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side. Liberality razes the fence to the ground, and is as much at home on one side of where it was as on the other. The Unitarian Association is on the fence. The conservatives are on its right hand, the radicals are on its left. It carries its pocket-book on the right hand side. In its left side pocket it has a few pennies. The pennies are for the radicals; the greenbacks are for the conservatives. It gives five thousand dollars to the Third Society in Brooklyn, so long as it is strictly Unitarian. If that is not a premium upon dishonesty, what is it? It sends out strong conservatives if it can find them ; but the strong radicals must look out for themselves. Weak radicals,―men who do not know exactly what they do believe; men whose radical theology is swamped in a great mush of orthodox sentiment-get an occasional crumb from the Association's table. It turns a cold shoulder on a scholar and a saint, because he cannot conscientiously administer the Lord's Supper. A prominent church wants the Association to aid it in procuring a minister after its own heart. The Association sends the money and a conservative bigot to take care of it. There is a question of books. The Life of Channing is the most liberal book that the Association has ever printed, and that is not radical. Of radical books it publishes none. Of radical tracts it publishes none. It pub

lishes a creed which, if the words be taken in their plain honest signification, not one Unitarian in America believes. It publishes books and tracts which must sound a little old-fashioned even to the few Arian divines that still keep up a show of their lean dogma. It publishes a liturgy which is more suggestive of St. Albans, than of a self-respecting Unitarian Church. But the Association does not mean to be illiberal. It insists that it is not. Unitarianism, it says, " has not broadened in one direction only. If it has on one side gone further in the radical direction than Norton and Ripley, it has also gone in the orthodox direction beyond Burnap and Buckminster and Ware." These are the words of Secretary Lowe, and he goes on to say:

"So that Dr, Eliot and Dr. Gannett, or any other names who were part of that original nucleus, no more represent the extreme on one side, than does Robert Colyer or Dr. Furness or Dr. Clarke on the other. The wide circle which would include Theodore Parker and extreme radical names, would, in its opposite arc, embrace Bushnell and Beecher, and a host of names like those. Unitarianism may yet come to be the Broad Church that shall comprehend them all!"

The charming simplicity of this argument does not atone for its absurdity. It is doubly fallacious, First, because it takes for granted that Bushnell and Beecher are more conservative than Eliot and Gannett, when the facts are just the other way. I know that Mr. Beecher varies; but I have heard him preach sermons so radical that because of their radicalism the Unitarian Association would not publish them. But this is not the worst. Even if Beecher and Bushnell were more conservative than Eliot and Peabody, would the Association by stretching out its arms to them by way of welcome, entitle itself to stretch out its feet with contrary intent to Weiss and Potter and Frothingham? No. For the radicals of the Unitarian movement are bone

of its bone and flesh of its flesh. It is that which has made us, not we ourselves. We are the people of its pasture and the sheep of its hand. If Beecher and Bushnell had grown conservative with us, then there might be something in the matter. But they are the extreme left of orthodoxy, not the extreme right of Unitarianism, and this fact spoils the argument. Conservative or radical, Unitarianism is not responsible for them. It is responsible for us. There has been no break in our development. Channing carried Parker and Weiss and Potter in his conscience, if not in his brain. We have followed our leaders, and if, when they have fallen pierced by many arrows, we have pushed forward, it has been in strict accordance with their teachings, in the full spirit of their lives. Therefore I say the Unitarian Association is lopsided and illiberal, and cannot consistently expect the suffrages of any liberal church.

But it is only for the principle of the thing that I have dwelt on this so long. Were the work of the Association exactly after your own hearts, there would still be a very good reason why for some years to come you should make different disposition of your surplus cash. I trust that in future you will not do less but more than you have ever done in the past, but I am as sure as I can be that the right way for you to do this is to make yourselves more earnest and efficient; make this church what it ought to be, and what it can be if you will put your shoulders to the wheel like one man. There is certainly a great work for you to do in this city, and if I am not the man to help you do it then give me your God-speed and I will give you mine. But if I am the man, or if you believe I am the man, then let us go to work. Let us fairly lift our banner up, and though we may not draw all men unto it, we shall draw a great many more than are yet mustered under its shining folds. This church-building of ours, beautiful and home-like as it is, is not suited to our purposes, or, if it is, so much the worse for us. It is so small that the rents are higher than a poor man can afford to pay. Do you know that it goes right to my heart that there isn't a mechanic that I know of in my congregation? And I have not been a mechanic myself without learning that mechanics think on the great subjects that we come here to study, and that their strong instincts and quick intuitions anticipate the results of scholarship and long investigation. "Can a poor man go in there?" asked a poor man, standing in front of Dr. Osgood's church, of a delegate to the Conference, last Tuesday night. I should hate to think that any poor man ever stood at this church door and said that; but I should hate still worse to think that there are not a great many poor men in this city, whose hearts and souls are with us, but whose bodies are not, only because they cannot afford to pay the price of admission. Of all the good things said at the Conference I can endorse none more heartily than those said in favor of free churches. Let us be content with what we have now, but let us not be satisfied. Let us at least cherish the hope that one of these days we too shall have A FREE WORKING CHURCH. There may be almost insuperable obstacles to overcome, among

them the difficulty of selling our present edifice.

But let us not for one minute take our eyes from the goal. I for one pledge myself never to be satisfied until it is attained. And may the day of its attainment not be very far away!

Every sensible working church ought to have connected with it a free reading room, with other rooms for conversation and amusement. Only by giving the young people of our cities proper enjoyment shall we save them from wreaking their God-given instincts on unworthy objects. In the absence of any of these attractions from our Church, I rejoice that the Liberal Christian Union of this city has at least one of them-a free reading room. An appeal will shortly be made to you in behalf of this useful instrument of social culture, and I trust that your response will be most generous. Do not say that you cannot afford to give anything. You cannot afford to miss so grand an opportunity for doing work that God will smile upon.

The subject of theatre preaching received a great deal of attention from the Conference, and the general sense of the body was evidently in favor of that method of operating on the public mind. For myself I accept it as a provisional arrangement, but as nothing more. It is a confession that our churches are not upon the right basis, pecuniary or moral. We are told that the tendency of the times is to Ritualism. If these great meetings of the people mean anything they mean that just the opposite is true; that our churches are all of them, not merely the ritualistic, but all of them, too ecclesiastical—too churchy; that if men can go to church without seeming to do so, they are ready; that they like public preaching, but do not like public worship, or, rather, like the worship of ideas better than the worship of lawn sleeves and genuflections. When instead of our present exclusive churches we have buildings free to all, supported by the generosity of all who can afford anything, and when, instead of priests, with or without the chasuble, we have preachers pure and simple, we shall not need to hire a theatre to soothe the well-founded prejudices of the people. Happy that people who can make their church beautiful with all the wonderful devices of the architect and painter, and then offer it as a free gift to the community! But better, it seems to me, a free barn for the many than a cathedral for the few.

In Mr. Dall's account of the India Mission I did not find myself sufficiently interested to promise it your aid. Against the establishment of a denominational magazine I voted for so many reasons that I will not specify them. All true science and all good literature are already at work for the Church of the Future, and if any able man among us has a good word to say, he can say it through established channels much better than he can say it in a denominational magazine, and much more influentially. One good word in the Atlantic is worth ten in a denominational organ.

That the right hand of fellowship should be held out as it was to the African Methodists, seemed exceedingly fit and beautiful. Another excellent suggestion was that congregations who can afford to let their ministers go off

on missionary tours should do so. There will then be no troublesome suspicions that they are sending food to others at which they would themselves decidedly reluct.

I now come to speak of the general attitude and spirit of the Convention. If the sermon of Dr. Bellows had been, as doubtless he hoped to make it, the key-note of that attitude and spirit, I should stand here with a very sad and painful story. But the real key-note was more as if James Martineau, whom we hoped to have with us, had been there to strike it. And yet we cannot be too glad that Martineau was not there; for had he been, and everything else had been just as it was, he would have been so grossly insulted by the remarks of certain individuals on Thursday morning that his opinion of America would probably have suffered a considerable shock. And yet again, perhaps, had he been with us some things that were said would have been left unsaid, for I have noticed that my conservative friends are not troubled by the radicalism of Martineau, only by radicalism here in America. Men on this side of the water who believe almost exactly what Martineau believes upon the other side, are called enemies of Christianity; but Mr. Martineau is never spoken of so disrespectfully.

The last public utterance of Dr. Bellows previous to the Conference had been so broad, he had declared himself so unmistakably in favor of the widest liberty, that persons with bad memories fondly expected to find him still firmly rooted in that noble attitude. But when did Dr. Bellows ever hold to the same opinion for three or four months running? After the first shock, therefore, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that he had forgotten all about his last pronunciamento, and was sailing on an entirely different tack. It was time, he thought, to make Unitarianism a sect. He would keep open doors, but every man that entered he would have seized, his head shaved, his ears cropped, a uniform put on him, and his limbs stretched on a denominational Procrustes' bed, there to be lengthened out or shortened in to the required denominational limit. "Let us have a rigid, well-defined ecclesiasticism, a creed, a theological slop-shop, where young men can provide themselves with ready-made sectarian uniforms." Such was the bearing of his eloquent discourse. Do you wonder that the Conference did not choose to follow him on such a downward, backward, God-forsaken, man-forsaking way?

The general temper of the Conference was every way an improvement on the two previous Conferences, and rebuked the temper of the introductory discourse as it deserved. It was truly encouraging to look over the Conference and see what light had risen within two years on many of its members; how much more generally and fully the great principle of liberty was apprehended than at Syracuse. The test of all this came on Thursday morning in the form of a proposed amendment to the constitution, which was debated for several hours, and which was withdrawn at the last moment, when it might just as well have been carried. This amendment was as follows:

ART. IX.—To secure the largest unity of the Spirit and the widest practical co-operation, it is hereby declared that all expressions in this Preamble and Constitution are expressions only of the majority of the Conference, committing in no degree those who object to them, and depending wholly for their effect upon the consent they command on their own merits from the Churches here represented or belonging within the circle of our fellowship; and that we heartily welcome to that fellowship all who desire to work with us in advancing the kingdom of God.

With the exception of the last sentence it was substantially the same as a resolve that passed the Convention in New York three years ago. That resolve was an agreement that there should be no creed put to the lips or any man or church. But no sooner was the constitution framed and accepted than it was loudly heralded that the Conference had placed itself unequivocally on the side of the authoritative Christ. Hence the attempt at Syracuse to change the Preamble and first part of the Constitution, an attempt which only succeeded in relieving us from the purely sectarian strait-jacket into which we put ourselves in New York by inserting the words "and other Christian" after the word Unitarian" in the first article of the constitution, thereby making ourselves a conference of "Unitarian and other Christian churches." This was a decided gain. It broke down the wall of partition built up at the original convention in New York. But still the question remained, was the Preamble a creed, and wherever the word Christian was used was that also a creed? The more conservative-or rather I should say the more illiberal— members of the Syracuse Conference said Yes, and said that if we radicals were honest men we should clear out and leave them to themselves. And if there hadn't been anybody to leave but these we should have done so in a hurry. But besides these men there was the great body of liberal conservatives who assured us that they did not consider any expression in Preamble or Constitution as a creed, and that they thought we might remain with perfect honesty. Somewhat in doubt we did as these advised, only resolved to win the battle at some future day which that day had been lost. And last Thursday morning we did it securely and triumphantly. There was great need, for, as from New York, so also from Syracuse, the devotees of the authoritative, supernatural Christ went home and proclaimed from their pulpits that the Conference had again committed itself to their dogma, and that radicalism must put its neck into the yoke or go. They cannot say so now without departing from the truth. By an immense majority the Conference has decided that no expression in the Preamble or Constitution commits any person who does not agree with it; that even the word Christian has no fixed meaning; but that any Church which chooses to call itself by that name has as good a right in the Conference as if it came reciting the apostle's creed.

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Do you ask, Why then are you not entirely satisfied?" For I certainly am Because, for the amendment that we hoped to carry, we allowed to be substituted another that was exactly the same with this exception: it omitted

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