The trend of Garfield’s mind could not have been other than deeply religious. The Ballous, for ten generations, had been preachers. No man could combine in himself the Puritan and Huguenot without being a true worshiper of God. On the other hand, while Puritans and Huguenots were at first religious sects, their struggles were with the civil power; so that each of them in time became the representative of the deepest political life of their respective nationalities. Through both father and mother, therefore, came a genius for politics and affairs of state; the conservatism of the sturdy Briton being quickened by the radicalism, the genius for reform which belongs to the mercurial Frenchman. From both parents would also come a liberality and breadth of mind, which distinguishes only a few great historic characters. The large, slow moving, good natured Garfields were by temperament far removed from bigotry; while the near ancestor of the mother had been excommunicated from the Baptist Church, because he thought God was merciful enough to save all mankind from the flames of ultimate perdition. In Garfield’s ancestry there was also a vein of military genius. The coat of arms, the militia captaincy of Benjamin Garfield, the affidavit of Abraham at Concord bridge, are the outcroppings on the father’s side. The mother was a near relative of General Rufus Ingalls; and her brother, for whom the President was named, was a brave soldier in the war of 1812. These, then, are some of the prophecies which had been spoken of the child that was born in the Garfield cabin in the fall of 1831. Future biographers will, perhaps, make more extended investigations, but we have seen something, in the language of the dead hero himself, “of those latent forces infolded in the spirit of the new-born child; forces that may date back centuries and find their origin in the life and thoughts and deeds of remote ancestors; forces, the germs of which, enveloped in the awful mystery of life, have been transmitted silently from generation to generation, and never perish.” As we pursue his history we will see these various forces cropping out in his career; at one time the scholar, at another, the preacher; at others, the soldier, the orator, or the statesman, but always, always the man.