My father was, as I have said elsewhere, a clergyman in Boston, Massachusetts, a Unitarian minister to the First Church, standing in a long line of men, of whom the earliest was severely orthodox, while he abhorred orthodoxy. Yet he was ordained without hesitation, was more than acceptable to the best minds through a service of thirty-five years, and continued more and more unorthodox to the end; so gradually and insensibly did the Puritan tenets disappear one by one until the shadow of them onl

Of the primary schools it is unnecessary to speak. They were of the same kind that were established in Boston at that period. Indeed I can recollect but two, one, a child's school of boys and girls, kept by a Miss Scott, at the corner of Mt. Vernon Street and Hancock; the other a boys' school kept by a Mr. Capen, a poor hump-backed cripple who could not get out of his chair, but wheeled himself about the room, and kept on his table a cowhide, which was pretty generously exercised. The school was

To enter at once the Divinity School was to start on a predestined career. From childhood I was marked out for a clergyman. This was taken for granted in all places and conversations, and my own thoughts fell habitually into that groove. There was nothing unattractive in the professional career as illustrated by my father. I was the only one of a large family of brothers who pursued the full course of studies at Cambridge, or who showed a taste for the scholastic life. An appetite for books rath

Old Salem was a city of the imagination. History does it no justice. The "Essex Institute," founded in 1848, by the union of the "Essex County Historical Society" and the "Essex County Natural History Society," has a very fine collection of books, pamphlets, manuscripts, an invaluable museum, relics, pictures, so that in no locality in the country has so much been accomplished in exhuming the treasures of municipal and civil history, and in bringing to light antiquities. Hurd's "History of Essex

I was in Salem when this came. It happened in the following way: A woman in my choir, a melancholy, tearful, forlorn woman, asked me one day if I knew Theodore Parker. I said I did not, but then, seeing her disappointment, I asked her why she put that question. She replied that her husband had abandoned her some months before and with another woman had gone to Maine. There he had left the woman and was living in Boston, and was a member of Mr. Parker's Society; and she thought that if I knew Mr.

Jersey City, to which I went directly from Salem, was a very different place from what it is now; smaller and perhaps pleasanter. Where now is a large city, a few years ago was but a village. Now it is a manufacturing place, with great establishments, foundries, machine-shops, banks, insurance companies, newspapers, more than forty schools, and more than sixty churches. Then it was a large town, though it was nominally a city (incorporated in 1820), with a population of about twenty thousand, th

For the first year in New York I lived with Dr. Bellows at his parsonage. Mrs. Bellows and the children were at Eagleswood, New Jersey, the children being at school with Mr. Weld. And this is the place to say something about Henry Whitney Bellows. He was a very remarkable man, most extraordinary in his way; an original man, a peculiar individual; of mercurial temper, various, quick, sympathetic, brave, whole-hearted, generous, but all in his own fashion. More Celtic than Saxon, more French than

Hardly had I got warm in my place when the mutterings of war were in the air. During the autumn of 1859, on the 16th of October, John Brown planned his attack on Harper's Ferry. His was a portentous figure. His position in history—greater than his achievements would warrant—was due partly to his position as herald of the coming strife, but mainly to his personal qualities. These were colossal; however much one may criticise his particular deeds, or the details of his motive, these qualities can

The happy ending of the war stimulated, as has been said, the sentiment of Unity. The success of the government in putting down the rebellion filled the air with the spirit of union. The restoration of political harmony suggested a deeper harmony, when divisions should cease. At this moment, in April, 1865, the indefatigable Dr. Bellows, who had been the soul of the Sanitary Commission, summoned all Christian believers of the liberal persuasions to a convention in his church for a more complete

An article in the North American Review for April, 1885, on "Free Thought in America," is chiefly significant as showing how gradual and tentative the progress of thought in religion was. The comments on individuals are often wide of the mark, but the general drift is quite correct. The course was shadowy, but the main point was unmistakable. At this day, the wholesale abuse of religion is harmless, and can exert no wide influence. The friends of liberal thought are against it; and those who see

It is natural that the clerical profession should be an order by itself. Every other calling is—the lawyer's, the physician's, the artist's and the merchant's. There is an absurd notion that the clerical profession stands alone; that it has a supernatural origin, which takes it out of the circle of ordinary employments; that it is not to be compared with other institutions of society. But the real dignity of the profession consists in its filling its place among human arrangements. A certain tem

Among Englishmen, I owe the most to James Martineau, at the time of my ordination (1847), a Unitarian clergyman in Liverpool. His lectures in the Unitarian controversy (1839) on "Christianity without Priest and without Ritual," on "The Christian View of Moral Evil," on "The Bible: What It Is and What It is Not"; his articles on "Distinctive Types of Christianity," on "Creeds and Heresies of Early Christianity," on "The Ethics of Christendom," on "The Creed of Christendom," on "St. Paul and His M

These were many, but most of them are living and cannot, therefore, be spoken of. There is an advantage in writing about the dead, for they cannot protest against the handsome things you say, and they cannot remonstrate against the unhandsome things. I shall on this account choose but two, with whom I was very intimate, and who are very near to my heart. I shall give sketches of John Weiss and Samuel Johnson, and first of John Weiss. [B] [B] Reprinted from the Unitarian Review of May, 1888. This

It is impossible to mention them all, and to single out a few from a multitude must not be done. I should like to commemorate those who came nearest to me by their earnest work and faithful allegiance, but these cannot be spoken of, and I prefer to enumerate some of those with whom I was less intimate. Alice and Phœbe Cary came to New York in 1852, and were prominent when I was there; their famous Sunday evenings, which were frequented by the brightest minds and were sought by a large class of p

The progress of mind is continuous. Strictly speaking, there are no periods of transition, no crises in thought. The history of ideas presents no gap. Every stage begins and ends an epoch. One is often reminded of the common notion that the year begins and ends at a particular moment. Every day begins and ends a year; every hour is equally sacred. Yet solemn thought, worship, self-examination, are precious, and these can be secured only by the observance of times and seasons; so that we fall on

In the Revue des Deux Mondes of October 15, 1860, M. Renan wrote a remarkable article on the "Future of Religion in Modern Society." This paper of course dealt largely with questions that were interesting at that time, but it also contains very acute observations on the whole subject, which are of universal concern. His conclusions are that neither Judaism nor Romanism nor the established forms of Protestantism will constitute the coming faith, which must be spiritual (that is, free of space and

The course of spiritual advance is traced with difficulty and hesitation. It is the most obscure phase of the general problem of progress, which is almost insoluble. There are so many currents and counter-currents; so many tributaries; so many swift torrents and still bays; so many times the stream seems moving in the opposite direction—it is not surprising if some have concluded that there was no progress at all, that we only moved in a circle, went over the same ground again and again, and eve