The very charity we claim is a reason why we should endeavor to destroy the distinguishing principles of Orthodoxy. It is our duty to prove that no external authority is competent to fix the limit within which religious thought shall act. A shrewd man of the State lately said to me, "It is your mission as an organization to liberalize the sects of this country, that in the end all may become free. Your sectarian work is to destroy sects."

And further, though at the risk of wandering from my subject, I will say that, for the sake of our relation to the older sects, Unitarianism should be very cautious in in what it does concerning what calls itself more advanced thought, and professes to occupy a more free position than the one Unitarianism seems willing to assume. On every side our principles should be preserved inviolate. Is it not possible, friends, that some error has been committed, somewhere at some time, that Unitarianism has not been able to keep within itself some of the earnest minds who now think of us as we think of the older sccts? This is a question I cannot enter upon here, but if it suggest any wrong in our denominational record; in the acts of this Association; in the declarations of that body which claims to be our representative Conference; then for the sake of our far past; for the sake of truth; for Christ's sake, let the wrong be made right.

To all earnest Unitarians let one say, who has come to you from the older sects, who knows their estimate of you, who knows of many he left behind him longing for a Christian body, in which, with its vital religion, there shall be perfect mental freedom,-"Beware of every act which may identify Unitarianism in letter or in spirit with the principles of the sects from which your fathers struggled so nobly to be free." Should Unitarianism become true to its understood principles, it has a grand future. As an alliance of free minds, it can make itself the agent for setting Christianity in America free; and as Christianity becomes free, it can afford room in which the liberated thought can perfect itself, while at the same time it can continue to cherish the religious life,--the Christian life,

to which all intellectual action must ever be subordinate, with as excellent a culture as the best older sect has achieved.

I prophesy that, like the world now springing into life, with each leaf and flower maturing after its own nature, each showing forth its own measure of the universal life, and all combining to make up the wide expanse of grace and fragrance now surrounding us, so can Unitarianism become a true Church of God, where each soul can grow to maturity after its own nature, inspired by its own knowledge and experience of the universal Fatherhood of God and of the universal Brotherhood of Man: all making the true Kingdom of Heaven upon earth which seers in all ages have beheld in visions, but which Jesus of Nazareth realized in his life and teachings.

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CHAPTER SIXTH

CONSUMMATE EXPRESSION OF MY FAITH

Nearly a half century has now passed since the days in which I realized fully that I had been emancipated from the "Creed of Calvin," and, with freed mind and heart, had gained a reasonable and happy personal Faith in God, in Christ, and in Man.

As I have already said, the experiences of after years in no way essentially changed the Faith which I had won in early manhood. But, inevitably, that Faith has been intimately involved in the whole of my much varied and eventful personal career; and it has been given expression in many different forms. It has naturally, too, passed through processes of expansion, and of development.

Looking now, over writings which were devoted to themes specifically religious, I have chosen a few, prepared in the after years, in which I think my Faith received consummate expression. I shall reproduce two of these articles in this chapter. Some other writings which, though fundamentally religious, are especially products of formal philosophical speculation, I shall repeat in a subsequent chapter.

a. Resignation from the Waltham Pulpit.-The Waltham pastorate was served with zeal and with much mental serenity. I did my work as well as I could, making continuously a wider acquaintance with books and men.

Of specific moment in connection with my mental development was membership in the Chestnut Street Club

of Boston, meeting at the house of Rev. John T. Sargent. Also, I joined the Free Religious Association, and was much interested in its efforts on behalf of full liberty in theological thinking. I had the privilege, too, of friendship with several prominent members of these fine fellowships; friendships ever since memorable as factors in my intellectual growth. Among those who were most active in these organizations devoted to the larger liberty, and whom, under the limitations of my youth, I learned to know most closely, were R. W. Emerson, A. B. Alcott, O. B. Frothingham, T. W. Higginson, John Weiss, D. A. Wasson, Samuel Longfellow, Dr. C. A. Bartol and Francis Tiffany. And I was honored in gaining very pleasant acquaintanceships with Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Edna D. Cheney, Mrs. Caroline H. Dall and Miss Louisa M. Alcott. My religious conservatism and Christian discipleship in no way seriously separated me from a thoroughly free fellowship with the more "radical" of the two "wings" with which the Unitarian fellowship then seemed to be finding its evolution.

So far as I had, at the time, any intention concerning my professional future, I regarded myself as indefinitely the minister of the Waltham "First Parish." I was well aware of my own serious intellectual limitations, especially in the deeper study of religious problems which some of my more favored acquaintances had achieved. But I was not restless because of the fact.

Unexpectedly, however, after about three years of this pleasant ministry, a parishioner generously gave me an opportunity to go to Europe and spend some time in the pursuit of favorite studies. The offer was so attractive in every way that I willingly accepted it and resigned my

pastorate; though I sincerely regretted closing, thereby, official relations with the Waltham people.

b. In Europe:-Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Dresden. Early in 1873, I went to Germany where, for the next two years and longer, I attended lectures on Philosophy and Theology at the universities of Heidelberg and Leipzig. In 1874, I represented the American Unitarian Association. at the meetings of the Protestantenverein, in Wiesbaden. For some months in the same year, I had special readings in Philosophy with a friend in Dresden, Dr. Paul Hohlfeld, a devoted disciple and interpreter of Krause's speculative system, known, in the modern Philosophy of Religion, as Panentheism.

The effect of these years on my Faith was not to change it, except by further informing it, clarifying it, making it more reasonable; and by disclosing more clearly what I had already apprehended as its immovable foundation. My readings carried me well into the records of the great historic systems of Philosophy; the history of the origins and development of Christianity; and, somewhat, into the new science of "Comparative Religion."

C. The Philosophy of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause.-During my last year in Germany, I became accidentally acquainted with the writings of a much neglected, or rather but little known, philosopher of the early part of the Nineteenth Century, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause.

In conversation with a German acquaintance I had told him of my absorbing interest in a clarified Theism. He answered that I "ought by all means" to study the "Subjective Analytic, and Objective Synthetic Philosophy" of Krause, the clearest exponent, he believed, of the God Idea among modern thinkers. I gave months, as I have said