ABSTRACT
Autobiographies that are confined to childhood can uncover experiences and capacities that are inconsequent. Those continue into adolescence and the adult years almost inevitably narrow their scope to the story of a main achievement, a particular outlook or professional career, that by which the person is publicly known and that often is the actual cause of writing. Interwoven is the life-history of a brilliant theologian, a distinguished organist and interpreter of Bach, who gave up a strikingly successful career at the age of 30 in order to devote himself to Africans as a medical missionary. Autobiographies of the type discussed in this chapter are written with a more or less emphatic intention of expounding doctrine, and in the author's mind the justification of the enterprise lies in the rightness of the outlook he has reached. Autobiography delineates the acquisition of a philosophy may tend to replace living experience by opinion, and thus lose in plasticity and human substance.
