It was among the children of his children that Adams and his words to the wise would live longest in memory. “The Lord deliver us from all family pride,” he had written to John Quincy’s son John, for example. “No pride, John, no pride.”
“You are not singular in your suspicions that you know but little,” he had told Caroline, in response to her quandary over the riddles of life. “The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know. . . . Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough. . . . So questions and so answers your affectionate grandfather.”
Adams had, however, arrived at certain bedrock conclusions before the end came. He believed, with all his heart, as he had written to Jefferson, that no effort in favor of virtue was lost.
He felt he had lived in the greatest of times, that the eighteenth century, as he also told Jefferson, was for all its errors and vices “the most honorable” to human nature. “Knowledge and virtues were increased and diffused; arts, sciences useful to man, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any period.”
His faith in God and the hereafter remained unshaken. His fundamental creed, he had reduced to a single sentence: “He who loves the Workman and his work, and does what he can to preserve and improve it, shall be accepted of Him.”
His confidence in the future of the country he had served so long and dutifully was, in the final years of his life, greater than ever.
Human nature had not changed, however, for all the improvements. Nor would it, he was sure. Nor did he love life any the less for its pain and terrible uncertainties. He remained as he had been, clear-eyed about the paradoxes of life and in his own nature. Once, in a letter to his old friend Francis van der Kemp, he had written, “Griefs upon griefs! Disappointments upon disappointments. What then? This is a gay, merry world notwithstanding.”
It could have been his epitaph.
引自 Chapter Twelve: Journey's End
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