But for the constant demand the publishers have made upon him he would have been in financial discomfort more than once; and this regardless of the fact that in dress, house-rent, and other necessary objects of expenditure, his family have never practised any more extravagance than in matters of pure luxury. Their habit has been to have that which was required by the passing conditions of their life, and as good of its kind as they could afford, and stop there; and they have carried into the White House the same generous but quiet manner of living which characterized them outside.

Stories told about the President for the sake of making some particular trait conspicuous, often overshoot the mark. Not a few of these deal with him on his religious side. A clergyman, for example, is quoted as telling how Mr. Roosevelt, in the full bloom of his early manhood, left the Protestant Episcopal communion "because he had tired of its inanities," and was "attracted into the Reformed [Dutch] church by its robust virility." This narrative is interesting, but it lacks certain essentials of veracious history: Mr. Roosevelt could not have quitted a church with which he never was connected, nor could he have left it to enter a church of which

UNIVERSAL CHRISTIANITY

he was already a member. The records show that he joined the Middle Collegiate church, in Second Avenue near Seventh Street, New York City, on December 2, 1874, when he was sixteen years old, and never withdrew from that connection. His father and grandfather were members of the same church, so that in a sense he may be considered to have been born into it.

Mrs. Roosevelt was brought up a Protestant Episcopalian, and at various times in their married life, while moving from place to place, they have attended Sunday services together. Since their last advent in Washington they have divided, the President going to a Reformed church in Fifteenth Street, about ten minutes' walk from the White House, and Mrs. Roosevelt to old St. John's, just across Lafayette Square. Some of the children accompany one parent and some the other.

Although the clergyman quoted went a good way astray on his facts, the idea he was trying to bring out was correct, that Mr. Roosevelt is contemptuous of mere formalism in religion as everywhere else. With ecclesiastical polemics he has as little patience as with cant. His name belongs somewhere in Abou Ben Adhem's list, with those whose first thought is practical hu

manity; and by this standard he measures the religious quality in others. It makes absolutely no difference to him whether the men with whom he has to do are Jews or Gentiles, Catholics or Protestants, Christians, Deists or Agnostics, as long as they live up to the best that is in them: he is with them then in spirit, whatever form or absence of form may distinguish their worship. He has no use for the devotee who praises God in the abstract and neglects his fellow man in the concrete. He professes Christianity himself, as he professes Republicanism, not because it is the only faith that draws good men to it, but because it contains most that appeals to him; his is the sort of Christianity that embraces whatever is best in all religions, and derives its vitality from its moral rather than its ritual code.

CHAPTER XIX

CONCLUSION

Unique feature of Mr. Roosevelt's career-Purpose of this review -The future.

IN one respect the career of Theodore Roosevelt is almost unique in our modern public life: the American people have watched him grow. Most of his contemporaries who have become powerful and famous have burst upon the notice of their fellow countrymen within a very short time of the attainment of their highest ambitions.Lincoln had cut but a small figure in Congress before his nomination for President. Grant was earning a precarious livelihood in the back country when called to his first command in the civil war. Cleveland compassed the whole stride from mayor of an interior city to President-elect of the United States in two years. But thousands of citizens in remote quarters of the Union had heard, as long ago as 1883, of that curio in rough-and-tumble politics:

the young "dude lawmaker" at Albany whose speeches were verbal cataracts bursting through clenched teeth, who hunted jobbery in termtime and grizzly bears in recess, and who was not too good or nice to hobnob with his colleagues of all classes.

They had their interest quickened when they saw this extraordinary youngster of twenty-six heading his State delegation to the Republican national convention at Chicago, to resist in vain the nomination of Blaine for President. They recognized in him the true popular leader when he coined for the Erie Railroad ring and their corrupt coparceners the title, "the wealthy criminal classes." They saw him come to the front in national affairs when as Civil Service Commissioner, the war-club of reform in hand, he dealt blow after blow on the heads of bigger men till he had made them respect the Commission and bow to its authority. They saw him later bring order into a chaotic naval establishment, and prepare it for instant service in a war which was to restore its old prestige. They read of the Rough Riders' campaign, and abated none of their liking for its author because, in his youthful enthusiasm, he felt as if the whole conquest of Cuba had been the