HEGEL, the philosopher, in his “Philosophy of History says: "God governs the world; the actual working of his government and the carrying out of his plan is the history of the world."

This is my profound religious faith, and I hold that all good men and true should make it their life-work to contribute what they can to carrying out that plan; to making the community in which they dwell more governed by the principle of justice, more pervaded by the spirit of mercy, generosity, and good will, and more guided by reverence and humility. When I became Editor-in-Chief of The Outlook, more than forty years ago, I determined to introduce into it a history of current questions; to make it contain an interpretative history week by week of the world's life. In this history I intended to interpret every question by its effect on the betterment of the community-by its contribution to justice, mercy, and loyalty. The effect of any proposed policy on any party (Democratic, Republican, Progressive, or Prohibition) or on any church (Protestant, Roman Catholic, Jewish, or agnostic) I proposed to ignore. Conventional standards were dropped

out of sight. The only standards I proposed to pay any attention to were the eternal standards of Micah's definition of religion: "To do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God."

Governed in all our editorial policy by this basic purpose—the endeavor to state impartially and interpret truthfully the fundamental principles necessary for the welfare of the community

we have also been governed by some other principles which I might call constitutional, though never formulated or written.

We have tried not to judge the motives of public men, but only their actions. We have aimed always to be impartial, but never neutral.

When convinced that we have unintentionally done injustice to any man by a misrepresentation, we make the correction as prominent as the mistake.

We have always made our utmost endeavor with the resources at our command to give our readers an accurate account of the tangled controversies which we have frequently had to report, including the strongest statements we could obtain of the policies opposed to our views. LYMAN ABBOTT.

S

EVEN years ago, when he was eighty years old, my father wrote his autobiography, most of which appeared at the time in The Outlook and will be found in a volume entitled "Reminiscences," published by Houghton Mifflin Company, of Boston. It contains the main facts of his life.

He was born on the 18th of December, 1835, in Roxbury, Massachusetts. His father was Jacob Abbott, a teacher, preacher, and author, who was best known in his time as the author of the "Rollo Books." His mother died when he was eight years old. For that reason, perhaps, he was thrown upon his own resources at least his own intellectual resources-when he was still a boy, although he says in his autobiography that, "while motherless, he was not homeless." He entered New York University as a freshman when he was not quite fourteen, and was graduated with the degree of B.A. in the class of 1853, when he was not quite eighteen. This was not because he was especially precocious, but probably because seventy years ago the intellectual demands of the colleges were not what they are to-day. He studied law; was admitted to the bar when he was twenty-one; joined his two older brothers in the practice of law; and in his reminiscences relates two rather interesting cases which the firm conducted in behalf of the New York "Times," cases in which he had a not unimportant part.

An irresistible impulse, or a sense of duty to his fellow-men, or a longing to help them, or a call of the spirit-he never defined the moving cause himself -led him to give up the law and go into the ministry. He was ordained a Congregational minister at twenty-five, and his first pastorate was in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he lived and preached during the Civil War. Returning to New York in 1865, he became a minister of a modest little church in this city. After four years in this pastorate, he moved to Cornwall-on-Hudson in 1869 and established there what has been the family homestead ever since. His vocation then became that of a writer and editor, although his avocation preaching every Sunday in a Presbyterian church of his community.

was

In 1888 he was called to succeed Henry Ward Beecher as minister of Plymouth Church, and filled that position for eleven years. At the same time

he was Editor-in-Chief of the "Christian Union," the name of which was later changed to The Outlook. He assumed this editorial position in 1876, and has therefore been the guiding spirit and Editor-in-Chief of this journal for fortysix years. He surrounded himself with editorial associates who were always glad to relieve him of the details of administration, so that he was free to preach or to speak in public. In this, what may, perhaps, be called the oratorical side of his work, I think his greatest satisfaction was in preaching and talking to young men and young women in American schools and colleges. One of these college parishioners of his, who is now a distinguished clergyman in this city, told me recently that he roughly estimated that in this school and college preaching my father must have talked to two or three hundred thousand different individual students.

His "Reminiscences" not only fill in the foregoing outline of his activities, but the volume contains a kind of valedictory; I shall quote it:

In one respect my life has succeeded beyond the dreams of my youth. I have never cared for money; perhaps if I had cared more my wife would have had an easier time, but I doubt whether we should have been happier. Nor for reputation; therefore the attacks made upon me and the misreports and misrepresentations to which I have been subjected have never much troubled me. They have had a value. One can learn his faults better from his critics than from his friends, because his critics are more frank. Nor for power; I like to influence, but not to command. But I have desired friends; and it sometimes seems to me that no man ever had more friends than I have. I am often stopped on the street by a stranger who thanks me for some word of counsel or inspiration received; and scarcely a week goes by that I do not receive a letter of grateful appreciation from some unknown friend whom I never shall see, and who, perhaps, has never seen me.

I have other invisible friends who people my quiet home with their companionship. I believe that death and resurrection are synonymous, that death is the dropping of the body from the spirit, that resurrection is the upspringing of the spirit from the body; and I think of my friends and companions, not as lying in the grave waiting for a future resurrection, nor as living in some distant land singing hymns in loveless forgetfulness of those they loved on earth. I think of them as a great cloud of witnesses

looking on to see how we run the race that is set before us, grieved in our failures, glad in our triumphs. I think of my mother rejoicing in the joys of the boy whom she was not permitted to care for on earth; of my father still counseling me by his unspoken wisdom in my times of perplexity; of my wife giving me rest and reinvigoration by her love. So I am never lonely when I am alone; rarely restless when I am sleepless.

I believe that I have learned one secret of happiness; it is a habit easier to describe than to adopt.

We live in the past and in the future. The present is only a threshold over which we cross in going from the past into the future. We live, therefore, in our memory and in our anticipation. He who forms the habit of forgetting the unpleasant and remembering the pleasant lives in a happy past; he who forms the habit of anticipating the pleasant and striking out from his anticipation the unpleasant lives in a happy future. I have no wish to live in a fool's paradise; but it is no better to live in a fool's purgatory. I therefore allow myself to anticipate evil only that I may avoid it if it is avoidable or, if it is unavoidable, may meet it with wisdom and courage. I recall past errors, follies, and faults in order that I may learn their lesson and avoid their repetition. Then I forget them. The prophet tells me that my Father buries my sins in the depths of the sea. I have no inclination to fish them up again and take an inventory. I gladly dismiss from my memory what he no more remembers against me forever. Thus my religion is to me, not a servitude, but an emancipation; not a self-torment because of past sins, but a divinely given joy because of present forgiveness.

ers.

It is almost impossible to write freely of the experiences of one's heart to a throng of unknown readIt is easier to portray them to an intimate friend. For this reason I transfer to these pages a few sentences which I wrote to my wife from Terre Haute during her absence in the East in the summer of 1863:

"Ought we to go always through life condemned of ourselves and thinking and feeling that God must condemn us? Is this a necessity? Is it not possible so to live that our own conscience approves us, and we have the happiness of feeling that we have the approval of God and of our own hearts? It is possible. Is it not practicable? Was it not Paul's experience? . . . It is true that we ought never to be satisfied with ourselves— that our ideal of holiness ought always to outrun our attainments; that we ought always to desire something more and better. Put we may be self-approved and not self-satisfied. We may be dissatisfied and yet not self-condemned."

It is thus at eighty years of age that I look back upon the years that have passed since I imbibed some

thing of the spirit of faith and hope
and love in my grandfather's home at
Farmington. I am far from satisfied
with this review; but I am not self-
condemned. I say to my Father, as I
say to myself, I have often been de-
feated, but I have fought a good
fight; I have often faltered and fallen,
but I have kept up the race; I have
been besieged all my life with doubts.
and they still sometimes hammer at
the gates, but I have kept my faith.

And I look forward to the Great
Adventure, which now cannot be far
off, with awe, but not with apprehen-
sion. I enjoy my work, my home, my
friends, my life. I shall be sorry to
part with them. But always I have
stood in the bow looking forward with
hopeful anticipation to the life before
me. When the time comes for my
embarkation, and the ropes are cast
off and I put out to sea, I think I
shall still be standing in the bow and
still looking forward with eager
curiosity and glad hopefulness to the
new world to which the unknown
voyage will bring me.

No man, I suppose, can know another man so intimately, so through and through, so undraped and uncurtained, as a son knows his father-especially when the relationship has been not only filial, but that of partnership. Thirtyone years ago last April I became President of the Outlook Company, and during those thirty-one years my father always treated me as his superior in business affairs, and as his equal editorially-never as an inferior or a subordinate. I don't mean that he consciously treated me so; I think it was just a perfectly simple and natural attitude of which he never more consciously thought than he would have thought when he came downstairs in the morning, "Now I must say 'Good-morning' to my children cheerfully." Of course I was not his superior in business, for he was a very wise man, of sound judgment, grasping and acting upon the essential principles of economic human relationship. (As one of my cousins has said to me since his death, "His goodness subtracted nothing from his wisdom; neither did his wisdom subtract anything from his goodness.") And I was his inferior editorially. But as I look back I am not conscious that I ever felt that I was not his equal; in fact, I never thought anything about it, and he never thought anything about it.

He wanted to be, and he really and essentially was, a preacher of the Brotherhood of Man under the Fatherhood of God, but he was this without ecclesiasticism, or ministerialism, or professionalism, or even emotionalism. He loved deeply, and he was deeply loved; but he was as free from sentimentality or gushes of feeling as anybody I have ever known. In our family circle, and in the circle of intimate friends and connections that surrounded the family, I have

seen him over and over again during a period of fifty years conduct the celebrations of marriage and of christening and administer the last rites of death, but I don't recall that I ever heard his voice falter or ever saw a tear glisten in his eye. I think this was because his feelings were so deep and so established on a rock, and therefore so serene and unshaken, that they did not affect his body.

He was a delightful companion-in the earlier years in the pastimes and excursions, and even some of the sports of outdoor life. For example, he taught his four boys how to swim and was a "good swimmer himself. In his later life, up to the very last, I would rather sit vis-à-vis with him at the luncheon table than with any man I know-not as son lunching with a father, but as a club companion lunching with a chosen club companion. He was interested in the whole of life, and in every wholesome expression of life, from the "Three Musketeers" of Dumas to William James's "Varieties of Religious Experience." He says somewhere that as a boy and a young man he had an ungovernable temper. Perhaps he had-no, I won't say "perhaps," because I think he never made a statement of fact of which he was not sure. But in fifty years I never saw any display of temper, and I never knew him to say a mean or rankling or biting thing in controversy about any body. He had vigor and decision and could denounce, but he never indulged in pin-pricks or in sarcasm for the sake of provoking an opponent in a contest. This used to seem to me remarkable, because I think the temptation of most men in controversy-it is mine, I know -is to say something that will get "under the skin" of their antagonists, much as a toreador in a bull-fight throws the barbed darts or banderillas into the skin of the bull in order to provoke him to rush upon his own destruction.

Even those who, like my father, believe that death is only an incident of a much greater, more glorious, and more permanent or immortal experience, which we call life, cannot with all their philosophy and all their faith escape the wrench of personal parting. Nevertheless as I write these lines I find that my own feelings are expressed better than I could have expressed them myself in a note which I have just received from a friend, a man who has led an active life in the great world of industry and affairs: "I have just read the announcement of your father's passing, and my impulse is to send you a note of congratulation on your heritage, rather than sympathy for your loss. I cannot feel that what we miscall the ending of such a life should be the subject of mourning." LAWRENCE F. ABBOTT.

MY FATHER'S

PURPOSE

N a letter, now yellow with age,

IN

there can still be read in the faded

ink the expression of some doub whether a certain motherless little boy could ever be raised to manhood. His body was frail; but something in his mind and soul made it serve him for nearly eighty-seven years. It was only when he found that body failing at the end that, turning to one of his children and quoting Holmes, he confessed, "The old coat is worn out."

When I was still a small boy, he was a grown man approaching middle age. Even then he seemed frail to my boyish eyes. He not only was not athletic; he seemed to me physically weak. And yet, as I look back upon those days, I see that he was doing an extraordinary amount of work requiring frequent draughts upon his reservoirs of nervous and muscular vitality. By his habit of saving his time, by making sure of suffi cient sleep-he had trained himself to be able to drop into a nap at any time and under any circumstances-by carefulness in selecting his physicians and following their directions, and by regular recreation in preparation for work, he kept those reservoirs replenished.

This care of his unathletic body was essentially that of a good athlete. It was not for his body's sake; it was for a purpose which he was determined his body should serve. He was in this respect a man's man. As a youth he envied in Beecher the abounding physique that was the opposite of his own; and as an old man he admired in Roosevelt the robustness which he himself lacked. He had, however, in common with each this athletic and masculine point of view that regards the body as a means to the attainment of an end through struggle.

To that end he directed not only his body but his mind, and not only his mind but his spirit. He has been called a scholar and a mystic. He had in his brain the scholar's equipment and in his faith the mystic's inner light; but I do not think he had either the scholar's or the mystic's purpose. In knowledge, which the scholar seeks for its own sake, and in faith, which the mystic desires as a source of the highest enjoyment, my father found not ends in themselves but means to the attainment of his object.

The adoption of this purpose in life was, I think, a matter of growth. At first it was a vague desire to be like the people he most admired. Then he found that these people all had the same ideal, and he adopted that ideal as his. As pictured to his mind it was the ideal of "a Man who had courage and yet for bearance, authority and yet infinite