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The Sunday service in Cork 22 October, was entitled "Samhain - Honouring the Ancestors & Our Dead Loved Ones" for which everyone was asked to bring a photo or momento. For the occasion I wrote about my father. My father’s newly refurbished books promptly went back into storage. But today’s service Honouring the Ancestors has motivated me to unearth them and to try and put into context my desire to preserve these ancient books and my memories of him. The first book is his undergraduate text, Smith’s Inorganic Chemistry, 1926. While being out of date, it is remarkable to think upon both what they knew and what they did not know when he was a young student some 80 years ago. In any case the study and practice of science for him was more than a way of earning a living. His acquisition of such knowledge entailed revelation as to mankind’s capacity to roll back and defeat the forces of superstition and ignorance. The second book is a 1927 edition of The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant and points to the breadth of my father’s interests even as a young man. Opinions of Durant as a philosophic thinker are mixed, however he was a tireless writer of accessible philosophy and history. Significantly he was still writing in his inimitable style when I too was a young man. I think these characteristics appealed to my father’s democratic instincts. Durant died a few years before my father in 1981 at age 96. So I offer these books as symbols of a completed life who recently acquired another descendent, a great grandson, born to my daughter 11 days ago. These symbols are: a book on science and a book on philosophy; each with a facing page with the distinctive signature of Willard Spengeman, the man who first introduced me to Unitarianism. F R Spengeman 22 October, 2006 Cork Unitarian Church
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