J. WILBUR CHAPMAN A BIOGRAPHY CHAPTER I LINEAGE THROUGH heredity our ancestors may enrich or impoverish us, but the law of heredity defies uniformity and fails to account for endless variations. Out of common clay all men are formed: some to be vessels of honour; others to be vessels of dishonour. We cannot appreciate the worth of the one or apprehend the use of the other without consideration of the mystic force that moulds the clay into the form it takes. The ethics of the spirit are not less mysterious than the ethics of the dust. Ruskin has disclosed the weird potentialities in the mud we trample under foot. But by whom or by what is this potentiality controlled and evolved? By whose ingenuity may the atoms of this mud be separated and then combined into the sapphire, the diamond, and the ruby set in a star of snow? Organic chemistry may be defined as the chemistry of the carbon compounds. But who frames and executes the law that determines whether the carbon compound shall be a bit of graphite or a gem for a royal coronet? Equally arresting are the questions relative to the evolutionary forces of the spirit. Biography, the writing of a life, means more than a superficial survey of a field. It involves the sending of thought-shafts, where no eye can penetrate, deep down into intellectual processes, into dominating emotional forces, far aloft into the celestial realms of spirit guidance, backward in perhaps a futile search for natural causes, and onward thence to discern the index finger of God pointing the way over which the feet are to travel. The study of a genealogical table, however alluring, is freighted with dangerous possibilities. Blue blood, like the more common kind, has its disturbing whirlpools. Yet all of us are more or less curious to learn something of our lineage. We ponder over the hieroglyphics of old tombstones and we dig into the musty records of past generations in the illusive hope that, somewhere along the line, we may discover a distinguished ancestor to whom, if we are not quite willing to credit our fame, we may charge our folly. Moody used to tell of a man who, in tracing the line of his ancestry, ran up against a horse thief, which discouraged all further research. Yet even such a man might have derived comfort from the suggestion once made by Spurgeon that, were the best of us willing to go back far enough, we should find our common ancestor to have been a gardener under indictment for stealing his Master's fruit. Genealogical trees with trunks "gnarled and twisted into myriad strange forms" mark the channels through which the blood of human nature pours. But mere blood, patrician or plebeian, is neither guaranty of greatness nor antecedent of littleness. The scion of royalty is often |