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e are anchored at Phalerum; how can I spend the morning better than in beginning to write my reminiscences? My hostess is, I believe, writing hers in her stateroom above; I think I shall follow her example. Hers will sell by the thousands, for she is a famous writer; I cannot hope for an interest like this in mine, but there may be people who will like to look at them, and I shall enjoy calling back the past. Certainly I shan’t read them to my friendly but extremely critical companions on this cruise. For one thing there won’t be time; our days are spent in looking at the Ægean Islands, or in seeing sights on shore. In the evening we sit on deck and talk; or, if the wind is blowing, we listen in the cabin to Robert Norton’s reading of Butcher and Lang’s translation of the Odyssey, and beautifully he reads it.

So with this brief preface I begin the record of my boyhood and youth, to which I may add, if the spirit moves me, a few of the experiences of my later years.

It is the custom of good Americans to bestow, somewhat in the Chinese fashion, a kind of posthumous nobility upon their ancestors; to transform the farmers and small tradesmen from whom they are almost all descended into scions of great, historic English houses. This innocent exercise of the fancy produces a good deal of blameless satisfaction, since there is indeed, I believe, a more abiding sense of noble birth to be derived from false than from authentic pedigrees; and plebeian blood flows with a more consciously aristocratic thrill through the veins of those who have dyed it in the azure of their own imaginations.

It is not for me, at least, to reprobate such delusions, for was I not nourished in my youth upon them? Had not certain elderly and imaginative members of my family succeeded, after long meditation, in adorning the mediocrity of their circumstances with at least one escutcheon, in tracing one portion of their line to aristocratic sources?

Of the plebeian lineage and name of Smith they could indeed make little; the Smiths were only too plainly a race of Yorkshire yeoman farmers, who, becoming Quakers, had emigrated to New Jersey in the time of William Penn, and, settling in the quiet town of Burlington on the Delaware, had engaged in commerce with the West Indies, watching the broad river for the arrival of small brigantines or “snows,” which sailed thither, laden with the products of the South. But one of them in the eighteenth century, my grandfather’s grandfather, with the respectable name of John Smith, had married a daughter of the secretary whom William Penn had brought to Pennsylvania and left there as his representative.

This secretary, James Logan, was, so history says, the son of a schoolmaster of Scottish descent at Lurgan in the north of Ireland. When the troubles of the civil war drove the family to Bristol, young Logan was apprenticed to a linen draper, but became afterwards a master in the school his father started there. This father belonged to a respectable Scottish family and neither he nor his son claimed a nobler derivation. In the creative imagination of their descendants in America, however, they became members of a noble and famous race, the Logans of Restalrig, and owners of that Fast Castle which was described by Scott in The Bride of Lammermoor as the house of Ravenswood. One of the Logans had gone to Palestine as a Crusader, to convey thither the heart of Robert Bruce, and another had been hanged, centuries later, for his participation in the Gowrie Conspiracy.

This background of crusades and crimes, with imaginary castles and gallows in the distance, shed a kind of glamour on the lives of these mild Quakers, who, in spite of the Quaker ban on worldly fiction, must, it appears, have been reading Waverley Novels on the sly. And was it not for them all perfectly authentic? Had not one of them crossed the Atlantic and made a special pilgrimage to Scotland, and there, on the spot, when visiting the estate of this famous family, been overcome by a profound conviction of its truth? Was not the heart of Bruce which adorned the arms of the Restalrig family (arms which James Logan had never dreamt of assuming)—was not this bleeding heart splashed upon the note paper and engraved upon the silver of the family in Philadelphia? What genealogist could demand, what documents could provide, more convincing evidence than this?

These imagined glories rather obscured in the eyes of his descendants their ancestor’s real distinction; for William Penn’s secretary had become the most remarkable inhabitant of the English colonies during the first half of the eighteenth century. Remaining in Pennsylvania as the agent for William Penn and his sons, he held in turn every important office in that commonwealth. He was the master of many languages, and an authority also on mathematics and astronomy, and as a botanist he made an important contribution to the theory of the sexuality of plants. He corresponded with learned men all over Europe, and collected the finest library in America, containing all the best books on history, on art and geography, of the time, as well as all the Latin and Greek classics, including Bentley’s editions. He transformed Philadelphia in fact into the Athens of America, as it was called; and it was thither that Benjamin Franklin fled in his youth from a less cultivated Boston. Of Franklin and his printing press he was one of the earliest patrons, and Franklin printed for him two of his translations from Cicero, in one of which, described as the first translation made in America from the classics, the young printer expressed a hope that “this first translation of a classic in the Western world might be a happy omen that Philadelphia shall become the seat of the Muses.” This hope, I may note in passing, has not been yet fulfilled, though my ancestor did his best to prepare for the advent of the Nine to the Quaker city, by bequeathing his books to the Philadelphia Library which Benjamin Franklin founded there.

In the meantime his son-in-law, the John Smith I have mentioned, occupied himself in a prosperous commerce with the West Indies, exchanging grain, lumber, and other products of the North for sugar, rum, and molasses from the South. These were transported in his own vessels, built in his own shipyard at Burlington, and sailing from the wharf there which he owned. After publishing in Philadelphia, where he dwelt, a pamphlet in defense of the pacifist principles of the Quakers, he had retired to the family home at Burlington, up the river, and spent the rest of his life in reading and, as his grandson, my grandfather, put it, in “copying into commonplace books those sentiments and sententious remarks of favorite authors which he approved.” This taste for copying out was shared by his family and descendants. His brother, Samuel Smith, compiled from many documents a history of New Jersey which is still, I believe, cited by those who are interested in that subject; his son, who inherited the name of John Smith, inherited this taste also and filled several volumes with the lives and memorable sayings of New Jersey Quakers; his grandson, who was my grandfather, published many colonial documents; and I too, with the various documents and anthologies I have published, have not failed in carrying on this family tradition.

I like to think of that lot of quiet and bookish old forbears, among whom was at least one minor poet, settled on the banks of the Delaware among the wigwams and papooses of the Indians, thinking their mild Quaker thoughts in their meetinghouses, or listening to the preaching of John Woolman, who also lived at Burlington, and was their friend and neighbor. They seem to have been content to spend their lives in this Quaker Arcadia, fishing in the broad river which flowed past their farms, or reading the books which trickled over to them across the Atlantic, and copying out sententious extracts from those eighteenth-century volumes.

My grandfather, however, John Jay Smith, left Burlington as a boy, and sailing down the Delaware to Philadelphia, establishing himself there first as a chemist’s assistant, soon began to engage in other activities. Among the stipulations which James Logan had made in bequeathing his books to the Philadelphia Library was one to the effect that his eldest son should be the librarian, and his eldest grandson in the male line should succeed; and should the male line fail, the position should be offered to the eldest of the female line. To my grandfather this appointment was given; he occupied it many years, and was succeeded in it by one of my uncles. James Logan’s will was, I believe, invalid; the position thus dubiously bequeathed was a modest one; but since it was held for more than fifty years by members of our family, our claim to this humble librarianship came to be regarded, at least by ourselves, as conferring a kind of dim distinction; and it was originally intended that I should succeed my uncle (who had no son) in this, as we imaginatively designated it, the only hereditary office in America.

It was from this old Philadelphia Library, an eighteenth-century building in the neighborhood of Independence Square, with its air of venerable antiquity,—for the few old buildings found in a new country seem to possess a more antique aspect than anything in Europe,—it was in this old library, long since destroyed, with its dim interior and old folios and bewigged portraits, that I received my first bookish impressions, being often taken there as a little boy, and given a book to read by my uncle who presided over the silence of that unfrequented institution. Thus in my earliest years I became familiar with the atmosphere of old libraries, and the dim light that dwells in them, and fell under the spell which they cast upon those who haunt their precincts—that quietness, that hush of the human spirit in the ghostly presence of its own immortality, stored up in rows of ancient volumes and great folios of the classics.

But I anticipate, perhaps, my more romantic impressions of this kind. It was in this library at least that, encouraged by my librarian uncle, I first formed the habit of reading. What that habit might grow into was impressed upon me by my occasional visits to the aged ex-librarian, my grandfather, at the house to which he had retired in the Quaker suburb of Germantown, where he lived to a great old age, spending his days in his study upstairs, with his gouty toe on a cushion, reading and reading all day long. “I believe it may be safely said,” he wrote of himself towards the end of his life, “that for forty years, eight hours of every day, or nearly so, have been employed in reading of the most miscellaneous character, often the best books, but too often the lighter kind.” When I happened, not long ago, upon this sentence in my grandfather’s Recollections, I was struck by the accurate description it gave of my own existence, which for the last forty years or so has been spent, like his, in miscellaneous reading, and often too, like his, “of the lighter kind.” The analogy was a curious one; indeed, I found it more curious than pleasing; for recalling my visits to that old gentleman, I turned my eyes on my elderly self, where I sat reading upstairs, and saw myself for a disconcerting moment. And then I went on reading.

It might have increased my awe of my grandfather had I known, as I now know, that he had every right to the designation of a retired pirate, since a large portion of his earlier years had been spent in the occupation of pirating the works of famous English writers. Indeed, he has some claim to be the earliest of these pirates, since, as the Dictionary of American Biography states, he suggested in 1832 to Adam Waldie, a Philadelphia printer, the republication, in the absence of international copyright, of important foreign books, and became the editor of Waldie’s Select Circulating Library, in which many English books were reprinted for American readers, without any thought of remunerating their authors. This became finally an international crime and scandal; and if I cannot boast of descent from any Scottish criminals, I may at least claim that my grandfather was the first of American literary pirates. But he incurred no blame among his contemporaries, and writes freely of these activities in his printed Recollections. The thing, however, which was the subject of reprobation in his lifetime, and which, reaching my ears in dark references and whispers, much increased the terror of my visits to him, was the dreadful fact that he was an “Unbeliever.” What exactly an Unbeliever was, and what he disbelieved in, I had not the dimmest notion, but I knew that his future was thereby involved in the most dreadful consequences; and I remember a sense of the removal of an impending calamity when it was generally agreed that, by a deathbed conversion, this dark cloud had been lifted from the old gentleman’s prospects in the future world.

More definite and more terrifying is the memory of one dreadful occasion when, not long before his death, my grandfather, who seldom left his study, hobbled downstairs and, establishing himself in his drawing-room, began to denounce the age, uttering sentiments of a kind that sounded incredible in my ears. The theme of his discourse—it is a theme which is familiar, perhaps too familiar, to me now—was a general castigation of the time in which he found himself, and a diatribe in especial against America, against the conditions of life and the democratic institutions of our land of freedom. Although his invective seemed to have no relation to life in America as I knew it, yet it went on for long reverberating beneath all the optimisms and enthusiasms and patriotic beliefs of my boyish years.

Thus to children at odd moments come, as through windows left unexpectedly ajar, intimations of the unknown aspects of the world they live in. In my grandfather’s house there was another half-open window, through which I would sometimes peep with wondering eyes.

The life of the Quakers in Philadelphia, where we lived as children, was that of a secluded community, carefully entrenched and guarded from all contact with what we called the “World”—that dangerous world of wickedness which, we vaguely knew, lay all about us. With that world and its guilty splendors we had no contact; of the fashionable American aristocracy (and every population has its aristocracy and fashion) we were not members; and I can make no claim, as Americans abroad are apt to claim, that I belong to one of what are called America’s first families. With members of this greater world, like Edith Wharton and Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, I became acquainted only after I had come to live in Europe.

No, we spent our youth amid the evangelical plainness and the simple ways of living of the stricter Philadelphia Friends. And yet, those richly carved and velvet-covered chairs which adorned my grandfather’s drawing-room at Germantown, those antlers which hung on the walls of his suburban residence—these seemed to tell a tale of richer experience, and tinged for me with gayer colors the past history and the European expeditions of the old gentleman who sat reading upstairs.

The theme of the American abroad has given rise to a considerable literature in recent years; its earlier documents are less well known, and it was with a good deal of interest that I recently read my grandfather’s account of his experiences in Europe, and the authentic history of those trophies which had so impressed me as a boy. In my grandfather a tendency, which he bequeathed to his descendants, manifested itself at an early date, to make “jaunts,” as he called them, to Europe; and in 1845 he had gone to England on a sailing packet, accompanied by my father. On his return he published in two volumes, under the title of A Summer’s Jaunt across the Waters, an account of this journey. To boast of the distinguished acquaintances they have made abroad is one of the most legitimate satisfactions of returned Americans, and this was plainly one of the motives which inspired the composition of my grandfather’s volumes.

The Philadelphia Quakers had always kept up a connection with the members of their sect in England, and this connection was frequently renewed by the visits of English Friends on holy missions. Some of these visiting Friends belonged to the highest sphere of the Quaker world—for all religious communities, however holy, are stratified in social layers of increasing splendor—and the impressiveness of their doctrine was much augmented by a sense of the plain yet brilliant world in which they lived, a world of Barclays and Gurneys and other rich English Quaker families which, like a Quaker Versailles, holy and yet splendid, shone for us across the Atlantic with a kind of glory—a glory which, to tell the truth, has never completely faded from my eyes.

My grandfather, though not interested in their doctrines, was by no means indifferent to the country houses and opulent tables of these English Quakers; he tells of dining with Samuel Gurney at Ham House, of meeting Elizabeth Fry, and of hearing her, in her feeble but honored old age, make a beautiful prayer from her large mahogany armchair in the meeting she attended. He tells also of being welcomed among a company of English Friends by a fellow Philadelphian and youthful acquaintance, Eliza P. Kirkbride, who had married, as his third wife, the eminent and opulent Joseph John Gurney.

But the great glory of this jaunt abroad of my grandfather was his visit to Stoke Park, then the residence of Granville Penn, William Penn’s great-grandson and heir. Granville Penn, learning, according to my grandfather’s account,—and I dare say by a note from my grandfather himself,—that a descendant of William Penn’s secretary had come from Pennsylvania to England, sent him an invitation to Stoke Poges, which was accepted with alacrity. He relates how an elegant family carriage with liveried servants met him at the station; how he was conducted to the noble family mansion of the Penn family, where he spent some days, and in whose deer park he shot the buck of which the antlers afterwards adorned his suburban home; how his host drove him about the neighborhood in a coach with four horses, and took him to Oxford, where they dined at a raised table in the hall of Christ Church, and where, he tells with undisguised elation, all the guests except Mr. Penn and himself were lords.

These were indeed rich experiences; encouraged by them, my grandfather, five years after his return to America, started out on a still more glorious jaunt abroad. The great Crystal Palace Exhibition was then in preparation, and he had the happy idea of traveling to Europe as a sort of self-appointed and unofficial envoy to arrange, if possible, for the transport of this exhibition, or a portion of it, across the Atlantic after it had run its course in England. His purpose, as he states in his memoirs, was in part at least the utility to America of this plan, but his main intention, as he frankly admits, was to gain by this means “an introduction to men of mark abroad, and a sight of foreign life behind the scenes.” Though the public part of his scheme came to no fruition, his private aim was brilliantly successful. Procuring a letter of recommendation from the Secretary of State at Washington, he proceeded to London, where he was received by Lord Granville and made the acquaintance of a certain General Gray, whom he describes as “a most elegant and portly gentleman.” In London also he was privileged to witness the Duchess of Sutherland purchase a rug, which was indeed a sight of foreign life behind the scenes. He sat at tables, he tells his descendants, “of the most recherché character”; and once when the royal box at the Opera had been lent to someone of his acquaintance, and he was invited to share it, he had reason to believe, he tells us, that he was mistaken by some of the opera-goers for a foreign prince who was then on a visit to England.

Most “gratifying” of all his experiences (“gratifying” and “elegant” are favorite words in his vocabulary) was his reception by Queen Victoria’s uncle, King Leopold, in Belgium. The King of the Belgians, who was much interested in the proposed London Exhibition, wished to discuss the project of its transference to America; but that thrifty monarch seems on this occasion to have done a good bit of business on his own account, since he induced my grandfather to purchase from a workshop of his own two expensive and elaborately carved chairs, facsimiles of the chair in which the King was wont to seat his own royal person. These splendid chairs, reeking with the bad taste of the Louis-Philippe period, my grandfather conveyed home with him in great triumph on the new steamer, the Atlantic, on which steamer one of the fellow passengers was the singer Jenny Lind, who “was most affable, and danced and sang the whole trip, the weather being admirable.”

The echo of these glories, the sight of these antlers and royal chairs, must have seemed evidences of a “gayness” they could not but deplore to the stricter Quakers of Philadelphia, to whom my mother’s family belonged, and among whom my sisters and I spent our childish years. But into the hearts of these most unspotted of the Chosen People had not the spirit of the world found an entrance, though unsuspected by themselves? No dreams, indeed, of dining with lords, of opera boxes, or of being mistaken for foreign princes, troubled, I am sure, their meditations in their silent Meetings; but when some opulent Friend from England came to preach the gospel to them, was not the impressiveness of his or her doctrine tinged and deepened by a sense of the sanctified splendor of such English Friends? Had they not indeed among them a living representative of that splendor in the Eliza Kirkbride who had reigned at Earlham, and with whom my grandfather had dined in England, and who, after the decease of her husband,—that eminent evangelist, Joseph John Gurney,—had returned to her native city, where, preaching with great acceptance, she now reigned as a kind of Quaker queen, with many courtiers to listen to her holy boastings? Among these courtiers, one of the most assiduous was my mother’s mother, Friend Mary Whitall, who was in our childhood always holding up before us the figure of Friend Gurney as the glass of Quaker fashion, and the very mould of form among the stricter Friends.

Thus into my boyish heart the spirit of the World found its entrance in various disguises, and intimations were also not wanting of those other enemies of our souls, the Flesh and the Devil.

It has become of late the fashion to speak with great frankness on sex matters, and many eminent authors dwell with especial emphasis on the first awakenings in them of a consciousness of this kind. Why should I not follow their example? These awakenings often come to innocent youth in troubled ways, and my first awareness of the allurements of what we call the Flesh was derived from circumstances of an unusual nature. Barnum’s Circus came to Philadelphia in my boyhood, rousing considerable excitement in the youth of that quiet city; and among the Quakers the question was much debated whether their children should be allowed to witness this entertainment. While it was admitted on the one hand that the sight of the elephants and the other exotic animals would help to enhance their conception of the wonders of creation, there were grave fears on the other hand that the spectacle of the scantily clad female acrobats on the tightropes might sully the innocence of their childish minds. The compromise finally arrived at, at least in our family, was that the children should be taken to the circus and allowed to see the animals, but should sit with closed eyes while the acrobats were performing.

So there we sat, a row of Quaker children, staring with all our eyes at the performing elephants, but with our organs of vision closed and our hands before them during the less seemly interludes. But one little Quaker boy permitted himself a guilty peep through his fingers, and gazed on a show of muscular limbs moving, slowly moving, in pink tights. What he was gazing at was, he knew, the spectacle of Sin; and so striking was the impression that his concept of that word became colored in his imagination for a long time with the pinkness of those slowly moving legs. It was only long afterwards that he came to understand why he had been forbidden to gaze upon them, and the grave danger he might have thereby incurred.

While notions of the World and the Flesh reached me in hints that I hardly comprehended, I had no doubts about the Devil: his activities were present to my apprehension in visible forms, about which there could be no mistake. The godly community of Philadelphia Quakers, going their ways and attending to their affairs in peace and quietness, would, to an observer from outside, have seemed a uniform community of pious people, all dressed in the same garb, all speaking the same language, all living in the same houses, all sitting in the same meditative silence, or listening to the same doctrines in the same square, unadorned meetinghouses. To such a superficial observer, William Penn’s ideal of brotherly love, which he had expressed in the name of the city he had founded, would indeed have seemed to have been realized among them. As a matter of fact, however, this pious folk was divided into two bitterly hostile races, each of which regarded the other with holy abhorrence. There were two sets of meetinghouses, two sets of burial places, two orders of preachers of the Quaker faith; and between the adherents of one sect and those of another no relations could ever occur. This gulf was the result of a doctrinal earthquake which early in the nineteenth century had shaken the foundations of Quakerism in America and split it into two bodies—the orthodox sect on one side of the gulf, who clung to the stricter Trinitarian theology, and on the other the followers of Elias Hicks. Elias Hicks seems to have been much more like one of the primitive Quakers than their respectable and orthodox successors. The decorums, or even ceremonies they had adopted as they grew in worldly prosperity, he rejected, along with the orthodox doctrines which had come to prevail among them. The true Christian religion, the old man preached (he lived to be nearly ninety), consisted in neither rites nor sermons nor Sundays, but in the love of God and of our neighbors, in the Inner Light, and the ideal aspirations of the soul. The blood of Christ which cleanses us from sin was, he declared, not His material blood. At the great Yearly Meeting of Philadelphia in which the schism originated, he made use of these words, “The blood of Christ—the blood of Christ, why, my friends, the actual blood of Christ in itself is no more effectual than the blood of bulls and goats—not a bit more, not a bit.” These words were followed by a great tumult. Hundreds rose to their feet, canes were pounded on the floor. Many left the meeting, more remained with flushed faces and angry eyes. This was the definite beginning of the great split and separation—the yawning of that gulf which opened between the orthodox Quakers, who accepted the statement of the Bible, “It is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul,” and the followers of Elias Hicks, who took a more allegorical and therefore Socinian view. At the time of the division these two factions fought each other like Quaker demons, quarreling over their meetinghouses and burial places, and digging up their dead to save them from pollution, and these quarrels had left behind them a legacy of undying hate.

Both my father’s and my mother’s families were adherents of the orthodox or conservative party, and Hicksite Quakers were to my boyish apprehensions undoubtedly nothing less than children of the Devil. Even now, when I see my friend John Balderston, I shudder a little at the thought that though Samuel Kite, one of the most orthodox of the preachers in Germantown Meeting, was his grandfather, he himself played as a child with Hicksite boys in the street. But he was a bad boy, I fear, from his birth, and that he should end up at Hollywood need not surprise us. I remember climbing the wall that surrounded one of the Hicksite meetinghouses, and gazing in on those precincts with all the horror of one who gazes into Hell. Never since have I looked upon any object with such feelings of abomination.

This theological horror was accompanied, among the orthodox at least, by an immense sense of social superiority: ours were the high places, we felt, in this world as well as in the next. This feeling that the Hicksites were outcasts and untouchables and social pariahs, though it had no foundation in fact, for they were as well off and as well-descended as we were, and probably a more enlightened and cultivated set of people—this sense of social superiority is the main religious feeling which I still retain; and even now, when, as sometimes happens, I meet in London Philadelphians with the taint in their veins of Hicksite blood, I seem to know them at once, as by a kind of instinct, by a subtly mingled sense of theological and social repugnance, which I find it extremely difficult to overcome.

My grandfather had married a Rachel Pearsall, of a Quaker family in Long Island, and my father, Robert Pearsall Smith, was, by his marriage in 1851 to my mother, Hannah Whitall, introduced into surroundings and circumstances different from those of his own family. His wife’s father, John Whitall, was descended from another, more pious and less bookish line of New Jersey Quakers, being the grandson of that rather terrific Ann Whitall, of whose old religious journal I have written elsewhere. He had run away to sea as a boy, and, sailing before the mast on East Indian voyages, had become the captain of a merchantman at the age of twenty-four. On retiring from the sea he purchased a glass factory in New Jersey, and founded a manufacturing business which, owing to the admirable output of glass bottles, had prospered with the years, and indeed still prospers. My father, after several unsuccessful business adventures, had, owing to his marriage to my mother, been given a partnership in this firm.

My father was a man of fine presence, and of a sanguine, enthusiastic temperament, too impulsive to manage his own affairs by himself; however, being restrained by the caution of his cautious partners, his gifts of imagination were made to contribute to the firm’s prosperity. He was, above all, a magnificent salesman; and traveling all over the United States, and offering the firm’s wares to the chemists of the rapidly expanding Republic, he exercised upon those apothecaries the gifts of persuasion and blandishment, almost of hypnotization, which were destined later, in European and more exalted spheres, to produce some startling results. However, before he undertook these journeys, he had been placed for some years in charge of the glass factories in New Jersey; and it was in a small New Jersey town, with the romantic name of Millville, that I was born in 1865.

My earliest recollections are tinged with the gleam of those great fiery furnaces which I used to gaze at from a distance. To my infant apprehensions the whole alarming picture, with the half-naked glass blowers moving like devils among the flames, presented a vivid image of what I believed might very likely be my future fate. For partly owing to the more serious religious tone of my mother’s family, but still more (for the darker aspects of Christian doctrine were not much dwelt on by good Quakers) to the lava stream of evangelical revivalism into which my parents were swept away, the notion of Hell formed a fiery background to my childish thoughts; I was always expecting, half in terror, half in thrilled anticipation, to hear the blast of the Last Trumpet, to see the earth and heavens collapse and the sinners led off to their abodes of Eternal Torment.

The old doctrines of the corruption of man and his inevitable doom unless he finds salvation in the conviction of sin, the gift of grace, and a sudden catastrophic, miraculous conversion—this evangelical theology, though I was nourished on it in my youth, and tasted its joys and terrors, has now become utterly alien and strange to me. I cannot reconstruct in imagination that melodramatic world of hopes and terrors. I know, of course, that this body of convictions has an important place in religious history, and that, as a scheme of salvation, millions have fervently believed in it.

My parents, dissatisfied with what they considered the spiritual deadness of Quaker doctrine, welcomed the new outburst in America of revivalism, into which they plunged as into a great flood of life-giving water; and their evangelical activities formed for many years the absorbing interest of their lives. They went to revivalist meetings, they preached, they both wrote innumerable tracts, they converted souls, they lived in constant expectation of the Day of Judgment; and this highly colored world, with the heights of Heaven above them and the abysses of Hell beneath—this, and not their commonplace and commercial surroundings, formed the environment in which they lived with such feverish excitement. We children naturally caught the infection of this excitement; and were encouraged to embark in our tender years upon these spiritual adventures.

There can be no doubt that I was born a vessel of wrath, full to the brim of that Original Sin we all inherit from that crude apple that diverted Eve. I was, as my mother’s letters of the time bear witness, greedy, given to fits of temper, and, as she expressed it, a gorilla for screaming. Against this old Adam in me one of the kindest and the best of mothers strove with all her strength, but strove in vain. “Logan and I,” she writes when I was four months old, “had our first regular battle to-day, and he came off conqueror, though I don’t think he knew it. I whipped him till he was actually black and blue, and until I could not whip him any more, and he never gave up one single inch.” In this state of sin I remained till I was four years old, when, however, I was rescued from it by my elder sister, now Mrs. Bernard Berenson, who, at the age of six, following the example of our parents, began the career of an evangelist, which she has since abandoned. I, who was then two years younger than herself, was the first object of her holy zeal. One memorable day she and a like-minded maiden named Fanny Potts led me to our bathroom, and there they prayed and wrestled with my carnal nature, until the great miracle of Conversion was accomplished in me.

“O Lord,” prayed the future Mrs. Berenson, “please make little Logan a good boy; and don’t let him tell any more lies!”

And then little Fanny Potts also lifted up her voice in prayer. “Lord, please give Logan a new heart.”

Their prayer was granted, and a new heart was bestowed upon little Logan. But this heart, though purged of all former sin, was by no means immune from temptation in the future. He had in fact reached on this occasion the state of Justification only, not that of Sanctification, which, according to evangelical theology, renders us immune from sin. Again and again Satan would enter into his heart, and he would fall into sin again. In vain were his efforts to keep good by the force of his own will alone; and it was only after three years of spiritual struggle, lasting from the age of four to that of seven, that he renounced these Pelagian attempts to conquer Sin and Satan by his own carnal struggles, and realized that only by Grace, and unmerited Grace alone, and by no “deadly doing,” could he attain the conquest that he sought.

All these facts I learn from a tract of my father’s which I recently found among some old papers. The history of my struggle and salvation I had half forgotten, though I could still remember my infant agonies. This tract had an unusually large circulation, and, penetrating to the Western districts of America, made a powerful impression on the remaining tribes of Red Indians, who were converted by it in their thousands. Such, at least, was our family legend; and I remember the pride I took in the conversions thus accomplished; and believing, as I then believed, that each of us should wear as stars in our diadems in Heaven the souls which we had saved on earth, I took a holy delight in the prospect of shining in the courts of Heaven with the radiance of these rubies of the West.

I sometimes wonder if the children I see to-day playing about partake of the rich experiences of my childhood. Do they feel that they are disporting themselves on a thin crust above the flames of Hell; and when they are taken home do their mothers beat them black and blue to drive out the old Adam from within their tender skins? Do they strive, as we used to strive, to keep out Satan from their hearts, and pass their young years tormented as I was by the grim fact of sin and the dire necessity of grace? If not, many pains are no doubt spared them, but many joys and exaltations also. The glorious certainty that they are sanctified among millions doomed to Eternal Torment can never fill their hearts with holy pride, nor can they rejoice—as all my life I have rejoiced—in the consciousness that they can commit no wrong. I may do, I have undoubtedly done, things that were foolish, tactless and dishonest, and what the world would consider wrong, but since I attained the state of Sanctification at the age of seven I have never felt the slightest twinge of conscience, never experienced for one second the sense of sin.