26 FAMOUS LIVING AMERICANS
felt any emotional conversion, nor was it that she wished to conform with the views of those about her. She simply took the step as the outward expression of her inner religious sin- cerity. Her pastor was wise enough to recognize her real Christian spirit and required no profession of belief in creed or dogma. It was the longing for a visible fellowship with the saints of the church and a devotion to the ideals of dem- ocracy, which seemed to her most perf ectiy exemplified in the Christian Church, that had drawn her ; for her childhood faith was little changed. It was in resisting these appeals of those whom she knew to be her true friends that she gained the poise which she has found necessary to keep her later work from being diverted into a merely secular or partisan movement. She learned to select what was reasonable from the confusion of dogmas in the world and to stand fast in the midst of all the attacks of partisanship. She has been able to keep Hull House alike out of the hands of capital and of labor and has made it stand for raw humanity in whatever dress it may appear. As the end of the four years* course drew near, the ques- tion of the future loomed large. Miss Addams had picked upon medicine as her profession and the poor as her especial clientage. That she should choose the field of science was in- evitable in a day when Darwin's Origin of Species was the subject of so much bitter controversy. Trained from infancy ^ to look at matters of opinion from a detache d Point of view, and unbound by the sense that she must defend any creed with which evolution might seem to conflict, the prejudiced arguments which she heard against evolution could not but turn her toward it. Perhaps a touch of bravado was in her acceptance of this theory, now a commonplace, but then a thing anathema. The next winter was spent in the Woman's Medical College of Philadelphia. Early in the spring, however, the spinal trouble which had threatened her from childhood put her in the hospital. Four years in college and a year's strenuous professional study had left her weary, and it was a relief, after a few weeks, to turn from anatomy to Carlyle. Upon
