Page:American Boy's Life of William McKinley.djvu/45

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was blessed with the best of mothers, a kind, loving woman, who could still be firm when the occasion demanded it, and who did all she could to bring him up a sober, upright, God-fearing, Christian man. We have seen how he attended Sunday School regularly and how he was rarely absent from the McKinley pew in church. When between fifteen and sixteen years of age he joined the Methodist Church, and in this faith he remained to the day of his death. But, as becomes a great statesman, he was broad in his views, and in later life numbered among his friends people of all religious beliefs.

It was a great day for William McKinley when he graduated from the Union School of Poland. He had studied hard to acquit