There was a deep undercurrent of religious reverence in Senator Kern which did not flout itself upon the surface. Reference has been made to his conversion at a revival meeting during his boyhood when for a time he became ardent in his devotion to religious duties, and while this phase passed, he retained through life a profound reverence for sacred things. During the greater portion of his life, while retaining his membership with the Presbyterian church, he was not much given to church attendance. This was not due to any compromise with his faith. He was not interested in dogma or creed. He cared little for the outer manifestations of the spirit of worship. He seldom quoted from the Bible in his speeches and had a horror of the politician who attempts to capitalize his religion. The thought of the life beyond was to him too solemn for conversational purposes. He never or seldom discussed it. But he never permitted himself to doubt it. His veneration for the cloth asserted itself less in tributes to the dignity of the clergy than in his occasional excoriations of members of the clergy who lowered their dignity and compromised their religion by lending themselves to the support of inhumanity. For the minister from Lawrence, Massachusetts, who appeared for the mill owners at the strike hearings in Washington to gravely assure the committee that there was a good moral effect in throwing children of twelve and thirteen into factories to labor for a pittance while paying the mill owners for the cold water that they drank rather than permit them to play “in the streets” in the sunshine he had no words with which to express his contempt. The only letter protesting against the passage of the child labor law that he cared to notice was from a minister of the cotton mill section--and it blazed with indignant protest against--not the protest, but the source of it. He had the average man’s appreciation of the occasional value of an explicative, but he never lightly played with the name of his Creator. And he had a quiet contempt for the man who did. No man ever put more of the genuine spirit of Christianity into his political philosophy. He loved his fellow men. And throughout his life he particularly concerned himself with the alleviation of suffering whenever possible, and the amelioration of the condition of the poor. Because of that quality he was sometimes looked upon as not quite “respectable” by some more prone to pose in prayer in the market places. For these, too, he had a profound contempt. It was in his attitude toward his fellow men that he disclosed the profundity of his religious convictions. He had faith--it followed him from the cradle to the grave. I have before me a letter by Kern to his sister, Sarah, on the death of her little boy, which so perfectly mirrors the man and his religious views: “KOKOMO, January 4, 1883.