Birth and CJiildhood. q 



ston, of Coxsackie, but as the father objected to double 

 names it was agreed to call him Livingston simply. 

 In after years he himself assumed the forename Ed- 

 ward, by which most of his friends soon came to 

 know him, though his mother always called him Liv- 

 ingston till the end of his days. 



As the good grandmother Scofield was taking leave 

 of the newcomer that day she tenderly breathed over 

 him the prayer that he might become as good and as 

 useful a man as the minister whose name he was to 

 bear ; which in her mind, of course, was equivalent to 

 praying that he might become a minister. In later 

 years, when hopes that had been encouraged by his 

 rare gifts of mind and heart were seemingly thwarted 

 by the unforeseen line of development which he 

 began to follow, his mother sometimes reproachfully 

 reminded him of this early consecration to the work 

 of saving souls. Edward always met this mood seri- 

 ously, assuring her that he felt his responsibility, and 

 should certainly employ such powers as he had in the 

 way his loving and beloved grandmother had pointed 

 out. But in order to clear his own path, and to widen 

 the scope of his mother's perceptions, he never failed 

 to insist that in order to take part in the work of sav- 

 ing souls it was not necessary to be a clergyman. It 

 was difficult for Calvinists and Puritans, like Vincent 

 Youmans and his wife, to understand any other classi- 

 fication of pursuits than that of sacred and secular, 

 and what they regarded as Edward's religious defec- 

 tion was a source of keen disappointment and worry. 

 But after he had reached middle life it was an un- 

 speakable comfort to him that they came to recognize 

 their error, and to see that his career was a true answer 

 to the grandmother's prayer. Even if they did not 



