be wiser than they. We had hoped that we could be proud of you, and by this time, when your name was mentioned, speak of your honorable position before God and man. But that is past."

b. Public Comment on my becoming a Unitarian.Beginning with April 1st, 1868, I undertook service to the Detroit Unitarian Church, for a six months ministry. The Independent of New York, made this note of the event.

"Some of our readers may remember the case of the Rev. Clay McCauley, who, last year, was refused ordination, on the ground of heretical opinions, by a Congregational association sitting at Morrison, Ill. A few weeks later, license to preach was taken from him by the Old School Presbytery of Chicago. As Orthodox pulpits were thus closed against him, he turned this way and that to find some rostrum on which to stand and utter the thought that was within him. The only door open to him was that of the Unitarian pulpit; and, without trammels or pledges, he went there to preach, using the same sermons that seemed good food to many hearts at Morrison. He is now ministering to the Unitarian society at Detroit. Though still a very young man, he shows a grasp of thought and a power of utterance which are commanding attention in that community. We hope that he will be faithful to the manhood which God has given him; that he will not become embittered by his experience; and that, whatever may be the nominal direction of his mental development hereafter, it may be into the truth, and beauty, and goodness of Christ."

Some former friends of the Presbytery of Chicago, however, were not so generous in their comments as the Independent. On May 9th, the North Western Presbyterian,-in its "Editorial Brevities "-published the following note. There was reference to another person in the note. I quote only the part referring to me.

66 STRAYING STILL FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH.

Mr. Clay McCauley, whose license was withdrawn by the Presbytery of Chicago for defection from the faith of the church, has strayed so far from the truth as to cast in his lot with the Unitarians, and is now preaching to a Unitarian church in Detroit, Mich.

The Rev. Robert Collyer in writing recently to the Liberal Christian, thus glories over this accession, to their and our reproach:

Rev. C. McCauley, about whose going to Detroit you printed a brief paragraph, gives promise of great usefulness there, or wherever he may go. He has just come to us from the Old School Presbyterians, in one of whose churches at Morrison, in this State, he has been preaching since his ordination with great acceptance. But he got into some trouble about the doctrine of the Atonementperhaps the most difficult doctrine for any delicate and honorable soul in the whole scheme of Orthodoxy, especially as it is insisted on by the stern Old School of which he is a disciple. The result was, at last, that they turned him out. Perhaps it would be a milder thing to say that they suspended him from preaching.'

The stumbling of such stripling and novice in the truth, at the great central doctrine of the Christian system, necessarily proves nothing, as to the correctness of Unitarianism. or Universalism, nor any thing as to the falsity of Orthodoxy. If any man preach any other Gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed."

The italics are those of the editor. The Morrison church was Congregational, not Presbyterian.

There was but little outward change in my preaching at Detroit from that which was given at Morrison. The sermons were nearly all rewritten for the new pulpit, but they were only freed from some of their more pronounced Orthodox phrases, and from what I was discovering then to be their literary crudities, or errors. The Detroit people were very generous, forbearing and encouraging to

the stranger "stripling and novice." My newly-won faith was, of course, not yet well formulated. But I was at last wholly emancipated from the bondage of my “inherited creed." Days of real mental struggle and distress, except for the grief I felt over the sorrow and opposition of kindred and former friends, were past. Mind, heart, soul, I was buoyed upon a serene and sheltered faith. Over me was the open sky, and, before me, freedom to take my way as the Spirit of Truth" might inspire.

The summer passed without notable event. Increasing contentment and undisturbed opportunity to think intelligently of my work for the future, had come. Important personal and professional problems confronted me, but they could be studied without special stress. I read widely among the writings of those who were spoken of as leaders among Liberal Christians, that I might become familiar with their ways of thinking, and with the administration of the doings of the Churches with which I had become associated.

My newly composed sermons were not controversial, or even speculative, notwithstanding my interest in theological readjustments. I made general ethical, and purely religious, motives the principal themes of the new sermonizing. Besides, I took considerable interest in matters of public morals, and in the general welfare of the city. I undertook some campaigning on behalf of the "Massachusetts Society for the Protection of Animals," seeking to bring about a State organization for Michigan. The problems of the city's charities also interested me a good deal.

3.

At Rochester.

But more than all else, as the summer of 1868 advanced, I came to see that my preparation for this new ministry had been very limited, and that the service I was giving to this important Detroit Society was poorly inadequate. I did not seek a change of position, but I freely acknowledge that the invitation which I received in September from Rochester, New York, to go the "First Unitarian Congregagational Society," there, upon the close of my Detroit engement, was welcome. I had become much attached to many persons in Detroit, but the Rochester invitation offered new opportunity for furthering a much needed acquaintance with Unitarian people, and with another phase of the work of the Unitarian ministry, which I thought it wise not to forego.

Installation at Rochester, New York-On September 14th, the Rochester Society sent me a unanimous invitation to be its minister for one year, from October 1st.

Five days after the latter date, I was installed in office : Rev. Robert Collyer, preaching the sermon, and Revs. Samuel J. May, Robert Laird Collier, S. R. Calthorp, Frederick Frothingham, and the local Universalist minister, Rev. Asa Saxe, sharing the other parts of the ceremony.

A letter of thanks to Robert Collyer brought a most affectionate answer, from which the following extracts are pertinent here:

"Very glad I am to see you standing in your true place, winning the love of so true a people as that you have about you in Rochester. I look forward to your gaining there a

great spiritual fortune. "The gold of the land is good and there is bedelium and the honey-comb."

In Detroit, you did well. Your work, I hear on all hands, was wise and good. It was wise, too I think, that you resigned the reins. I suppose they may get-. If they do, he will enter into your labors, and find his own easier through the preparation you made."

The pastorate at Rochester was quite eventful, and it was served with much more ease, because of increasing knowledge on my part of how to preach and of how to work, than the ministry at Detroit I was beginning really "to find myself"; and to be that much more useful to the parish and to the fellowship of the Churches of a "rational Christian faith." As in Detroit, I took part in several movements in the community directed towards social betterment: also in the affairs of several beneficiary institutions, particularly those connected with reform in the prison, and in the insane asylum, and in the society whose object was protection of animals.

But of special importance for these "Memories," regarded as a series of specific life-sketches, I have to recall the Rochester ministry as being distinctive, because in it my first real antagonism in public to my ancestral Creed was shown; also because, more than any other period in my career, it became one of theological controversy.

b. First Public Attack on Calvinism.-On November 22nd, 1868, I made an open attack on Calvinism, denouncing its distinctive "doctrine of Human Nature" This sermon marks the time when, to the public, I appeared as actually hostile to that irrational, terror-burdened dogma of my inherited Creed,—the "Total Depravity of Human Nature;" and as devoted to the rational optimism of faith in man's Native Dignity.