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tax, I was allowed much more freedom in translation than was permitted the next morning when I read Homer; neither did we discuss

doctrines, for although it was with this same teacher that in our junior

year we studied Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews, committing all of it to

memory and analyzing and reducing it to doctrines within an inch of

our lives, we never allowed an echo of this exercise to appear at these

blessed Sunday morning readings. It was as if the disputatious Paul had

not yet been, for we always read from the Gospels. The regime of

Rockford Seminary was still very simple in the seventies. Each student

made her own fire and kept her own room in order. Sunday morning

was a great clearing up day, and the sense of having made immaculate

my own immediate surroundings, the consciousness of clean linen,

said to he close to the consciousness of a clean conscience, always mingles in my mind with these early readings. I certainly bore away with

me a lifelong enthusiasm for reading the Gospels in hulk, a whole one

at a time, and an insurmountable distaste for having them cut up into

chapter and verse, or for hearing the incidents in that wonderful Life

thus referred to as if it were merely a record.

My copy of the Greek testament had been presented to me by the

brother of our Greek teacher, Professor Blaisdell of Beloit College, a

true scholar in "Christian Ethics," as his department was called. I recall that one day in the summer after I left college —one of the black

days which followed the death of my father —this kindly scholar came

to see me in order to bring such comfort as he might and to inquire

how far I had found solace in the little hook he had given me so long

before. When I suddenly recall the village in which 1 was born, its

steeples and roofs look as they did that day from the hilltop where we

talked together, the familiar details smoothed out and merging, as it

were, into that wide conception of the universe, which for the moment swallowed up my personal grief or at least assuaged it with a realization that it was hut a drop in that "torrent of sorrow and anguish

and terror which flows under all the footsteps of man." This realization

of sorrow as the common lot, of death as the universal experience, was

the first comfort which my bruised spirit had received. In reply to my

impatience with the Christian doctrine of "resignation," that it implied that you thought of your sorrow only in its effect upon you and

were disloyal to the affection itself, I remember how quietly the Christian scholar changed his phraseology, saying that sometimes consola