WILLIAM QUAN JUDGE While William was still young, his mother, Mary Quan, died in childbirth. His father Frederick decided to take his children to America where they might have a better opportunity to develop their talents and earn a living. Arriving in New York in 1864, the family settled in Brooklyn where, despite hardship, William Q. Judge attended school. Judge joined the legal staff of George P. Andrews as a clerk and soon took an interest in the profession. While preparing himself for the bar, his father died and Judge found himself thrust into the world. He became a citizen in April 1872 and was admitted shortly thereafter to the State Bar of New York where he practised for the remainder of his life, specializing in commercial law. His compassion, integrity, conscientiousness and intelligence were widely recognized, and he was called 'the Christ of the legal profession.' In 1874 Judge married a staunch Methodist lady who bore him a child. His natural fondness for children increased his pain when his daughter died of diphtheria in infancy. In the same year Judge read Colonel Henry Steel Olcott's accounts of the spiritualistic phenomena occurring at the Eddy Homestead in Chittenden, Vermont. These articles were published in the New York Daily Graphic It was her eye that attracted me, the eye of one whom I must have known in lives long passed away. She looked at me in recognition at that first hour, and never since has that look changed. Not as a questioner of philosophies did I come before her, not as one groping in the dark for lights that Schools and fanciful theories had obscured, but as one who, wandering many periods through the corridors of life, was seeking the friends who could show where the designs for the work had been hidden. And true to the call she responded, revealing the plans once again, and speaking no words to explain, simply pointed them out and went on with the task. It was as if but the evening before we had parted, leaving yet to be done some detail of a task taken up with one common end; it was teacher and pupil, elder brother and younger, both bent on the one single end, but she with the power and the knowledge that belong but to lions and sages. | |
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