indifferent and ignorant as to questions of pedigree, and
accepted with sturdy dignity an inheritance of hard work and the
privileges of poverty, leaving the same bequest to their
descendants. And poverty has its privileges. When there is very
little of the seen and temporal to intercept spiritual vision,
unseen and eternal realities are, or may be, more clearly beheld.

To have been born of people of integrity and profound faith in
God, is better than to have inherited material wealth of any
kind. And to those serious-minded, reticent progenitors of mine,
looking out from their lonely fields across the lonelier sea,
their faith must have been everything.

My father's parents both died years before my birth. My
grandmother had been left a widow with a large family in my
father's boyhood, and he, with the rest, had to toil early for a
livelihood. She was an earnest Christian woman, of keen
intelligence and unusual spiritual perception. She was supposed
by her neighbors to have the gift of "second sight"; and some
remarkable stories are told of her knowledge of distant events
while they were occurring, or just before they took place. Her
dignity of presence and character must have been noticeable.
A relative of mine, who as a very little child, was taken by her
mother to visit my grandmother, told me that she had always
remembered the aged woman's solemnity of voice and bearing, and
her mother's deferential attitude towards her: and she was so
profoundly impressed by it all at the time, that when they had
left the house, and were on their homeward path through the
woods, she looked up into her mother's face and asked in a
whisper, "Mother, was that God?"