Indeed, this theme runs deep in Mrs. Clinton's sense of things.

"If you go back and read the correspondence that existed in the 19th century between people of all different walks of life," she says, "you know, it may not be some kind of heavy theological inquiry, but there will be all kinds of flashes about what happened in a way, that, you know, that the whole cycle of life and its meaning is tied into their daily life.

"And you know, by the nature of how we spend our time today, we have walled ourselves off from that. I mean, we get up in the morning and we go to work and our children don't know what our work is, because they don't see us plowing a field or making a quilt. We go off and push papers and then come home and try to explain it. Our relatives age and die often in places far away from our homes. We've compartmentalized so much of our lives that trying to find even the time to think about how all of it fits together has become harder and harder."

Jones was a dedicated proponent of the idea, then and now the driving force of the United Methodist Church, that Christian duty lay in taking a direct, helpful interest in the lives of the less fortunate. He organized the white, suburban children of Park Ridge to help provide baby sitting for the children of migrant workers in the Chicago area. Hillary was among the students he took on an eye-opening visit to talk with young black and Hispanic gang members at a community center on Chicago's South Side and also among those taken to meet the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was speaking in the city.

Now, asked if she has always been impelled by what she called, in a recent interview with The Washington Post, "a burning desire" to "make the world . . . better for everybody," Mrs. Clinton says, with a slight, self-conscious laugh: "Yeah, I always have. I have not always known what it meant, but I have always had it."

Then, on a moment's reflection. she amends her answer in a way that shows clearly the effect Jones's field trips had on the sensibilities of a child of well-off suburbia: "Especially since I was in junior high and high school and got a sense of what people were up against, and how lucky I had been, a sense, you know, that I was a very lucky person in what I had been given."

But there was more to Hillary's education than the inculcation of a guilt-induced sense of obligation. Jones also exposed her to the writings of Niebuhr, who argued that the tragedy of history proved that the hope for a better world could not depend on any sentimental view of human behavior but must encompass the legitimate use of power.

"My sense of Hillary is that she realizes absolutely the truth of the human condition, which is that you cannot depend on the basic nature of man to be good and you cannot depend entirely on moral suasion to make it good," Jones says. "You have to use power. And there is nothing wrong with wielding power in the pursuit of policies that will add to the human good. I think Hillary knows this. She is very much the sort of Christian who understands that the use of power to achieve social good is legitimate."