nt people welcomed "The Education of Henry Adams."
Unconsciously to most of us, it showed elaborately what we talked about
in our graduation essays and what we believed in a vague way--that
education consists in putting value on the circumstances of life, and
regarding each circumstance as a step either forward or backward in
one's educational progress. This is the lesson which young Americans
are taught by Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton-Porter; and which
Samuel Smiles beat into the heads of the English. Henry Adams's lesson,
however, is not taught in the same way at all. There is no preaching; it
is a series of pictures, painted by a gentleman, with a sure hand, who
looks on the phenomena of life as no other American has ever looked on
them, or, at least, as no other American has ever expressed them. The
judicious and the sensitive and the nicely discerning may shrink with
horror from me when I say that I put at once "The Education of Henry
Adams," for my delectation, beside the "Apologia pro Vita Sua" of
Cardinal Newman!

There is the same delicate egoism in both; there is the same reasonable
and well-bred reticence. There is one great difference, however; while
Cardinal Newman ardently longs for truth and is determined to find it,
Henry Adams seems not quite sure whether truth is worth searching for or
not. And yet Henry Adams is more human, more interesting than Cardinal
Newman, for, while Newman is almost purely intellectual and so much
above the reach of most of us, Adams is merely intelligent--but
intelligent enough to discern the richness of life, and mystical enough
to long for a religious key to its meaning. Newman not only longs, but
reasons and acts. It was not the definition of the unity of God that
troubled Adams. It was the question of His personality. The existence of
pain and wretchedness in the world was a bar to his understanding that a
personal Christ should be equal in divinity with God, in fact, God
Himself.

Newman, who was more spiritual, saw that pain was no barrier to faith in
a personal God. I am speaking now only from my own point of view; others
who like to read both Newman and Adams may look on this view as entirely
negligible. What other American than Adams would have so loved without
understanding the spirit of Saint Francis d'Assisi:

Vast swarms of Americans knew the Civil War only by school history,
as they knew the story of Cromwell or Cicero, and were as familiar