Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

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ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
services upon the text: "Love is the fulfilling of the law."
He said in his sermon:
The man whose mortal remains lie before us beheved in the reign
of law in this world. He was my friend, and I knew much of his way
of thinking. He was a man in many ways of most unusual interest.
His surpassing characteristics were but little understood. He was
known as an educator in our common schools. His intellectual
attainments would have fitted him for a high place in our univer-
sities. But it is rather of the moral and spiritual side of the man I
would speak. It was that which chiefly attracted my interest. As
a lover of his kind, as a believer in essential right and justice, he
came to be known in the world of reform, of truth, and of equity
among men. ... He had looked out over life's evil social
conditions and his heart had been stirred to its depths for the sorrows
of men, brought upon them by the cruel and persistent selfishness
of the powerful. The agitation of his pitiful heart never ceased.
There was a forceful greatness of soul in him that would not give up
to the easy-going conclusions of so many, that these sorrows of men
had always existed and would always exist and could not be helped.
The spirit of the man was larger, grander, mightier than this. He
believed the very forces of God and nature were on his side, the side
of justice. We need not here and now consider the methods by
which he hoped to see unjust social conditions obliterated; what we
speak of is rather his full and perfect confidence in the possibility
not only of the amelioration of these conditions, but of their complete
remedy. For this, his confidence, I loved the mari, as I admired him
for his phenomenal mental ability and acquirements. It was
inspiring to hear him express with unqualified assurance his expectation
of the time when men should live together according to a law of
perfect altruism, of love and justice. To me it was the expression of
a confidence of the time when Christ's prayer, "Thy Kingdom
come," should be fulfilled.
For more than half a century I have preserved a letter
written by the hand of our mother. It lies before me now; the
writing is clear, though the paper is yellow. It was written to
me while I was at the Hunt's and she and father and Ida were
in Harrison. In it is what I would like to make the very keynote
of these voices from our past. The mother who wrote
this letter to me, her eldest daughter, was one in whom each
one of her children had the greatest confidence; we believed her
a loving, a wise, a true mother. I would like each one of her
posterity in particular to read the part she wrote for them whom