Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 85.djvu/7

 is advanced by some students of character that in what concerns the formation of the individual nature, the shaping and determination of it in the plastic stage, and especially in respect to the moral elements on which the stability and purpose of a man's life depend, a man is indebted to his mother, for good or for ill. The question is too subtle for argument,but so far as my own observation goes, it tends to a confirmation of the theory. I have often noticed, in children of friends, that in childhood the likeness to a mother was so vivid that one found no trace of the father, but that in maturity this likeness disappeared to give place to that of the father. In my own case, taking it for what it is worth, I can only wish that the mother's part had been more enduring; not that I regret the effect of my father's influence, but because I think my mother had some qualities from which my best are derived, and which I should like to see completely carried out in the life of a man, while I recognize in a certain vagarious tendency in my father the probably hereditary basis of the inconstancy of purpose and pursuit which may not have deprived my life of interest to others, but which has made it comparatively barren of practical result. As a study of a characteristic phase of New England life which has now entirely disappeared, I believe that a picture of my mother and her family will not be without interest.

My mother, Eliza Ward Maxson, was born in Newport, Rhode Island, as nearly as I can determine, in 1782, my father being seven years her senior. The childhood of both was therefore surrounded by the facts and associations of the war of American independence. My father in fact, as I have heard him say, was born under the rule of the King of England, and his father considered the Revolution so little justified that to the day of his death he refused to recognize the government of the United States; but, living a quiet life on his farm, he was never disturbed by the measures which exiled the noted and active Tories.

My mother's earliest recorded ancestor was a John Maxson, one of the band of Roger Williams, driven by the Puritans out of Massachusetts into the wilder parts of "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations," where they might worship God in the way their consciences dictated, free from the restrictions on the liberty of belief and practice imposed by the Pilgrim Fathers. There at last complete freedom of dissent was found, and one of the consequences was that the colony became a sort of field for Christian dialectics, where the most extreme doctrines on all points of Christian belief were discussed without more serious results of the odium theologicum than the building of many meeting houses and the multiplication of sects. Among these sects was one which played an important part in the local theology of that day, and for many years afterward, known as the Seventh-Day Bap-