry she nursed him just as the other women nursed their babies.