The steps of life: further essays on happiness

BY CARL HILTY
THE STEPS OF LIFE
Further Essays on Happiness
BY CARL HILTY PROFESSOR OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BERN
TRANSLATED BY MELVIN BRANDOW MINISTER OF THE CHURCH OF OUR FATHER IN LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY FRANCIS GREENWOOD PEABODY PROFESSOR OF CHRISTIAN MORALS IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO. LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 1907
COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1907. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
The welcome offered to the translation of Professor Hilty’s “Happiness” amply justifies the translation of a second series of his essays. The same notes of tranquil reflection and keen observation, which have drawn to the earlier volumes many readers both in Europe and America, are here struck again. Professor Hilty is not a preacher, and his essays are not sermons. He is a professor of Constitutional Law, and the studies of life which these volumes represent are products of his leisure hours, wrought out of his meditation and experience. Sin and sorrow, culture and courage, a just judgment of others, a rational optimism, and a simple Christian faith—these are the “Steps of Life” up which this wise teacher mounts, and which he invites thoughtful readers to climb. Laurence Oliphant is reported to have said that what England in the nineteenth century most needed was “a spiritually minded man of the world”—a man, that is to say, who could live in the world without being subdued to that he worked in, a man who could survey and judge his world with the sanity and insight of the spiritual mind. Professor Hilty in a very exceptional degree meets this test. His vocation is among the institutions of the political world. His last professional treatise dealt with the history of the Referendum in mediæval Switzerland. When in these Essays he approaches the problems of other professions, such as those of theology or Biblical criticism, it is as an amateur, who satisfies himself with conclusions which must appear to many minds untenable. It is, however, precisely this unprofessional character of his reflections which gives them their importance. Here is a learned man, whose business is with other studies, and who has known much both of public honor and of private affliction, who refreshes and consoles himself with the observation and interpretation of life, and surveys the shifting landscape of human experience from the height of a responsive mind and a chastened will. It is the testimony of a spiritually minded man of the world.