The writer of a book designed for his friends has no reason to anticipate an unkind reception, but there is always some danger of its being damned with faint praise.  The responses in my case, however, exceeded expectations, and were of such a character as to satisfy me that the writers really had enjoyed the book, or meant at least a part of what they said about it.  Every author is prone to believe sweet words.  Among the first that came were in a letter from Anthony Drexel, Philadelphia’s great banker, complaining that I had robbed him of several hours of sleep.  Having begun the book he could not lay it down and retired at two o’clock in the morning after finishing.  Several similar letters were received.  I remember Mr. Huntington, president of the Central Pacific Railway, meeting me one morning and saying he was going to pay me a great compliment.

“What is it?” Tasked.

“Oh, I read your book from end to end.”

“Well,” I said, “that is not such a great compliment.  Others of our mutual friends have done that.”

“Oh, yes, but probably none of your friends are like me.  I have not read a book for years except my ledger and I did not intend to read yours, but when I began it I could not lay it down.  My ledger is the only book I have gone through for five years.”

I was not disposed to credit all that my friends said, but others who had obtained the book from them were pleased with it and I lived for some months under intoxicating, but I trust not perilously pernicious, flattery.  Several editions of the book were printed to meet the request for copies.  Some notices of it and extracts got into the papers, and finally Charles Scribner’s Sons asked to publish it for the market.  So “Round the World"[36] came before the public and I was at last “an author.”

[Footnote 36:  Round the World, by Andrew Carnegie.  New York and London, 1884.]

A new horizon was opened up to me by this voyage.  It quite changed my intellectual outlook.  Spencer and Darwin were then high in the zenith, and I had become deeply interested in their work.  I began to view the various phases of human life from the standpoint of the evolutionist.  In China I read Confucius; in India, Buddha and the sacred books of the Hindoos; among the Parsees, in Bombay, I studied Zoroaster.  The result of my journey was to bring a certain mental peace.  Where there had been chaos there was now order.  My mind was at rest.  I had a philosophy at last.  The words of Christ “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” had a new meaning for me.  Not in the past or in the future, but now and here is Heaven within us.  All our duties lie in this world and in the present, and trying impatiently to peer into that which lies beyond is as vain as fruitless.

All the remnants of theology in which I had been born and bred, all the impressions that Swedenborg had made upon me, now ceased to influence me or to occupy my thoughts.  I found that no nation had all the truth in the revelation it regards as divine, and no tribe is so low as to be left without some truth; that every people has had its great teacher; Buddha for one; Confucius for another; Zoroaster for a third; Christ for a fourth.  The teachings of all these I found ethically akin so that I could say with Matthew Arnold, one I was so proud to call friend: