HISTORICAL DISCOURSE BY JOHN WHITE 
 CHADWICK, SUNDAY, APRIL FOURTEENTH, 
 NINETEEN HUNDRED AND ONE, WITH 
 OTHER SERVICES IN RECOGNITION OF 
 THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE 
 FIRST MEETING OF THE SECOND UNITA- 
 
 RIAN SOCIETY, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK. 
 
 “Our finest hope is finest memory.” 
 —Ge0rGE ELiorT. 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM GREEN, 
 324-330 PEARL STREET, NEW YORK. 
 1901. 
 
Pamphlet Collection 
 e Divinity School 
 
 MORNING SERVICE. 
 
 ORGAN VOLUNTARY: “Largo” (Xerxes).—Handel. 
 
 INVOCATION: Cuorr, 
 
 Everlasting Holy One! 
 
 Many a well-beloved son 
 
 Thou dost choose, like Him of old, 
 For Thy truth’s sake to be bold. 
 Not by any outward sign 
 
 Dost Thou show Thy will divine; 
 Deep within Thy voice doth cry, 
 And our spirits make reply. 
 
 Lo! we stand before Thee now, 
 And the silent, inward vow 
 Thou hast heard in that profound 
 Where is neither voice nor sound; 
 Thou hast heard, and Thou wilt bless 
 With Thy might and tenderness; 
 We have come to do Thy will; 
 With Thy love our spirits fill. 
 —John W. Chadweck. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY SENTENCES. 
 
 HYMN. Tune: Missionary Chant. 
 
 O Life that maketh all things new— 
 
 The blooming earth, the thoughts of men! 
 Our pilgrim feet, wet with Thy dew, 
 
 In gladness hither turn again. 
 
 From hand to hand the greeting flows, 
 From eye to eye the signals run, 
 
 From heart to heart the bright hope glows; 
 The seekers of the Light are one. 
 
 3 
 
One in the freedom of the Truth, 
 One in the joy of paths untrod, 
 
 One in the soul’s perennial youth, 
 One in the larger thought of God ;— 
 
 The freer step, the fuller breath, 
 The wide horizon’s grander view, 
 The sense of life that knows no death, 
 The Life that maketh all things new. 
 —Samuel Longfellow. 
 
 READING OF THE SCRIPTURES. 
 CHOIR: ‘' Praise Ye the Father.”—Gounod. 
 
 PRAYER. 
 
 HYMN. Tune: Prayer. 
 
 (Written for our Twenty-fifth Anniversary.) 
 
 We sowed a seed in faith and hope 
 Out in the unfenced lands. 
 
 Now, rooted deep and spreading fair, 
 A living tree it stands. 
 
 Nor strife nor cry has marred its growth, 
 But, broadening silently, 
 
 Each bough that sways in sunshine says: 
 ‘‘The Truth shall make you free!” 
 
 Its leaves have for our healing been, 
 By dews of heaven blest; 
 
 Beneath its boughs our children sang, 
 Our dear ones passed to rest. 
 
 We in its shade with God have walked, 
 Whom our own hearts could see, 
 
 And lo! from need of rite or creed 
 His Truth has made us free. 
 
 From outward rule to inner law 
 That Truth our feet still lead! 
 From letter into spirit still, 
 From form to life and deed! 
 From God afar to God most near! 
 Our confidence is He; 
 From fear of man or church’s ban 
 His Truth has made us free. 
 —Samuel Longfellow. 
 
 4 
 
HISTORICAL DISCOURSE. 
 
 Ir has been plausibly maintained by some of the geologists 
 that America is the older continent, but, thought of in the 
 terms of civilization and enlightenment, nothing upon the con- 
 tinent is very old. It is but little more than four centuries 
 since Columbus, unaware of what had happened, touched our 
 shores, not half the time since Oxford entered on her millen- 
 nial career and Alfred made a brave beginning for that Eng- 
 land who is the mother of us all. There are Unitarian 
 churches in America which are venerable as measured by the 
 standards of our American history; the oldest that of the Pil- 
 grim Fathers, 1620; the First Church in Salem, 1629; the 
 First Church in Boston, 1630; but these churches have not 
 this age as Unitarian churches. They were originally Cal- 
 vinistic, and did not become Unitarian till a century ago and 
 less. It is the Congregational organization and not the Uni- 
 tarian faith that has the venerable date. The first church 
 organized in America as Unitarian was that of Philadelphia 
 in 1796. The first church to become Unitarian was King’s 
 Chapel, Boston, 1785. The next was even more distin- 
 guished, the Church of the Pilgrim Fathers, at the century’s 
 turn. This was the first New England Congregational church 
 to hang out the Unitarian banner. Of the old Puritan churches 
 we have, or had a few years ago, 120 on our Unitarian list. 
 
 The first Unitarian church in this vicinity, organized as 
 such, is also the first Congregational church in New York, 
 that of All Souls. Our Brooklyn beginnings were in the 
 thirties. In all strictness the Church of the Saviour is the 
 second Unitarian church in Brooklyn. It was chartered as 
 such, but in 1842 its charter, as well as that of the original 
 First Church, was abandoned and a new First Church was 
 
 5 
 
duly incorporated. Consequently, our mother church was 
 only nine years old when we were born. ‘‘ Where everything 
 is new, and our own is of the newest, no savour of antiquity 
 must be expected in the feast prepared.” I said this twenty- 
 five years ago, but since then so many Unitarian churches 
 have sprung up that ours is now one of the most immemorial. 
 Yet, somehow—I do not know exactly how—the fifty years 
 now past seem less extended than did the twenty-five in 1876; 
 perhaps because then I was still young, and now am getting 
 old, and all the years seem shorter than they did. Perhaps, 
 too, because since then we have had many centennial anni- 
 versaries, and any historical period less than a century in 
 length seems less important than it did. 
 
 In 1876 I recited the life-history of our Society and, if I 
 would not falsify that history, I am obliged to repeat many 
 of the details which were embodied in my Twenty-fifth An- 
 niversary discourse. To invent others for the sake of an 
 agreeable variety would be quite improper. Moreover, some 
 of you have forgotten those details, and others have joined 
 themselves to our assembly since our former celebration. All 
 beginnings fluctuate around different points, and the dates for- 
 mally agreed upon are generally more or less arbitrary. Some, 
 no doubt, would say that we should reckon our lifetime from 
 November 5, 1850, when there was a meeting at the Brooklyn 
 Institute ‘‘of persons in favor of the formation of a second 
 Unitarian Society in Brooklyn.” Charles M. Olcott, father of 
 George M. Olcott, one of the later presidents of our trustees, 
 was chairman of this meeting, and the secretary was Benjamin 
 F. Seaver, father and namesake of our present secretary, two 
 out of many examples of a continuity which has run the old 
 and new together in one sacred stream. The need of a second 
 society was urged upon the ground that since the formation 
 of the first the population of the city had nearly doubled and 
 was nearly 100,000. When the secretary writes that Dr. Far- 
 ley and several leading members of his church ‘‘had been 
 consulted before proceeding to azy action whatever, and had 
 ail warmly approved the movement,” the record seems too 
 flattering to those concerned, but it is certain that no bad 
 blood in this case, as in many others, furnished the seed of the 
 new church. Something less than perfect satisfaction there 
 
 6 
 
was no doubt with ‘‘the sincere milk of the Word” which Dr. 
 Farley measured out. To-day there is not a single person 
 connected with our Society who was present at that meeting 
 of thirty-four persons, and the only survivor is, I think, Mr. 
 John C. Beale. In and between the lines of Mr. Seaver’s rec- 
 ord of the meeting we easily discern the leading spirits. One 
 of them was E. S. Mills, another was Hamlin Blake, father of 
 my friend, James Vila Blake, one of the most gifted of our 
 Unitarian ministers, his gifts unique as they are beautiful. 
 One thing to notice about this meeting and the general move- 
 ment is that there is not a sign of any disposition to encourage 
 a less conservative Unitarianism than that of the First Church. 
 A call was extended to Dr. A. P. Peabody, then preaching at 
 Portsmouth, N. H. Later his connection with Harvard Uni- 
 versity brought him an enviable and tender fame. In 1850, 
 as later, he was one of the most conservative of Unitarian 
 preachers, and, if he had come when called, this might have 
 been the banner church of Unitarian conservatism. 
 
 But he did not come, though the committee sent to 
 him was armed to the teeth with letters from Drs. 
 Farley, Bellows, Gannett and others. ‘‘I do not be- 
 lieve,” wrote Dr. Bellows, ‘‘that a Unitarian Society 
 was ever started in our country with as strong a 
 root as this. When before have we heard of fifty families 
 starting up at once ready to claim a place among the most 
 vigorous and important societies?” November 18 there was a 
 meeting to hear Dr. Peabody’s unwelcome letter, saying that 
 he could not come. Thecommittee kept up its urgency 
 through the winter, but without avail. There was a third 
 meeting, to hear its report, March 26, 1851. Mr. Reuben 
 Daniell, who is with us and of us still, but prevented by 
 broken health from joining in this commemoration, was 
 present at this meeting. A first religious service was ap- 
 pointed for April 2oth. With that genial optimism which is 
 so characteristic of religious initiative, the expenses of the 
 Society for the first year were estimated at $2,000, and were 
 $3,300. A committee of twelve held various meetings, and 
 the din of preparation was immense. What to do about the 
 music was then, as sometimes since, a very serious question. 
 A quartette calling themselves the Alleghanians was finally 
 
 7 
 
engaged, and its secular and festive title was adumbrated by 
 the assurance that its component parts were members of the 
 Sacred Music Society. But this assurance was not enough 
 for Judge Greenwood, who had agreed to play the organ, and 
 he made a masterly retreat. So, after the first Sunday, did 
 the promising young man, whose family, being Presbyterians, 
 were deeply grieved that he should assist at Unitarian worship. 
 If he had stayed we might have converted him or have soft- 
 ened his prejudices. We have had such fortune with some 
 others. The Alleghanians were soon called away on a pro- 
 fessional tour, and shortly the name of Mrs. Prindle appears 
 on the musical records, the tradition of whose singing lingers 
 among us to this day—a haunting melody. 
 
 The place of the first reguiar service was the Brooklyn 
 Female Academy, lineal predecessor of the Packer Institute 
 and occupying the same site. Dr. Gannett had been engaged 
 to preach, but for some reason could not come and sent John 
 Ware, who, being detained on the Sound, arrived a little late 
 and a good deal disquieted. No echo of that first sermon has 
 come down to us, but, because it was John Ware who preached 
 it, it was surely good. So were the next following for several 
 Sundays, Dr. Dewey preaching them. Ever after he had a cer- 
 tain tenderness for this Society, because of the response to 
 that preaching, and extended it to me, when in due time I came 
 into the good inheritance. At the first service there were 
 about fifty male persons present, and one of these, Mr. W. P. 
 Beale, a member of our Society from that beginning, is with 
 us here to-day. Strangely enough, in view of their perennial 
 help, the women were not counted, but of those who heard 
 those sermons of Mr. Ware and Dr. Dewey we have Mrs. 
 Whitney, Mrs. Seaver and Mrs. Boggs still with us, by God’s 
 grace; and if Mrs. Manning did not enter on the work with 
 these she was not far behind. 
 
 That, in its early course, the Society knew good preach- 
 ing when it heard it, is shown plainly enough by the calls ex- 
 tended to James Freeman Clarke and Horatio Stebbins in 1852, 
 and to Thomas Starr King in 1853. Whatever good has come 
 to you from other men, it is easy to imagine what a career of 
 usefulness and honor would have been Freeman Clarke’s if 
 he had come. He had already engaged to come for six 
 
 8 
 
months, when his wife’s health compelled a European journey, 
 and the Society, not knowing when he would return, reluc- 
 tantly abandoned him and turned to that great soul, Horatio 
 Stebbins, whose subsequent ministry in San Francisco began 
 on the same day with mine in Brooklyn and ran parallel with 
 it for five and thirty years. 
 
 With him matters went so far that a house was hired for 
 him and the money for its furnishing secured. He was then 
 preaching in Fitchburg, Mass., and such constraint was put 
 upon him that he could not get away. The ill news came on 
 Sunday morning, January 1, 1853, and the Scripture for the 
 day might well have been that which recites the successive 
 calamities of Job. For it was signalized by the burning of 
 the Female Academy, with the entire rolling stock of the So- 
 ciety, hymn-books, Sunday-School library, etc. Nevertheless 
 there was the usual service, at the usual hour, in the Brook- 
 lyn Institute, a kind of torture-chamber,then, where, from the 
 high and narrow seats, one’s feet dangled in mid-air. Secre- 
 tary Seaver must have bustled round that morning in a lively 
 manner. Four months later, April 23, services were held for 
 the first time in the Brooklyn Athenzum, then a brand-new 
 building and the finest in the city nota church. But in the 
 meantime Starr King, of glorious fame, had been called, as 
 vainly as the others heretofore, and Samuel Longfellow had 
 been heard one Sunday, April 16, the last Sunday in the 
 Brooklyn Institute. He was engaged in advance to preach 
 six months, but was not kept upon the anxious seat so long. 
 June 13, 1853, he received a unanimous call. Before his 
 first preaching some had been much attracted to his friend, 
 Samuel Johnson; probably we should make no mistake if we 
 regarded Mr. Manning as the chief of these. But Mr. Johnson 
 was too definitely and even sharply radical for the majority, 
 and he said: ‘‘ You must hear my friend Longfellow.” Upon 
 this hint he came, with the result which I have signified al- 
 ready. I should have said that in June, 1852, the Society 
 was legally organized with a Board of Trustees, of which 
 Charles M. Olcott was president. This organization contem- 
 plated the existence of a church, so called, made up of com- 
 municants (persons partaking of the Lord’s Supper), but no 
 such differentiation had taken place on Mr. Longfellow’s 
 
 9 
 
arrival, and there never was any such. Mr. Longfellow 
 administered the Lord’s Supper, but to the entire congrega- 
 tion—a measure hardly less radical than would have been total 
 abstention from therite. From the amended By-Laws of the 
 Society all mention of an interior ‘‘church” is rigidly ex- 
 cluded. Article I. of Section 2 reads: ‘‘ The pastor and congre- 
 gation constitute the Society, and no subscription or assent to 
 any formula of faith shall be required as a qualification for 
 church membership.” This article, if I mistake not, dates 
 from 1854, when it was inversely responsive to an elaborate 
 creed which had recently been smuggled into an annual 
 report of the American Unitarian Association, and had re- 
 ceived the attention of Theodore Parker in one of the most 
 pungent letters that he ever wrote. 
 
 Mr. Longfellow’s first sermon in the Athenzum was 
 printed; also the first after his ordination in October, 1853. 
 Both of these sermons, ‘‘ The Word Preached”’ and ‘‘ A Spiritual 
 and Working Church,” are preserved in the collection of Mr. 
 Longfellow’s sermons, made since his death. He said in the 
 former: ‘‘ The pulpit must not present a theology which con- 
 tradicts clear facts of science or of human nature. It must 
 not teach a bibliolatry which shuts its eyes tothe plainest dic- 
 tates of common-sense or puts itself in antagonism to reason 
 and conscience—to the living word of God in the soul.” ‘‘ As 
 I walked through your beautiful streets,” he said, ‘‘I won- 
 dered into which of these homes shall I go, and leave, perhaps, 
 some benediction.”” The words were prophecy of a benediction 
 as inclusive as the homes he entered and the friendships that 
 he made. In thesermon following his ordination, at which Dr. 
 Furness preached the sermon and Dr. Bellows gave the right 
 hand of fellowship, Mr. Longfellow defined a church as ‘‘a 
 society of men, women and children, associated together by a 
 religious spirit for a religious work.” ‘: Christian,” he said, 
 must mean simply ‘‘ religious,” or it would be sectarian. To 
 the name ‘‘ Unitarian” he objected, for Martineau’s reason— 
 it seemed to found a religious society on a theological doc- 
 trine. He sketched a scheme of work, some features of 
 which were at once accepted by the Society and have charac- 
 terized it ever since; notably monthly collections for charita- 
 ble purposes. Another feature, ‘‘the printing and distribu- 
 
 10 
 
ting of books and tracts,’’ was never realized during his 
 ministry, but since 1875 we have been faithful to the early 
 hope in this respect. 
 
 The settlement of Mr. Longfellow was one of various 
 signs that the new Society was gradually putting off the old 
 man of Unitarian orthodoxy and putting on the new man of 
 ‘‘Parkerism,” transcendentalism, liberalism, rationalism. 
 From the time of his settlement the Society proceeded rapidly 
 to develop a strongly individual character, reflecting that of 
 the pastor, who had a way of his own for doing everything 
 he did. Did he baptize children, the service was a tender 
 jubilee; did he marry people, the service was no mere cere- 
 mony but a sacred inspiration; no ministration to the sorrow- 
 ing was ever less formal or more comforting than his; and 
 “‘the communion,” so called, was indeed that, human and 
 divine, as he moved about among the people, carrying the 
 elements in his own hands and breathing little fragmentary 
 words out of the Bible or from his own spiritual deep. Men 
 and women after his own kind gravitated to him and stood 
 by him with unalterable devotion. There was growth by 
 elimination as well as by addition. Some dropped away and 
 others stayed who might as well have gone. His ministry 
 attracted no crowds; it built up no great society; by our con- 
 temporary standards—numbers and bigness, noise and shout- 
 ing—it was of smallaccount. Tried by the highest standards, 
 it was a success but seldom paralleled in the religious life of 
 nineteenth century communities. 
 
 For several years the happiness of those who have no his- 
 tory fell to the lot of the Society. In the political world, the 
 slave-power was marching on from one aggression to another, 
 and Mr. Longfellow did what he could for the ideals of free- 
 dom and humanity, let who would hear him or forbear. In 
 1856 there was talk of purchasing the little church which is 
 ‘still standing on the corner of Atlantic and Bond Streets, not 
 a brilliant idea, as seen from the present standing of that 
 tegion. In May, 1857, it was resolved to build a chapel on 
 the ground which we now occupy. ‘‘ Chapel” was Mr. Long- 
 fellow’s word, and ‘‘New Chapel” his designation of the 
 ‘completed building, from which many never varied their lives 
 long. A building committee was appointed May 7, and ground 
 
 HUE 
 
was broken the next month. With afresh access of that 
 genial optimism which marks religious undertakings, the cost 
 of the building (the land, orrzbile dictu, being leased) was 
 estimated at $14,000, and wasin the event some $13,000 more. 
 To make bad matters worse, the business crash of 1857 super- 
 vened, so that not all the $9,000 subscribed was paid in. The 
 sale of pews reduced the debt considerably, but a tidy re- 
 siduum of $10,000 was left—more than the original subscrip- 
 tion. This, with the ground rent, was sometimes an almost 
 fatal drain on the resources of the people. Question as we 
 may the wisdom of this business, it should be remembered 
 that there was no resort to such denominational or otherwise 
 external help as has latterly become the habit of all church- 
 building enterprises among Unitarians and others. However 
 straitened, we have never gone away from home for the 
 relief required. 
 
 I have told you more than once the story of the lilac- 
 covered sermon which in the spring of 1858 was sent to a 
 friend in Bridgewater, Mass., by Mr. Plimpton, for a long 
 time one of the most influential members of our Society. 
 From that friend it came into my hands, and was my first in-. 
 timation of the existence of this Society, and shaped my 
 dream of what a religious society should be. It was Mr. 
 Longfellow’s dedication sermon, preached March 2, 1858. A 
 better sermon was never preached under this lowly roof. My 
 dear friend, Mrs. Mills, wished to have me re-deliver it on 
 some anniversary occasion, and one of my vain regrets is that 
 I neyer met her wishes in this particular. When the year 
 1908 brings round the fiftieth anniversary of the dedication, 
 you must see to it that your minister—I wonder who—reads. 
 it then, and gives out the noble hymn which Samuel Johnson. 
 wrote for the event: 
 
 “To Light that shines in stars and souls, 
 To Law that rounds the world with calm, 
 To Love whose equal triumph rolls 
 Through martyr’s prayer and angel's psalm, 
 We wed these walls with unseen bands 
 In holier shrines not made with hands.” 
 
 The text of the sermon was, ‘‘ One God and Father of all, 
 who is above all and through all and in you all.” It was the: 
 12 
 
highest and most characteristic flight of Mr. Longfellow’s 
 mind. The flood of years has not denuded its essential truth 
 of any part of its significance nor washed away from it one 
 grain of gold. 
 
 A different text was suggested for the dedication sermon 
 by some malicious person: ‘‘ This man began to build and was 
 not able to finish ”—a reflection on the fact that higher walls 
 were at first intended, but not carried up, the money giving 
 out. But there was great pride and comfort in the new home 
 and much satisfaction in the vesper service, the first of its 
 kind established in any of our churches. It has had copies, 
 few of them equal to the original, which, with the hymns 
 written expressly for it by Mr. Longfellow, was a singularly 
 happy product of his inspiration. It was a vital growth of 
 his insight and imagination, and detached from him, as in 
 Mr. Staples’s case and mine, was an uprooted tree. For Mr. 
 Longfellow its popularity was its main defect. Its 
 appropriate quietness was devastated by the swarming 
 crowd. 
 
 It was a tragedy that Mr. Longfellow remained with the 
 Society but two years after the building of the church into 
 whose foundations and superstructure had gone so much of 
 his affectionate and careful thought. The strain of the polit- 
 ical situation may have had something to do with the event. 
 A plain-spoken, kindly man warned me to this effect. ‘‘ Some 
 of us,” he said, ‘‘went round and let all the benches, and 
 then Mr. Longfellow preached a John Brown sermon and 
 drove them allaway.” This was a gross exaggeration with a 
 kernel of reality. There was a John Brown sermon, and 
 there were others of like sterling quality, deprecated by the 
 more cautious in a halting and equivocating time; but a fuller 
 tide of health would have carried Mr. Longfellow over into 
 the years of the great war, when he would not have been 
 fierce enough for those who had by this time plucked up their 
 drowning courage by the locks. June 24, 1860 (having re- 
 signed his charge in April), he preached his ‘‘ Parting Words,” 
 the text from Deut., xv, 1—‘‘ At the end of seven years thou 
 shalt make arelease.”” It was a noble exposition of his views 
 and feelings on such great themes as God, Human Nature, 
 Jesus, the Bible, the Nature of Religion; and all that is essen- 
 
 3 
 
tial to the higher liberalism of to-day is packed within the 
 limits of that one superb discourse. 
 
 In the fall of 1860 the Society showed a noble prescience 
 by calling William J. Potter, then just settled in New Bedford. 
 His coming would have meant immeasurable good for Brook- 
 lyn, as his staying in New Bedford did for that favored city, 
 where, after publishing ‘‘ Twenty-five Sermons of Twenty- 
 five Years’’—the best expression of our later thought—he 
 still kept bravely on. Equally unsuccessful was the attempt 
 to capture Octavius Frothingham, then barely entered on his 
 brilliant course in New York City. In June, 1861, Rev. N. A. 
 Staples, of Milwaukee, preached for you once or twice, and 
 you hastened to invite him to remain with you. But, for all 
 your haste, your letter found him in camp before Washington 
 as chaplain of the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers. Having 
 served out his term in that capacity, he came to you in Novem- 
 ber, Mr. Frothingham preaching the installation sermon, 
 November 6, and Dr. Osgood refuting it as best he could 
 within the limits and obstructions of the installation prayer. 
 Preaching his last sermon November 15, 1863, his active 
 Brooklyn ministry exceeded two years only by one week. 
 But in those two years he made a wonderful impression. 
 For this Society they were years of pride and victory, for him 
 a period of alternating hopes and fears and heroic struggle 
 against fearful odds. A sick man for years, and sicker than 
 ever when he came to you, his sermons were the embodiment 
 of health, the expression of an amazing intellectual vitality. 
 Somehow the heavens were opened to him as they had never 
 been before, and he rejoiced in the vision with exceeding 
 great joy, and reported it to his people in words of tingling 
 flame. In 1870 I wrote, at your desire, a sketch of his life, 
 with a few of his complete sermons and selections from 
 others. These sermons and fragments justify the conviction 
 that here was a preacher of uncommon force and power. But 
 the printed page does not tell the whole story. The person- 
 ality of the preacher added to the vigor of his thought and to 
 his depth of feeling a magnetic force which multiplied their 
 effect with the prodigality of a numerical exponent, cubing 
 upon their statical significance to the tenth and hundredth 
 power. 
 
 14 
 
Agreeing substantially with Mr. Longfellow’s theological 
 and critical opinions, Mr. Staples was less considerate than 
 he had been of the prejudices and even of the sensibilities of 
 backward minds. In one respect he differed widely from Mr. 
 Longfellow. He was much more enamored than he of the 
 new science which in those years was coming in upon us in a 
 flood. He was one of the first among us to take up into his 
 preaching the significance of Darwin and Spencer, and no one 
 has done it since with more of insight into the spiritual real- 
 ities involved. In this respect his preaching was a wonderful 
 anticipation. 
 
 The excitements and the terrors of the Civil War wore out 
 his failing strength at an accelerated pace. He would sit 
 up all night to get the news, leaning out of his window to 
 catch some newsboy’s far off cry of victory or defeat. His 
 flaming soul burned up the house of life. You saw the 
 approaching end, while as yet he could not, the splendor of 
 his opportunity blinding him to all beside. Fortunately the 
 last stage of his disease was short and swift. It was glad- 
 dened for him by his consciousness of having beaten out 
 some little of his real music and by the unspeakable ten- 
 derness of many friends. He died February 5, 1864. He 
 was only thirty-three years old. But in him it was fulfilled 
 as it is written: ‘‘ He, being made perfect in a short time, 
 fulfilled a long time.” 
 
 Nothing could be more natural than for the Society to 
 turn in its bereavement and its helplessness to Robert 
 Collyer. He had been Staples’s closest friend, and at his 
 funeral, and again, more carefully, he had brought to you 
 the solace of an exquisite appreciation of his character and 
 mind. Mr. Collyer proving intractable to your desires, in 
 May you sent a letter to your present minister, then a senior 
 student in the Harvard Divinity School, and asked him to 
 come and preach for you three months, beginning Septem- 
 ber 11. He came, bringing with him for a reviving cordial 
 a call from the Haverhill Society, to which he had much 
 recourse in the first stages of the experiment. But the 
 agony was not prolonged. In less than two months (Novem- 
 ber 6) he received your invitation to remain. It was the 
 Sunday before Lincoln’s re-election, and my sermon was from 
 
 a5 
 
the text, ‘‘What God hath joined together,” interpreted as 
 Liberty and Union, ‘‘let not man put asunder.” I think it 
 cost me one dissentient vote. I was ordained and installed 
 December 21. Mr. Collyer preached the sermon, and when, 
 twenty-five years later, he preached it over again to us, it 
 seemed to have gathered strength and sweetness every year, 
 though, when we first heard it, it seemed too good to be 
 improved. 
 
 It willalways be to me one of the incomprehensible things 
 that you should have made this venture, and another that some- 
 how my ‘‘staying quality’ prevailed over the difficulties of 
 my position. Could I have compared myself, as I can now, 
 with Longfellow and Staples, wild horses could not have 
 drawn me from the safe inconspicuity of Haverhill to such a 
 perilous seat. Or would the joyous hardihood of youth have 
 made me bold to snatch what was so tempting to my hand? 
 Certain it is that I was dreadfully young and crude and inex- 
 perienced. To make bad matters worse, my coming here was 
 close upon the heels of five years of incessant overwork, and a 
 starvation diet, necessitated by the conditions of a course of 
 education without money and a passion for the private owner- 
 ship of books. Hence came reaction and, where I had ex- 
 pected unwonted access of ideas, an emptiness as if my brains 
 were out. Just at the worst, a friend took me off to the flag- 
 raising on Fort Sumter, so that I was one of those who took 
 to Charleston, where the rebellion had begun, the news of 
 Lee’s surrender and the rebellion’s end, and after my return 
 another friend welcomed me to his country home, and these 
 novel situations and these genial influences brought back the 
 blood into my heart, the thinking stuff into my brain. Mean- 
 time, and for a year or two, there was a gradual exodus from 
 the Society of the less stable elements. It was natural and 
 inevitable that those casually attracted by Mr. Staples’s 
 calcium light should not rejoice in such ‘‘a candle of the 
 Lord” as had been established in his place. Presently I 
 found myself with a constituency almost without exception 
 signed and sealed with Mr. Longfellow’s abiding spirit. Then 
 it began to grow, and my very own began to come to me, 
 until, in 1872, the condition of the Society seemed strong 
 enough to warrant the undertaking of an heroic enterprise— 
 
 16 
 
the payment of the debt incurred when the church was built, 
 and which, in the course of fourteen years of various change 
 and growth, had not been diminished. The sum of $10,400 was 
 raised, an amount nearly $2,000 in excess of the original sub- 
 scription for the church. The event could not have been more 
 timely, for the next year came Black Friday and the long period 
 of commercial misery and ruin following that fateful day. If 
 we had waited a year, the debt might never have been paid, 
 and the weight of that, added to our ground-rent, that ‘‘old 
 man of the sea,’’ would have been a well-nigh insuperable 
 burden. We cannot be too grateful to those who initiated 
 and carried out this enterprise. But some of those who were 
 most prominent in it were captivated with the idea thata 
 church must be ‘‘a paying concern,” that the rental must 
 meet the expenses, and, to bring about this condition, the 
 rents of the pews were so much increased that, coinciding 
 with the long financial depression, the increase tended to 
 freeze out a good many of our people who could not afford 
 the higher rates. This has always seemed to me one of the 
 most ill-considered and unfortunate turns in the affairs of our . 
 Society, in principle radically wrong, disastrous in its effect. ~ 
 
 The payment of the standing debt left unpaid a floating 
 debt which had mounted nearly to $5,000 by January, 1876, 
 when it was absolutely discharged, and since then, with brief 
 and inconsiderable exceptions—of late years without any— 
 we have enjoyed the distinction, most uncommon among 
 churches, of being free from debt, astate of things well pleas- 
 ing tomy soul, inheriting, as I do, from my father—who was, 
 as Charles Lamb described his own, ‘‘a man of most incor- 
 tigible and losing honesty ”—a hatred of debt which is one of 
 the most serious passions of my life. 
 
 In 1876 we celebrated the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of 
 the church foundation, Dr. Bellows and Mr. Frothingham 
 making the most notable contributions. Mr. Frothingham’s 
 portraitures of Longfellow and Staples were by a master’s 
 hand. Almost simultaneously we entered upon the work of 
 sermon publication and distribution. This was suggested by 
 Mr. Bryant one pleasant day as we were taking one of our 
 first walks together in my beloved Chesterfield. Mr. Froth- 
 ingham had set an example which it seemed presumptuous for 
 
 17 
 
me to follow, but in the event I have been glad of my te- 
 merity. In the course of twenty-six years we have published 
 twenty-six series of eight numbers each—in all some 300,000 
 copies. More of the work of distribution has fallen to Mr. 
 Bryant than to any other, and, I trust, more of the satisfaction 
 and delight. Hereby Ihave enjoyed an extension of my pul- 
 pit work and influence, which has been to me a consolation 
 but for which I should sometimes have wearied of the small- 
 ness of my way. It has brought to me hundreds of letters 
 from all parts of America and from other lands, not to be 
 touehed by which, sometimes to grateful tears, would mark 
 me as the veriest churl. It has assured me a larger parish of 
 at least one thousand souls. If one sermon a month is their 
 portion, that is as many assome of you here at home find nec- 
 essary for your spiritual edification. 
 
 Closely allied with this work of sermon publication, and 
 indeed one of its most effective instruments, has been the work 
 of our Post Office Mission, now a committee of the Women’s 
 Branch Alliance, but in its origin anticipating that. Its first 
 meeting, in 1886, was at the house of Mrs. Faris, and shortly 
 all the meetings were at the house of Mrs. William Henry 
 Parsons, whose interest in the work was very great and did 
 not slacken when from year to year weakness and pain en- 
 croached upon her bodily strength but could not chill the 
 ardor of her mind. In 1888 Mrs. Andrew Jacobs was made 
 chairman of the Mission, and for twelve years continued in 
 this office, doing an incalculable amount of conscientious 
 work. Under her charge the work, now issuing from the 
 Sunday-School Room as a place of meeting, grew to its 
 present bulk, and Mrs. Faris, the present chairman, takes no 
 backward step. The Mission is at present corresponding with 
 132 persons, nearly fifty of whom are in Texas and South 
 Dakota. Ten of these correspondents are distributing agents. 
 During the current year 3,722 sermons have been sent out, 
 724 magazines, 728 papers, Christian Registers, etc., with 89 
 letters, not to mention postals, 40 of these letters by the 
 chairman of the Mission. Here is a work extremely personal, 
 putting us in vital touch with more than one hundred men 
 and women, many of them living lonely lives on the out- 
 skirts of civilization, and prizing unspeakably their communi- 
 
 18 
 
cation with a larger intellectual and spiritual life than that 
 afforded by their immediate environment. We cannot bring 
 to those who have done for us this patient and exacting work 
 more gratitude and admiration than their fidelity, asking 
 nothing, should receive. I bow with special reverence before 
 that inner shrine of their activity—their correspondence with 
 so many whose faces they have never seen. Innumerable the 
 spirits they have touched to finer issues in this beautiful and 
 tender way. 
 
 The Women’s Branch Alliance, of which the Post Office 
 Mission is a vital part—was instituted in 1887, taking up into 
 itself the Beneficence Committee, which was organized at an 
 early stage of our development. Beginning with a member- 
 ship of 35, it has now more than 80 members on its 
 roll, and its committees on Hospitality, Literature,and Be- 
 neficence have done excellent work. The social life of our 
 Society is now pretty much exhausted by the monthly meet- 
 ings of the Alliance, and this life would be extremely one- 
 sided and hyper-feminine were not the balance partly re- 
 dressed by the church-aisle conference, which is held after 
 every Sunday morning service. What would you think of a 
 request, as in some churches, that you go out without speak- 
 ing to anyone? Yours is, I think, a much more excellent 
 way. The literary features of the Alliance work have taken 
 a wide range and been profitable, both for instruction and 
 righteousness, while the work of the Beneficence Committee, 
 both as replenishing our treasury and as giving help where it 
 is needed, has amply justified its name. I could not possibly 
 exaggerate my sense of gratitude for what the Branch Alli- 
 ance has done for the Society, and would have this feeling 
 shared by everyone to whom the welfare of the Society is a 
 cherished aim. 
 
 That ours has been a colonizing church is plain to all who 
 know the history of our interior life. One of our colonies is 
 the Female Employment Society, which originated in the aspir- 
 ations of certainnoble women here, and soon grew beyond our 
 parish bounds. Another is the Flower Mission, which sprang 
 like a red rose from the warm heart of Mrs. Beale. Another is 
 the Brooklyn Guild, which had its personal origin within our 
 ranks; here also some of its most active furtherance, the 
 
 19 
 
Maxwell House standing preéminently for that individual 
 help which it confesses in its name. The first private kinder- 
 garten in the city was long supported by your hands, and the 
 first public kindergarten was Mr. George W. Banker’s inspira- 
 tion. All that we see to-day upon this fruitful tree is but 
 what he foresaw. Reading within the week an interview of 
 Mr. Andrew D. White with Tolstoi, I found that wonderful 
 old man approving the publications of the Brooklyn Ethical 
 Association as among the best things that had come to him 
 from America. I would not make too much of that approval, 
 but I have received too many testimonies to the value of those 
 publications to doubt my own assurance of their usefulness 
 and worth, or that of the Association in its general course. 
 It began as a morning class in the Sunday-School, and went 
 on to more ambitious, if not better things. I cannot but con- 
 ceive that there was loss as well as gain in its expansive course. 
 Dr. Janes was a born teacher, and you should have kept him 
 here, though to do so you had been obliged to cut the 
 minister adrift. I am glad of his success, but sorry that he 
 ever left Brooklyn, where he is needed more, much more, than 
 amidst the hum of Harvard’s college factories. 
 
 Coming home again, by way of my allusion to the 
 Sunday-School, I should say that that was instituted in 
 September, 1851, and there are some of ‘‘the Whiting boys,” 
 and perhaps others, with us still who were members of it in 
 its earliest years. I found Mr. Gerrish superintending it. 
 For twelve years he stood up to the work with rare capacity 
 for it, loving little children with that pathetic passion which 
 we often find in persons who have no children of their own. 
 He was my dearest friend, and a great light went out for me 
 and mine when he passed out of life. Mr. Potts took up the 
 work and developed an exquisitely beautiful service; Mr. 
 Wheeler came next for many faithful years, and Mr. Palmer 
 for a shorter term; I took my turn, and one came after me 
 who should be preferred before me in all the work that I have 
 ever done of any kind, and still she holds the fort. If I 
 began to mention teachers I should not know where to stop. 
 Unfortunately we have not required so many latterly, but the 
 quality has never before risen to so’ high a point of intelli- 
 gence and moral inspiration. 
 
 20 
 
The transition is easy from this point to our present 
 choir, so largely has this been recruited from the Sunday- 
 School class formerly taught by Miss Ellen Brackett. What- 
 ever its defects—and those composing it are quite as sensible 
 of these as the most critical among you—it has contributed 
 more to our common worship than any previous musical organ- 
 ization. ‘Time was when this was conducted at an annual ex- 
 pense of more than $3,000, which the Society could ill afford 
 to meet. I can truly say that our singers generally in those 
 times entered earnestly into the spirit of our services. Some 
 of them endeared themselves greatly to the congregation. 
 But for myself, I wearied of the everlasting criticism of the 
 music as a purely esthetic performance, and rejoiced when 
 the excuse for such criticism was done away with forever. We 
 have our failures still, but the moral temper of the situation 
 is entirely changed. We are much indebted to our organist 
 and chorister for his fidelity. I will not offend his modesty 
 by so much as mentioning his name. 
 
 A few words may be permitted me concerning the course 
 of my own special work during the seven and thirty years of 
 my ministry to this Society. In its general import it has 
 continued the traditions of rational freedom so firmly estab- 
 lished by Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Staples. I have taught 
 with them the moral character of God; the natural re- 
 ligiousness of man; the pure humanity of Jesus; the 
 human origin of the Bible and its lack of all authority 
 save that of its intrinsic rationality. Great changes have 
 come over the spirit of the popular theology during my 
 ministry. Before I came here I was warned of the danger of 
 preaching for the Twenty-eighth Society in Boston (Theodore 
 Parker’s)—a warning which I did not heed—and I have lately 
 written a life of Theodore Parker which has been received 
 with exceptional cordiality by the leading orthodox journals 
 in this country and in England. It is more than thirty 
 years since I expounded, with all possible frankness, 
 ‘* What the Bible Is and What It Is Not.” It was damnable 
 heresy then, and now orthodox theological professors and 
 orthodox preachers everywhere are racing with each other 
 for my early goal, and expounding my doctrine ten times as 
 fully and as cogently as I could at any time. In the Divinity 
 
 21 
 
School it was my good fortune to live in an atmosphere quite 
 as positively scientific as theological, so many of Agassiz’s 
 students were my companions in Divinity Hall, and high 
 debate on the Darwinian hypothesis was always goingon. I 
 was an easy convert to that hypothesis, as should have been 
 all Emersonians, and in general my early transcendentalism 
 was gradually qualified by the scientific method. In the 
 seventies all thoughtful men were struggling with what then 
 seemed to be the materialistic implications of science, and I 
 was not exempted from the common lot. ‘There were for me 
 then sometimes moments of thick darkness, but, resolving to 
 preach nothing of which I was not well assured, I found my 
 sinking bark had reached another sea; that the inescapable 
 truths were, after all, the best. No less on this account was 
 I delighted when the long fight with the materialists culmi- 
 nated in a glorious victory for the spiritual conception of the 
 universe and man. Since the conclusion of that controversy 
 my preaching has been less controversial, and, though better 
 by that sign, perhaps less attractive to the passing crowd, to 
 which some kind of a fight has latterly been an essential ele- 
 ment of interest. If I cared to go upon the war-path, and 
 bring you every Sunday a fresh string of scalps, there would 
 be more to hear and to applaud, if not more to pay the bills. 
 That chink of coin reminds me that, for our ability, we have 
 done well on missionary lines, giving each year about $1,000, 
 but some years nearer twice as much, including the expense 
 of our own Publication Fund. 
 
 During the period of my ministry, and especially during 
 its latter part, I have done much with my pen not represented 
 by my pulpit-work. So doing, I have assumed that I was ful- 
 filling your purposes with more efficiency than by withholding 
 from the proffered opportunity. For I have conceived myself 
 to be your servant for the propagation of rational truth and 
 noble enterprise by all rightful means. And so, writing the 
 Life of Theodore Parker, or any other book, wzth your time, 
 Ihave said: ‘‘It is your book,” you using my right hand and 
 brain and heart to speak your truth and love to men beyond 
 these narrow walls. 
 
 Nevertheless I have done a fair amount of writing for your 
 immediate edification: Eleven hundred and fifty-two sermons 
 
 22 
 
and lectures, reserving for the writing of each sermon three 
 days of perfect disengagement from all meaner things; toeach 
 monthly lecture a much longer time. The lecturing went on 
 for more than twenty years. It was an incalculable drain 
 upon my time and strength. It filled my mind with useful 
 knowledge upon various lines; that it did not often leave me 
 spent for the regular sermons of each month I am by no means 
 sure. But I seem to be forgetting that Iam not intending a 
 personal history but the history of our Society. 
 
 This has been subject to the stress and strain of our con- 
 temporary life. The social gravitation has been away from 
 the churches. Fifty years ago religious societies were the 
 social centres in America; even in the great cities they long 
 since ceased to be so. Thechurch-going habit, too, has mani- 
 festly fallen off. Simultaneously this has come about: that 
 the dependence of the churches is less and less on those con- 
 ventionally bound to their support; more and more on those 
 deliberately devoted to their aspirations andtheiraims. Inthe 
 course of my own ministry I have had two or three good con- 
 gregations. The Reaper whose name is Death and the per- 
 petual flux of an unstable life have decimated and depleted 
 them, and others have come in to fill the broken files. But 
 never at any time, I think, have we been a more compact and 
 homogeneous unit than we are to-day, bound together by 
 stronger ties of affection, lifting a common heart more unre- 
 servedly to beautiful and exigent ideals. 
 
 Even where this life-history has seemed to be too much 
 the mere biography of one minister or another, you (the peo- 
 ple) have been implicated in it at every step—your earnest- 
 ness, your constancy, your loving kindness, your fidelity. If 
 the ministers have done something, the people have done in- 
 finitely more. Your generosity has been to them a perpetual 
 wonder, verging sometimes upon a doubting shame—‘‘ Can 
 we deserve so much?” Then they have reflected that they 
 were but your dull and broken weapons in the unending fight 
 with ignorance and wrong. As Ihave looked over the rec- 
 ords of the Society, and rallied my own thoughts, my heart 
 has swelled with honest pride to see what men have served 
 you all the way along in various capacities; what women, too; 
 and I have wondered how many churches have had such noble 
 
 23 
 
men and women conducting their affairs, how many could 
 present so fair a record of unbroken harmony. It is simple 
 truth that we have never had one parish quarrel in these fifty 
 years. A good record that, aschurches go. It is a melancholy 
 fact that the business of churches is frequently conducted on 
 a lower level than that of the shop and the exchange. It has 
 not been so among you. 
 
 If I dared attempt it, how I should like to bless myself 
 and you with a brief space of spiritual communion with those 
 friends of high and liberal soul in whose light we have from 
 time to time rejoiced! 
 
 “They throng the silence of the breast, 
 Imaginations strong and fair, 
 The memory like a cloudless air, 
 The conscience like a sea at rest.” 
 
 But where should I begin? With Mrs. Mills, who was to 
 me so large-hearted, motherly, and to all the vision of a high 
 nobility of womanhood worthy of all obedience? Or with 
 Mr. Manning?—large-brained, but with a larger heart; with 
 philosophic calm revolving all the vaster problems of the time, 
 and yet lynx-eyed for any human hurt. Vain the attempt to 
 make the right beginning, or, that made, fitly to characterize, 
 or even to name without many a culpable omission, those who 
 have been our confidence and strength, our comfort and our 
 
 peace. 
 
 “In every nobler mood 
 We feel the orient of their spirit glow, 
 Part of our life’s unalterable good, 
 Of all our saintlier aspiration; 
 They come transfigured back, 
 Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, 
 Beautiful evermore.” 
 
 It needs no word of mine to summon to this presence 
 those who were nearest to your private hearts, those who 
 loved this church of ours with a very great affection and gave 
 to it their best of wisdom and of will. 
 
 I have been speaking long, and yet how little have I told 
 of our life-history! For this in its completeness would in- 
 clude the aspirations that have been quickened here by ser- 
 mon, hymn, and prayer; the comfort that has passed from 
 soul to soul: the friendships that have been nourished in the 
 
 24 
 
protecting shadow of this dear and pleasant place; the loftier 
 ideals of social excellence and political justice and purity 
 which have risen here upon the earnest mind; the daring 
 hopes for earthly and immortal good which have been enter- 
 tained within these sacred walls. The most that we can hope 
 is that there have been many better men and women, many 
 better young people and children, as the grand result of all 
 that has been wrought and ventured here. 
 
 Taking the road again, for ‘‘road-melody or marching 
 music,” in Carlylean phrase, can we do better than to say and 
 sing?— 
 
 “« The Future hides in it 
 Gladness and sorrow; 
 We press till thorow, 
 
 Naught that abides in it 
 Daunting us—onward. 
 
 ‘* And solemn before us, 
 Veiled, the dark Portal; 
 Goal of all mortal. 
 
 Stars silent rest o’er us, 
 Graves under us silent! 
 
 ‘* But heard are the Voices, 
 Heard are the Sages, 
 The Worlds and the Ages: 
 ‘ Choose well; your choice is 
 Brief and yet endless. 
 
 ‘« * Here eyes do regard you, 
 In Eternity’s stillness; 
 Here is all fulness, 
 
 Ye brave, to reward you; 
 Work and despair not.’” 
 
 SILENT PRAYER, CHOIR RESPONDING: 
 
 Eternal ruler of the ceaseless round 
 Of circling planets singing on their way! 
 Guide of the nations from the night profound, 
 Into the glory of the perfect day! 
 Rule in our hearts that we may ever be 
 Guided and strengthened and upheld by Thee. 
 
 We would be one in hatred of all wrong, 
 One in our love of all things sweet and fair, 
 One with the joy that breaketh into song, 
 
 25 
 
One with the grief that trembles into prayer, 
 One in the power that makes Thy children free 
 To follow Truth, and thus to follow Thee. 
 —John W. Chadwick. 
 
 THANKOFFERING. 
 
 CHOIR: “The Lord is King.”— 7Zriméell. 
 
 HYMN. Tune: Federal Street. 
 
 Come, let us sing a tender song 
 Of those our glances seek in vain! 
 Dear heavenly friends, the way is long 
 On which we meet them not again! 
 
 But still, in memory’s silent deeps, 
 Their spirits pure with us abide, 
 
 And faithful love its secret keeps 
 Of things beyond the parting tide. 
 
 Hail, happy saint, whose spirit lives 
 Unwasted in the songs you sung! 
 
 And you, whose voice such challenge gives, 
 As if a silver ciarion rung! 
 
 And all who in the days no more, 
 With eager mind and glowing heart, 
 
 Here service gave and witness bore, 
 As knowing well the better part. 
 
 Come, let us sing a braver song 
 Of these—of all the good and true 
 Within the veil; God, make us strong, 
 More than they dreamed to wake and do! 
 IgOI. —John W. Chadwick. 
 
 BENEDICTION. 
 
 26 
 
EVENING SERVICE. 
 
 ORGAN: “ Andante in F.”— Volkmar. 
 
 HYMN: Cuore. 
 
 Again as evening’s shadow falls 
 
 We gather in these hallowed walls, 
 And vesper hymn and vesper prayer 
 Rise mingling on the holy air. 
 
 May struggling hearts that seek release 
 Here find the rest of God’s own peace, 
 
 And strengthened here by hymn and prayer 
 Lay down the burden and the care. 
 
 O God, our Light! to Thee we bow— 
 Within all shadows standest Thou; 
 Give deeper calm than night can bring. 
 Give sweeter songs than lips can sing. 
 
 Life’s tumult we must meet again, 
 We cannot at the shrine remain; 
 But in the spirit’s secret cell 
 May hymn and prayer forever dwell. 
 —Samuel Longfellow. 
 
 SCRIPTURE READING: REV. JOHN P. FORBES. 
 
 PRAYER: REV. ROBERT COLLYER. 
 
 O Thou, the Eternal One, our Father, we gather together 
 to-night in Thy name to lift our hearts to Thee, we trust in 
 spirit and truth; to speak to each other of the years that have 
 gone and, by Thy blessing, it may be, of the years to come; 
 to look back and see what Thou hast done to help and bless 
 
 27 
 
Thy sons and daughters in this place. All those years ago 
 they gathered together in Thy name, they gathered that they 
 might bear witness to Thy truth; that they might walk in 
 the light, as children of the light; that they might do Thy 
 
 will on earth as it is done in heaven, by Thy help and bless- 
 ing, through all the time they should stay in this place; to 
 bear free witness to Thy truth fearlessly and perpetually; to 
 wait on Thee for the word to say; to look unto Thee for 
 direction in the things they would do, the minister and the 
 congregation together being of one. heart and one mind in 
 Thy service; to be faithful to the truth as Thou shouldst de- 
 liver it unto them, as they should see it in the wide world and 
 the heavens, see it as Thy dear Son saw it when He was with 
 us on the earth, in the human soul, in the great human family, 
 in the glory and beauty of the world, in the shadow and in 
 the sunshine, and find lessons everywhere they could teach 
 and live out in their lives. They gathered together for this 
 great purpose, and through all the years Thou hast maintained 
 them as they have tried to maintain Thy truth, and to be 
 faithful in word and deed through all. Now we meet, in the 
 memory of the years, to bless Thee for the great bounty and 
 benediction that has rested upon this church; for all the 
 noble things they have been able to do in Thy name and as 
 witnesses of Thy truth, and as men and women close knitted 
 to this great city in which the church has stood as a light set 
 ona hill. We cannot tell the story, we can only bless Thee 
 that it has been so, and that minister and people have stood 
 together for all that was true and lovely and of good report. 
 Through evil report, as through good report, they have stood, 
 a burning and a shining light. We bless Thee for the min- 
 istry of the church, so beautiful, sonoble, as some of us so well 
 know; so faithful and so true to the grand, great charter of 
 freedom on which the church was founded. And we bless 
 Thee for the people that have maintained the ministers in 
 their place, that have been so faithful and true through 
 shadow and shine to this pulpit and its teachings. What 
 could they have done for Thee, or for the truth, or for the 
 great seething life of this great city, had they not so stood 
 together, resolute to be of one heart and of one mind for 
 Thee and for the Gospel, striving to do the work that Christ 
 
 28 
 
_ did when He was with us, taking Him for their divine pattern, 
 and thus enlarging all the boundaries of faith, as they were 
 led to see how great it is, how beautiful, how good, how true, 
 holding in their hearts that grand, sweet gospel, to which we 
 have just listened, of love; despising no man or woman, hold- 
 ing them all together as Thy children, and when it seemed, 
 as sometimes it seems to us all, that it was hopeless to try-to 
 do any more, shaking out their great banner of hope again, 
 and singing their song—a bright and cheerful psalm of victory; 
 now and then sitting by the waters and mourning for some 
 great sorrow, but then how tenderly, how sweetly the words 
 would come, touching the sorrows that came to these people 
 as they come to us all; finding every day a sacred day, not 
 alone here in this place, but yonder at the forge, on the 
 streets, in the marts of business, everywhere the work of God 
 to do, and trying to do it, living it out in their lives, in their 
 business, in their calling, whatever it might be, Thy true 
 sons, Thy true daughters. We cannot tell the story of the 
 sweetness and light that has been learned in the homes that 
 have been born out of this church—born again, born from 
 above, born to beauty and strength; for they are pillars, the 
 men and women, the fathers and mothers and children who 
 will remember this place, the fathers and mothers and children 
 who will think of it in the blessed world also to which they 
 have gone, all sacred, all beautiful, all true, after these fifty 
 years. Now shall we ask that Thy blessing may rest upon 
 us to-night as we recall these memories and touch these 
 sacred and beautiful things; that we may all feel that we are 
 of one heart and one mind, diverse in opinions, belonging to 
 this church, that church, no church, yet knitted and blended 
 together in a charity that knows no difference, free still to 
 preach Thy free Gospel wherever we may go, but not free to 
 disregard the noble, deep, heart-searching love that endureth 
 all things and believeth all things and never faileth. Let 
 Thy blessing rest on these moments, and then on all the 
 years to come, which we cannot scan but still can travel to- 
 ward, sure that as Thy people have been faithful so they will 
 be; and the little one, we trust, shall become a thousand, the 
 small one a great and noble church of God whose power shall 
 be felt not alone in this city, but through all the land, and 
 
 a9 
 
Thine shall be the kingdom and the power and the glory 
 forever andever. Amen. 
 
 CHOIR: “ The Lord’s Prayer.” 
 
 HYMN. Tune: Hursley. 
 
 O Thou whose perfect goodness crowns 
 With peace and joy this sacred day, 
 
 Our hearts are glad for all the years 
 Thy love has kept us in Thy way. 
 
 Thy glorious truth has made us free 
 From bounds of sect and bonds of creed; 
 Thy light has shone that we might see 
 Our own in every brother’s need. 
 
 For common tasks of help and cheer, 
 For quiet hours of thought and prayer, 
 
 For moments when we seemed to feel 
 The breath of a diviner air; 
 
 For mutual love and trust that keep 
 Unchanged through all the changing time; 
 For friends within the veil who thrill 
 Our spirits with a hope sublime ;— 
 
 For this, and more than words can say, 
 We praise and bless Thy holy name. 
 
 Come life or death, enough to know 
 That Thou art evermore the same! 
 
 —John W. Chadwick. 
 
 ADDRESSES: 
 
 Mr. Cuapwick: There has not been a minister of All 
 Souls’ Church in my day in whom I have not rejoiced. It was 
 so with Dr. Bellows, that incomparable man. It was so with 
 Theodore Williams, who made good his name, ‘‘the gift of 
 God,” to me. And it is so with Mr. Slicer, whose devotion 
 to his work and intellectual vitality and personal fidelity are 
 to me a constant inspiration, if not sometimes an unhappy 
 shame. His name is Thomas, and he has his doubts about 
 
 30 
 
some things, but we have none that he will speak to us to- 
 night the word of cheer.* 
 
 REV. THOMAS R. SLICER: 
 
 Mr. Chadwick and friends, I could very well wish that 
 Dr. Bellows might have some share in your rejoicing at this 
 Fiftieth Anniversary, as he had so great a share in fellow- 
 ship with your ministers in the years in which they and he 
 worked together in the two cities which now are one. I am, 
 however, to speak to you out of my affection, if not out of 
 my knowledge of all that has passed upon you and in which 
 the church of All Souls has had a share. 
 
 It is great happiness to come to a place in which you 
 have no doubts. Your minister has said—your minister! 
 think of his speaking of any man’s doubts!—your minister of 
 great faith out of his doubts has spoken of some doubts that 
 must come to every active man in this active time, but of one 
 thing I am quite sure, that the Second Church, this church, 
 has justified its existence in this half century of life. 
 
 It is a singular contrast, that which confronts us in think- 
 ing of a church like this, of a church piling up institutions, 
 growing moss, gathering accumulations of beliefs, fortifying 
 itself, stopping its leaks, keeping itself from running out by 
 enlarging its accumulations of the past. Now I have no 
 doubt that your minds could select several such churches as 
 that, when thinking of the many churches that you know. 
 But here is a church which began as a seed and appeared as a 
 growth from the soil, and leafed out on every side into foliage 
 and strength, put out great branches, spread its shade over 
 those that felt themselves to be in a weary land, and flowered 
 at its top and bore its fruit, and at the end of a half century 
 has life in itself. 
 
 I don’t wonder that Paul said when they were trying to 
 confound him with something they had built: ‘‘I thank God 
 that I baptized none of you but Crispus and Gaius; and it 
 may be some of the household of Stephanus; besides, I know 
 
 * The addresses following are printed as delivered, with few, very few, corrections 
 and omissions. For the stenographic reports we are indebted to Mrs, Clara Brockway 
 and Miss Sessions, with the assistance of Miss Angell. 
 
 31 
 
not whether I baptized any other. For Christ sent me not to 
 baptize, but to tell the good news.” That is, he was sent to 
 enlarge an idea, to illumine an ideal, to carry forward a glad 
 announcement, and in his mind, as in ours, the enlargement 
 of a thought, the justification of an ideal, is better than the 
 establishment of any institution. 
 
 I cannot refrain from saying there is a certain aptness 
 between the history of this church, as I have been informed 
 of it, and the fact that it is on leased ground. Weare all 
 sorry that it is so, but there is a certain aptness aboutit. It 
 never intended to be fixed in idea, and there seems a certain 
 pathetic aptness in the fact it cannot fix itself on its founda- 
 tion as upon owned land; to me there is a pathos in that. It 
 is a thing we only smile at in the idea, but the curious thing 
 about it is that if anybody wanted to move on in all these 
 fifty years to a new intellectual position this church was ready 
 to move. It had its baggage in the smallest possible compass 
 of thought, that is, in the smallest possible compass that need 
 encumber it. It easily adjusted itself to every change, and 
 what those changes are I need scarcely remind you. 
 
 It is a great thing to have been the minister of achurch in 
 these last fifty years, or any part of them, so many things 
 have come to be better, so many things to which only—I say 
 this with perfect deference to every sister church—only a 
 church like this could perfectly adjust itself. For instance, 
 many churches by their very constitution and traditions have 
 to defend themselves against the inroads of new thought. A 
 church like this is hospitable to every thought that knocks at 
 its door. It knocks at the minister’s study door first, 
 knocks at the mind door of every member of a church like 
 this, and the minister and people come together. Not, 
 though, to sit like robins in a nest with their mouths open to 
 be fed with a worm of modern discovery, but, a little past 
 feeding time, getting their own living like birds on the wing, 
 and ready with the minister to sing heartily the new song 
 that he has learned in his study, and which they have learned 
 in their own reading and contact with the world. 
 
 It is a great thing to be in a church the doors of aaa 
 swing both ways, to let people in with hospitality and let any- 
 body out that wants to go. That is the reason our churches 
 
 32 
 
prosper with the time; they never put a brake on going up 
 hill. They are conscious that it is safe even to drive a trifle 
 fast down hill and part let go the brakes; even then they are 
 so sure of the team, the machinery and build of the wagon, 
 that nothing can happen, no stumbling of the team, no giv- 
 ing way of the mechanism, no unsteady hands on the lines. 
 Let us enjoy this thing when it comes—this very swiftness of 
 motion in the thinking of the Liberal Church which is peril to 
 the onlooker, while the folks riding do not seem to be disturbed. 
 
 Let me call your attention for the moment to the things 
 that have made us glad in these years we have been working, 
 and been so glad to be at work. Itis a great thing to have 
 got rid of special creation. Itis a great thing to have come 
 into the inheritance of the unfolding world. Fifty years ago, 
 when this church began to be, there was much disturbance of 
 the pulpit also for fear there should be some discredit thrown 
 on the workmanship of the Great Artificer, and that things 
 he had made and put on the surface of the world should not be 
 seen to be in their place and bear the mark of the workman’s 
 hand. ‘‘The Vestiges of Creation” appeared on the other 
 side of the water, the first beginnings of the doctrine of de- 
 velopment, not yet coming to its full expression, as it did in 
 1859. Already there was some concern about the Creator, a 
 kind of pathetic anxiety that God should be found not quite 
 up to his task; that somebody would discover something that 
 had grown by itself, that should have come into being without 
 some mark of the Workman’s hand upon it. 
 
 It is a great thing to have got to the point where we can 
 let God create as He will and as He must in all the range of 
 this boundless universe which in these fifty years has come 
 to be unfolded in our vision; to be rid of the little cabinet- 
 world and to come into the inheritance of a universe that is 
 worth while and a Creator that is up to his task. Every Uni- 
 tarian church in these fifty years has been a sharer in this 
 steady advance, not held back, not restrained, not afraid. 
 And they are to be congratulated in heaven to-day who grad- 
 uated into the glory that resulted from the thought of this 
 place, that they went up to God unafraid of anything that 
 might be in God’s world. The habit of courage has been the 
 habit of this place. 
 
 33 
 
More than this: Here has been a place in which there 
 has never been the slightest doubt that faith and reason were 
 compatible in the same mind. When John Henry Newman 
 said that faith and reason were incompatible in the same 
 mind, or nearly that, he announced what must be the death 
 of intelligence on the one side or unwise abandonment of 
 faith upon the other. But here was a place—as many such 
 places are to be found—in which the human mind was not 
 afraid of its own conclusions, and found those conclusions 
 perfectly consistent with the deepest religious life. 
 
 What is not commonly understood by those who are not 
 of our own faith is that Unitarianism began not as an intelli- 
 gent protest simply, but as a religious overflow, as a spiritual 
 overflowing. If you will take the statements of Dr. Chan- 
 ning—in that same year, in September, in which the Church 
 of All Souls was established in New York, or nearly the same 
 year—in his ‘‘ Five Points of Unitarianism,” each one of them 
 is a vindication of some moral purpose and spiritual ideal, 
 not simply an intellectual protest. And so people have said, 
 ‘“Yes, they are very intelligent people, these Unitarians, but 
 they have no force, no power in their religion; there is no 
 warmth in it.” I wrote to somebody the other day who wrote 
 me that Unitarianism was a religion that had no warmth in 
 it: ‘‘An electric light, an incandescent lamp, gives more 
 light than a pine knot, and less heat, and the business of 
 lamps is to light, light the path of him who would go. 
 And as to the pine knot, it was its infirmity that it had to 
 throw out heat and soot as well as light.” I have never seen 
 any reason for bewailing the introduction of electricity as a 
 lighting agent into the world. The fact is contrary to the 
 thought of those who complain that a church like this fur- 
 nishes only light to see by. It-furnishes also warmth, before 
 which one suns himself. It is not necessary, it is entirely 
 unnecessary, that we should get the warmth of the room out 
 of the light of the room. What is to hinder our lighting up 
 the electric lamp and sunning ourselves before the ever ready 
 sunshine of the grate where the coal burns? 
 
 This church has had both light and heat—heat enough to 
 keep off the chill of doubt, and light enough to see to take the 
 next step ahead. So that Unitarianism, as represented here 
 
 34 
 
has been in the best sense a religious overflow, it has been a 
 deepening of the wells of life, it has been a quickening of the 
 power of action, the identification of life not with one aspect 
 of it, but with the whole line of life-experience in the com- 
 munity. 
 
 I am glad to be identified with an occasion that registers 
 the end of fifty years of entire accord between the worship- 
 ping soul and the intellectual power of the period that is rep- 
 resented. We live in an entirely different world to-night 
 from that in which this church began. It has long ago ceased 
 to be a reproach that we should be part of the advance move- 
 ment of thought and feeling and purpose in the world. One 
 aspect of the change that has come over the churches not of 
 our own name I think is in some sort due to the stand that 
 such churches as this have taken. The time was when to 
 declare, as Mr. Chadwick did in his ‘‘Man Jesus,” for the 
 essential and simple humanity of Jesus of Nazareth, filled 
 with affright those who thought that reverence lay in a 
 phrase and not in a thought, that devotion was in a set of 
 words and not in the attitude of mind. But he kept steadily 
 on his way, as others have had to do, sharing the feeling of 
 Emerson when he declined to celebrate the sacrament of the 
 Lord’s Supper in the Second Church in Boston in the sense 
 in which the people desired who wished him toremain. ‘‘I 
 should prefer,” he said, ‘‘to meet him”—that is, Jesus— 
 ‘upon terms of fellowship and friendship which would be 
 more acceptable to me and endear him to me more,” or 
 words to that effect. That was the attitude here. The real 
 reverence was the insistence upon the simple humanity of 
 Jesus. 
 
 Great churches known as evangelical have come back 
 from theories of Christ’s person to fellowship with his life. 
 That great change has gone on in the evangelical churches, 
 but we have never had to change our place beside the simple 
 Man of Nazareth, the best man that e’er wore flesh about 
 him. There we stood side by side with the brave Jesus of 
 Nazareth and waited for him to win his way out of the mani- 
 fold theories about him to the heart for which he longed and 
 the heart that was hungry to accept him. 
 
 These are only a few of the things in this brief time al- 
 
 35 
 
lowed to me that I can speak of as part of the splendid 
 achievement of a church like this. Stand firm, whether the 
 tide is at its ebb or flood. Its ebb cannot destroy the founda- 
 tions of thought, its flood cannot submerge the mounts of 
 feeling. Stand firm in ebb and flood. 
 
 There is an old elm beside where I live in the summer, a 
 great elm with a head that has been flattened by the beating 
 of storms. Limbs more protected have grown up and feath- 
 ered out in fan-shaped foliage, expanding from the trunk 
 like a great plume; but this old tree has stood there, I sup- 
 pose, for two hundred years, and the storms have beat upon 
 it, and the fishermen ’way out at sea have used it as a land- 
 mark, and the children have been shaded under its expanding 
 branches. It has been a landmark for landsmen and seamen. 
 It is the one great object in the landscape as you look down 
 the road or in from sea. The birds have nestled in it for 
 two hundred years, and you can go and stand under it in the 
 evening and hear them talking together in the branches as the 
 evening falls, and its great shadow in the morning and even- 
 ing sunshine has been cast upon the landscape. And it is 
 there because it was a living thing that had power in itself 
 to endure. That is a living church. It is not buttressed 
 from the outside, it is not sustained and supported artificially, 
 it has life in itself. Every new approach of thought finds its 
 door open, every new emergency finds it on the road, every 
 crisis in the community finds ittrue. And the church, happy 
 with three such ministers as this church has had, has nothing 
 to lament, but only to rejoice and thank God that it has held 
 firmly to the integrity of reason and abandoned its soul to the 
 task which God has put into its hands. 
 
 Mr. CHapwick: There was Minot’s Light, upon the Mas- 
 sachusetts coast. Well doIlremember its beam across the Bay 
 when I wasa boy. There is a Minot’s Light in New York, 
 and by its kindly beam how many a storm-tossed mariner 
 these last twenty-five and thirty years has found his way to 
 the haven where he would be! We hoped that light wouldshine 
 awhile for us here this evening, but I am very sorry to say 
 that Mr. Savage is not well enough to come. I hardly dared 
 expect him, but when I met him a few weeks ago a hope 
 
 36 
 
flamed up in his heart that he might come. Now, in his ab- 
 sence, I ask his senior colleague, my old friend, Robert Coll- 
 yer, to speak a few words to you, but in his own right, and no 
 one has abetterhere. Hewasthe closest friend, ascloseas any 
 brother, to Augustus Staples, my predecessor here. He has 
 been very fatherly to me, and there is no moment of my min- 
 istry that I remember better than one in its earliest stage, 
 when he addressed to me one of the most pungent and per- 
 sonal phrases that has ever been addressed to me by any man, 
 saying, in a private letter: ‘‘ John, never count yourself sure 
 of your position till you can dispense with the strongest man 
 in your congregation.”” I have cherished that phrase for 
 thirty-seven years. Now, Robert, will you speak a few words 
 tous? You can’t say anything better than that, but we will 
 take the best that you can give. 
 
 REV. ROBERT, COLLYER: 
 
 I sometimes tell the story of the old miller in our 
 little town in Yorkshire who came to hear me preach the 
 first time I tried. And he waylaid me on some week day soon 
 after and said: ‘‘I came to hear you preach, laddie, Sun- 
 day night.” Isaid: ‘‘ Yes; I think Isaw you.” ‘‘I want to 
 tell thee what tho’s going to do in this world. They will 
 mak’ a spare rail o’ thee and stick thee into every gap there 
 is.” Despite the charming word my dear friend said just 
 now about my own right and all the rest of it, lam that spare 
 rail, all the same, not to fill the gap, but just to stop it, made 
 by the sickness of my good associate, Mr. Savage. 
 
 I remember some years ago sitting on the piazza at a 
 summer hotel not far from Boston with an old Scotchman, 
 and we fell to chatting and got a little tiny bit chummy. I 
 liked him; he had a good face, and I found he was a good 
 fellow, and so we told stories to each other touching our dif- 
 ferent lives, and at last he said: ‘‘I would like to tell you a 
 story that I think will interest you very much. I came to 
 this country from Scotland when I was a big lad—growing 
 up, ye ken—with my father and mother, and the family came 
 
 37 
 
from a glen in the Highlands, and here we stayed, well down 
 in New England, and I grew up to be a man, and I got mar- 
 ried, and I prospered in my business, and when I got to be 
 past seventy ’—he was past eighty then—‘‘I said: ‘I will go 
 back to Scotland, into the old glen, and see the folks that are 
 left.’ I could do it very well, I wanted to, my heart lay there 
 the same, and away I went. But do you know, when I got to 
 that glen there wasn’t a living soul that knew anything about 
 my family—not one! I went to the hotel, inquired there. I 
 went about and inquired; nobody knew the Campbells; they 
 had all gone. There had been great changes in that region. 
 And do you know, my heart was very heavy. I would fain 
 have found somebody that ken us, that remembered us all 
 that while ago; but there wasn’t a soul. At last I said to the 
 landlord at the hotel: ‘Is there awoman about here anywhere 
 of the name of Janet? I forget the second name, but the first 
 name I remember.’ ‘Oh, yes!’ he said,‘she lives up the glen 
 in such a house; she has lived there ever since we came here, 
 and I suppose she has lived there always.’ I said: ‘I will go 
 and see Janet.’ And I went up the glen and tapped at the 
 door, and an old woman came out. I didn’t know her face at 
 all, but the first thing she did was to throw up her hands and 
 say, ‘John Campbell! is it thee? Come ben, John; come 
 ben.’ And we sat down by the fireside and I said to her: 
 ‘Tell us hoo was it that thou kenned me when I didna ken 
 thee at a’?? ‘Weel now, John,’ she said, ‘I will tell thee. 
 Before thee went awa’ there was a little somethin’ between 
 us, John. I think if thee had stayed we should have got 
 marrit. But ye went awa’, and I never blamed ye, John, for 
 not writin’ or comin’ to look me up. You couldn’t do that; 
 but I never forgot ye, John. The heart has a long memory.’ 
 ‘Ah!’ I said, ‘Janet, Janet, that is so.’” 
 
 And I thought it was such a sweet story. And it touched 
 me to-night as I sat here thinking of the years that have gone 
 since I first knew this church and its ministers. I havea kind 
 of tiny personal connection with the first minister, Mr. Long- 
 fellow. It is this, that the Longfellows came from the same 
 small town that I left to come to this country—in which I 
 lived for twelve years learning my trade and working at the 
 forge—leaving our dead in the old church. They went for 
 
 38 
 
225 years, or it may be 250 years, in the same old church 
 where I went as a boy and young man, so I have that connec- 
 tion with them, and that is all. I didn’t know the first minis- 
 ter of this church when he was its minister, or for some little 
 while after, but when I went to Chicago to take care of a 
 mission there, and they set me preaching, and finally made me 
 minister of a new church, one Sunday afternoon a young 
 minister from Milwaukee came to church and spoke to me 
 after church—he was with Mr. Brigham, who used to be at 
 Taunton, where Mr. Forbes was formerly. They heard me 
 preach and said something very nice after it was all over, and 
 I took to Mr. Staples at once. And it happened a little while 
 after, in the winter time, there was a great snow, and we had 
 to go up to a town in Wisconsin north of Milwaukee. I had 
 something to do, and Mr. Staples had to preach the sermon. 
 Do you know, I never heard such a sermon in my life, so won- 
 derful in its intuition of the truth and its inspiration. He 
 poured out his soul over me. And then, when I got back to 
 Chicago, I must sit down and write him and tell him what that 
 sermon had done to me; what a wonder it was, what a joy it 
 was; and rather intimated that possibly he did not understand 
 what a great thing it was for him todo. I gota letter di- 
 tectly from him full of joy. ‘‘Why, do you know,” he said, 
 ‘“‘T have been preaching here so long, and nobody has ever 
 said sucha word to me, and I was getting sort of disheartened; 
 but your letter has set me up, I feel as if there were some- 
 thing I could do.” 
 
 From that time we became very intimate indeed and used 
 to exchange letters once a week or once amonth. It was 
 wonderful how nearly our minds ran together in the burning 
 questions we had to discuss, he in his masterly fashion and I 
 the best I could. We used to tell each other also anything 
 that occurred that we thought would be of special interest of 
 any sort. An old gentleman came to the little church that 
 was started then, of some eminence, but he was not quite right 
 in his mind, and he went quite crazy, but he wouldn’t let any- 
 body come to his house to look after him, not his sons or 
 friends, except myself, so I had to go and stay with him nearly 
 two weeks; then it was ordered he should be taken to Hart- 
 ford, and I went with him, and came back, and his sons gave 
 
 39 
 
me what was avery large sum of money, and what should I 
 do but go right away to the jeweler’s and buy a gold watch. 
 I always coveted a gold watch. And what should I do but 
 write to Mr. Staples right away, telling of old Solomon, of my 
 great good fortune and of the gold watch. He wrote back, 
 ‘“‘Dear Brother Collyer, my sermons never drive anybody 
 crazy; I guess I shall have to keep on with my old silver watch 
 to the end of time.” He was one of the most delightful com- 
 trades I ever had in all this world. We were together a great 
 deal during the summer of 1861. I saw a great deal of him. 
 And he was called to this church to be the minister. He 
 wrote to me about it, and of course I encouraged him. He 
 wasn’t happy in Wisconsin, in Milwaukee. They didn’t know 
 their man, didn’t understand him, didn’t know what a joy it 
 was to hear such a man preach. And so he came down here. 
 And from that time I began to know something about what 
 was then called ‘‘ New Chapel,” that is, this church. So our 
 hearts knitted together. But it was not in the finite order of 
 life he should live. He began to droop. He did some grand 
 work here before then. He took the heart of this church and 
 he held it. And then the time came when he must leave it. 
 I came down when he was so very sick, near to his end. And 
 I was with him when he died. And I went with the friends 
 down to Mendon, where he was buried, and came back and 
 preached some sort of memorial the Sunday after. And that 
 was the end of the beautiful, but oh, so brief, ministry of 
 Augustus Staples in this church! 
 
 And then my memory touches much—heart memories, all 
 of them—the time when your dear minister came to you. I 
 came down by his invitation, and possibly the invitation of 
 the church also, and preached the sermon of his installation. 
 Oh, how proud I was to do that, you know, and find him—as 
 you found him, the elders of this church—the man after your 
 own heart, and the man after God’s own heart, if I know any- 
 thing about it, who has been with you through all these years 
 and done his work and grown in grace and in the knowledge of 
 the truth, and preached sermons that have gone far and wide 
 through the world, and sung songs that have gone far and 
 wide through the world, of which I plot and plan all along the 
 line of my own ministry to use one on a Sunday when I pos- 
 
 40 
 
sibly can. And at funerals I repeat, and it does me good and 
 does everybody good: 
 
 “Tt singeth low in every heart, 
 We hear it each and all— 
 A song of those who answer not, 
 However we may call.” 
 
 Now, I could stand here going on for an hour and talk 
 about all this; of my pride and joy in the man I used to call 
 my son, for love’s saake—but he has grown now so mature I 
 don’t use the word any more, he seems to have got beyond it. 
 Indeed, I don’t quite like to tell him about things I have been 
 hearing and reading, for fear he will pick me up and set me 
 right, as James Russell Lowell used to. I used to think of 
 our minister at Taunton, Mr. Brigham, as the man who knew 
 more than the whole Unitarian denomination put together of 
 what was in books, and so forth. I think the same thing 
 about my brother John—lI call him brother now. And so I am 
 glad to meet you here to-night and say this word out of 
 my heart. My heart also ‘‘has a long memory,” and it holds 
 these men. He said possibly there may be some way open by 
 which Brother Camp can come to-night. SolI think and 
 trust there may be some way open by which Brother Staples 
 also can come to-night, and Brother Longfellow, and we will 
 be all together. They are here if we feel the pulse of love 
 in our hearts for them, as I know we do. And what shall I 
 say more or better than this: that God may bless this church 
 through fifty years to come, as He has blessed it in the fifty 
 years that have gone, and give it ministers as faithful and as 
 true and as brave and as radiant as those that have ministered 
 at the altar and in the pulpit since the church began. 
 
 Mr. Cuapwickx: We are the oldest daughter of the First 
 Unitarian Church in Brooklyn, the Church of the Saviour. 
 What relation does that make me to Mr. Forbes? He is at 
 least my friend, andI am his. He will speak for his Society 
 and for himself, first reading one or two of the many letters 
 of congratulation we have received. 
 
 REV. JOHN P. FORBES: 
 
 It gives me great pleasure before speaking a few 
 words to you in my own person to read two letters. One 
 41 
 
from Dr. Alfred P. Putnam, who was for many years min- 
 ister of the First Church, and the other from Dr. Horatio 
 Stebbins, who has been for so many years minister of the 
 Church Universal. Iam very glad that a predecessor of mine 
 should have written Dr. Putnam’s letter. 
 
 My friends [after reading Dr. Stebbins’s letter], itis not 
 exactly descending from the sublime to the ridiculous to come 
 from the level of that letter down to the level of the few 
 words I have to address to you this evening; nevertheless, 
 it isa descent. My errand here to-night is chiefly that of a 
 messenger, a messenger of hearty good will. I bring to you 
 the loving greetings and warm felicitations of the mother 
 church. A very young mother, only nine years old when 
 you came forth, spirit of her spirit, and not well versed, it may 
 be, in the duties of motherhood, but she has never yet been 
 ashamed of her offspring. I would not have you think, how- 
 ever, that I have no personal interest in this occasion. When 
 your minister extended to me the right hand of fellowship at 
 the time I was called to the First Church, I did not realize 
 how, in becoming minister of that church, the mother of this, 
 I was also becoming your minister’s spiritual father, but he un- 
 derstood all about that, and hence, I suppose, the warmth of his 
 greeting. Now, the least I can do to-night is to applaud his 
 discernment and good judgment, and promise that I will be 
 faithful to my trust, although I am not prepared to accept 
 unlimited responsibility. 
 
 As I look abroad over our churches and consider the rela- 
 tions between them it seems to me that I detect an ever-wid- 
 ening and deepening fellowship. Those words, ‘‘radical”’ 
 and ‘‘ conservative,’ which formerly saluted our ears on every 
 occasion, no longer sound upon the air. We hear very little 
 about Jew or Gentile, or ‘‘my creed” and ‘‘thine.” In all 
 the churches truth is the watchword and righteousness the 
 end of our endeavor, while the sentiment that includes all is 
 the sentiment of brotherhood. 
 
 Intimately associated with this church, of course, I have 
 never been, but it has been my privilege to know two of your 
 ministers, Samuel Longfellow slightly, and your present 
 teacher and shepherd pretty well. Of Samuel Longfellow a 
 former parishioner once said, ‘‘ His feet were on the ground, 
 
 42 
 
but his head was always in the clouds.” Of course this re- 
 mark was not intended to convey the impression that Mr. 
 Longfellow was a sentimentalist, or that he was the victim of 
 a feeble other-worldliness. It was intended to set forth the 
 spirituality of his teaching and the quality of his manhood. 
 His broad and open, practical wisdom, I take it, was demonstrat- 
 ed whenever there wasa good cause that lacked assistance, or a 
 wrong that needed resistance, and the stamp of the positive 
 and constructive individuality was to be seen upon all the 
 work he undertook. He belonged to that little group of men 
 called, I think sometimes rather vaguely, Transcendentalists. 
 That word Transcendentalist isa very tall word, but very few of 
 us, so far as I know, have climbed to the top of it. These 
 men, if I understand their position, stood for the idea that 
 nothing, neither ecclesiastical authority nor Scriptural infalli- 
 bility, neither idealist nor materialist, neither powers nor 
 principalities, could come between the human soul and God. 
 This idea may have made them somewhat mystical in their 
 preaching, somewhat unconventional in their conduct, but it 
 made them also spiritual in their teaching and sublimely sin- 
 cere in their daily living. 
 
 A single anecdote of Samuel Longfellow I want to re- 
 hearse to you, trusting to your kind indulgence to overlook, 
 or better still, forget, its personal bias. Mr. Longfellow was 
 living in retirement in Cambridge and I wasa student in 
 Harvard Divinity School. The Ministerial Association, an 
 organization of ministers in and around Boston, invited Mr. 
 Longfellow to read a paper before them, and the divinity 
 students were invited to be present. The meeting was held 
 in the old Hollis Street Church, even then fragrant with the 
 memory of Starr King. Mr. Longfellow chose for his sub- 
 ject ‘‘ Truth ’”’—Truth from the philosophical and theological 
 point of view. There was nothing particularly striking in his 
 presentation of his theme, but when he came to the practical 
 application, which isalways the portion of real value in any 
 address, ah, then, every relation of life was illuminated, 
 every duty of life was intensified. That man’s word pierced 
 through to the very centre of every refuge of deceit and lies. 
 It seemed to us young fellows as though our whole hearts 
 were opened wide to his reading. Well, that afternoon when 
 
 43 
 
I tramped back over the Long Bridge to Cambridge it seemed 
 as though I trod upon air; and other men felt asI did. And 
 that night when we turned away from our ethical text-book, 
 or our own dear Everett’s ‘‘ Science of Thought,” and turned 
 out the lights, there came to more than one of us, like a bene- 
 diction that follows after prayer, the thought of that slight, 
 gentle, intense man with his spiritual message, and I can 
 readily believe that more than one man that night gave ‘‘ bonds 
 of secret tears’ to live his life after a nobler, worthier fashion. 
 I wonder if you know—yes, I believe you do know—what a 
 privilege it is to have had such a man for a minister, if only 
 for a few years. 
 
 It was in my mind to speak just a word about Samuel Long- 
 fellow’s hymns, but the rights of those who are to come after 
 me forbid that I should enter upon that theme. Let me just 
 say that such outpourings of noble thought and tender senti- 
 ment as ‘‘O Life That Maketh All Things New,” ‘‘ Now on 
 Sea and Land Descending,” ‘‘O God! Unseen, But Ever 
 Near,” ‘‘God of Ages and of Nations,” ‘‘One Holy Church 
 of God Appears,” ‘‘ Now When We Sing Our Parting Song,” 
 must always remain treasures, not only of our Unitarian the- 
 ology, but of the hymnology of Christendom. 
 
 And now, in my closing word, I must trench just a little 
 on forbidden ground. When your minister asked me to be 
 present here to-night to speak a word, he said: ‘‘It is the 
 Society’s anniversary; you will say nothing about me,” and I, 
 responding at once in my own feeling to his modesty, said, 
 ‘‘Of course not.” But what are you going to do when a 
 church has had fifty years of organized life, and thirty-seven 
 of those years have been spent under the ministration of 
 one man? What else can you do but say something about the 
 ministry of that man? And I only trust, my dear friend, that 
 the sincerity of my speech will be a hedge around your 
 modesty. 
 
 Mr. Longfellow set in golden letters over the entrance to 
 this church your motto, ‘‘The Truth shall make you free.” 
 You who are gathered here to-night in all love and loyalty 
 know whether the spirit of that motto has been cherished and 
 honored in the past thirty-seven years. You know, too, of 
 the relations of esteem and affection that have existed, warm 
 
 44 
 
and tender, between minister and people—the hopes, the 
 comforts, the helps, the confidences, the testimonies of word 
 and act that lie too deep for speech. Let no word of mine 
 intrude upon these sacred themes. But I welcome the oppor- 
 tunity to speak just a word of appreciation, not only for my- 
 self, but for the great number of our younger ministers who 
 have been strengthened and encouraged by the patient and 
 accurate scholarship, the noble preaching and the manly, 
 straightforward life of the minister of the Second Church in 
 Brooklyn. Many a David turning away from the armor and 
 sword of Saul, yet hardly daring to trust his own weapon, it 
 seemed so feeble and inadequate, has found faith in himself 
 and courage to go forward because of your minister’s printed 
 page. 
 
 And now, dear friends, sitting here together in this glad 
 hour, thankful for all of good the past has held, yet looking 
 forward hopefully and expectantly to the future, believing 
 that good to-morrow must follow good to-day, we can do no 
 better than repeat that beautiful hymn which Mr. Chadwick 
 wrote for his graduation from the Divinity School into the 
 work of the ministry: 
 
 ‘‘ Eternal Ruler of the ceaseless round 
 Of circling planets singing on their way; 
 Guide of the nations from the night profound 
 Into the glory of the perfect day; 
 Rule in our hearts, that we may ever be 
 Guided, and strengthened, and upheld by Thee. 
 
 ‘“‘ We would be one in hatred of all wrong, 
 One in our love of all things sweet and fair, 
 One with the joy that breaketh into song, 
 One with the grief that trembles into prayer, 
 One in the power that makes Thy children free 
 To follow truth, and thus to follow Thee.” 
 
 Mr. Cuapwick: I shall certainly feel happier, and I 
 know my people and all the friends here will, if Mr. Wilson 
 speaks a few words to us from his own heart and as repre- 
 senting Unity Church, so dear to us in many ways, not least 
 because it was so loved by Stephen Camp, who is with us 
 here to-night if there is any skyey roadway from his world to 
 this. 
 
 45 
 
REV. DANIEL M. WILSON: 
 
 I feel some measure of humiliation that I was not 
 here in time to take the part that was assigned me, but 
 Mr. Chadwick is to blame. Early in the evening, when I 
 was minded to come here I recalled that I had in my library 
 a printed copy of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary celebration of 
 this Society. I sought it and began to read it, and found it so 
 absorbing that in a short while I was so lost as to be entirely 
 buried, and so came late to this meeting. If he succeeded 
 this morning in presenting a discourse so able as that was, as 
 I have no doubt he did, it is evidence of the innate ability 
 and wide culture and fitting way in which he puts all things. 
 And he has been growing from that day to this, and has 
 been giving, not to this congregation alone, but to a wide 
 class of hearers and readers, sermons that have set them 
 thinking, and have fed the deepest sources of their being, and 
 have led them on to wider and larger life. 
 
 I recall that I wrote to Mr. Chadwick that some churches 
 of our denomination were known by their corporate name, the 
 First Church of this place or that; or they were known by 
 the material of which they were built, the Brick Church or 
 the Stone Church. Other churches are known by the men 
 who have preached in them. I recall to mind thatthe church 
 in Braintree, which was a neighboring church to Quincy, 
 where I was long settled, was known and is known to-day as 
 Dr. Storr’s Church; old Dr. Storrs preached there fifty years 
 ago, and still the church goes by his name. His son preached 
 here in Brooklyn, and the church is still known by his name. 
 The church in which Henry Ward Beecher preached is still 
 known by his name, though men so able have succeeded him. 
 
 And this church, the Second Unitarian Church of Brook- 
 lyn, is more commonly known throughout our denomination 
 as Mr. Chadwick’s church. He has made it what it is, a 
 church from which has emanated wise words; in which has 
 been exemplified the clearest freedom, and in which also 
 there has been given to the world the ripest scholarship. We 
 cannot help speaking about Mr. Chadwick. We know how 
 you have backed him up in what he has said, in his courage 
 and his freedom. But Mr. Chadwick stands as the repre- 
 
 46 
 
sentative of this church, and further as representing the church 
 of this day, and he speaks a word that is always clear and 
 rings true.* 
 
 I bring the greetings of Unity Church—not the youngest 
 of the Unitarian churches, because the Flatbush Church has 
 lately come into existence, but the youngest of those repre- 
 ‘sented here on the Twenty-fifth Anniversary to render its 
 congratulations, and it does so now. 
 
 Mr. Cuapwick: Two aspects of my life have been very 
 ‘satisfactory to me: One, my relation to the older men in our 
 ministry, Furness, Dewey, Bellows, Hedge and others, when 
 I was a young man; and the other, my relation to the younger 
 men as I am looking toward sunset and starting on the 
 descending grade. With no one I may truly say has this re- 
 lation been more delightful and inspiring than with Mr. 
 Wright. It is getting late, but you will not think of that 
 while he forecasts for us the future, which has been germinal 
 in our past and is budding in our present life. 
 
 REV. MERLE ST. C. WRIGHT: 
 
 I seem to be like the lash or the snapper, I might 
 almost say the ornamental tassel, on the long whip that 
 has been flicking over your backs this evening. I am not 
 sure that I shall not be like the end of that line of the boys’ 
 game of ‘‘Snap the whip,” and come tumbling down among 
 you, considering the amount I have had to feel and think in 
 listening to the addresses this evening. 
 
 My subject is ‘‘The Prospect.” The most interesting 
 prospect at present for me is that of this audience and church 
 and its historic duration, and of the long and honorable term 
 which its present minister has fulfilled. This church is fifty 
 years old, mine fifteen. Mr. Chadwick has been here thirty- 
 seven years, I there thirteen. But the point is this: This is 
 his only parish and that is mine, and I am wondering if I can 
 stick it out and it can stick me out so long as you and he 
 have. That is the interesting thing. 
 
 * Here followed a story very creditable to Mr. Chadwick, which is omitted because 
 the actual hero of it must have been some other man. 
 
 47 
 
Another interesting prospect is that it looks as if he 
 would last another thirteen years and that we should cele- 
 brate his golden wedding. And if he lasts I know you will, 
 so that is a bright thought. That puts a great deal of 
 responsibility on me and mine, but we are feeling your pulse, 
 anxiously inquiring about your health, and keeping step with 
 you as well as we can. If we can’t think of anything else to 
 say up there we repeat what is said here, and it all goes. 
 
 I wish I could speak to you in the historic strain these 
 gentlemen have adopted about your previous pastors and their 
 experiences. I really could if Ishouldtry. When I was in Har- 
 vard College, I think about twenty-four years ago, Samuel Long- 
 fellow was one of the visitors tomy room. My college chum 
 was a dear friend of his, and he used to come to see us two, 
 quietly and privately. He was a simple gentleman of whom 
 we expected no particular power or experience, but he always 
 left the room filled with a kind of white light, because, like 
 his brother, he, too, was a ‘‘ White Mr. Longfellow;” a virile 
 spirit, if there ever was one, a saint who had sanctity of mind 
 as well as of soul, who looked to the very root of truth, but 
 always unfolded for you its blossom. He was one of the wise 
 men of all time, it seems to me, and I speak from my ma- 
 turity and from the study of his published works. As to 
 the character of the man, greater than anything he ever 
 uttered or anything he ever did was the man he always 
 was. 
 
 Then in your present pastor’s case—for we are all drop- 
 ping into garrulity in this direction—I love to see a man who 
 vindicates the dignity of the province of the intellect in pulpit 
 speech, who represents the calm completion of acknowledged 
 conscience in public as well as in private affairs. I love to 
 see a man who can speak with the accumulated wisdom of 
 half a century’s experience upon the inward things of life in 
 terms that reveal them even to professed students; who can 
 sift and search the spirit, as he has, and who can sing the 
 songs he does, and who can turn the searchlight, mounted on 
 his heroic headpiece, over the centuries, and give us its story, 
 revealing its inherent meaning. It is a grand, great thing, 
 and I congratulate you as to his ministry at large in the 
 world; and his fellow ministers around him feed upon him, 
 
 48 
 
yet he ever is renewed as they are fed. I congratulate you 
 upon the splendid fellowship with such a mind and life. 
 
 I have another connection with this church, which is that 
 one of our most esteemed parishioners was one of your 
 original members. He went from you to Frothingham, from 
 Mr. Frothingham to me, and he is one of those spiritual con- 
 duits, one of those electric connections, wherewith I am sup- 
 plied and whereby I burn with a consuming joy until this 
 day. 
 
 I am to speak to you on ‘‘The Prospect” for a little 
 while. What is the prospect? I say the prospect is serene, 
 the prospect is fine. About the worst thing I see in the 
 prospect are some dead or indifferent and torpid Unitarians, 
 but everything else is all right. The faith is all right, the 
 future is all right. We are getting elementary agencies as 
 our allies on every hand. The trouble is we are so used to 
 being waited upon by all these public servants we don’t 
 bestir ourselves at all, and there is danger as of those who sit 
 in the midst of wealth—that we shall dwindle while they in- 
 crease. 
 
 We have been vindicated on the lines that our fore- 
 fathers chose. Orthodoxy is imperiled and enfeebled with 
 the widening of the suns, and its thought is coming to occupy 
 our position. It can’t help it, because Unitarianism long ago 
 squarely identified itself with the natural reason and the free 
 conscience and unfolded soul in every department of think- 
 ing, feeling, and living. There is not atrammel on us of doc- 
 trine or polity, nothing that hinders us except our own inef- 
 fectualness and impotence. We area free people, and they 
 can but come into our freedom; they cannot enlarge the 
 bounds of our freedom. Now, if orthodoxy has reached the 
 limit of Unitarian truth along those ancient lines, all hail to 
 it and God-speed to it. Do you think it has? Do you think 
 we have finished our task in those directions? Possibly we 
 may have, but it is a restless, yearning, unsatisfied, strug- 
 gling, hungry and ignorant world in spiritual things as I 
 know it and see it, and there is very much to be done there 
 yet. 
 
 But turn onward and outward and forward to the future 
 and see what science is doing for us. It has unfolded a uni- 
 
 49 
 
verse and made us for the first time understand what such 
 great terms as ‘‘infinite” and ‘‘eternal” mean; what ‘‘en- 
 ergy ’’ means when put into picturesque statement and illu- 
 minated by the imagination. 
 
 When we traverse the regions of astronomy, when we 
 move through the field of light and thrill with the swiftness of 
 its vibration; when we go back into geological ages and grow 
 up again with the world as children together; when we un- 
 derstand the marvelous shaping of this great, beautiful and 
 blessed earth on which we stand, then are we thrilled with 
 psalm, then are we attuned to prophecy, then do we settle 
 into prayer, then do we rise to action with a power that the 
 world could never confer before. When we look into the life 
 of things, whether animal or vegetable, what exquisite beau- 
 ties, what delicate adaptation, what myriad and marvelous 
 mechanisms are there disclosed! 
 
 When we trace man’s long and timid career in early 
 efforts at society, at morality, at religion, at science, what a 
 wonderful panorama! How we throb and pulse with him in 
 his new surprises and his latest discoveries! And all this is 
 but the noon of science. And what has it done? It has un- 
 folded the volume of the world, entertained us with its 
 miniatures and pictures, made it a real thing to us, taught 
 us that it is filled with mind and throbbing with life and ani- 
 mated with purpose as well as with power, with spirit as well 
 as with purpose, that leads on to perfection, as we personally, 
 in our own experience, are aware. 
 
 What is philosophy doing for us? Philosophy has solidi- 
 fied this universe as the Romans solidified the world in their 
 one government. We know to-day that in philosophy what 
 we have got to believe, if we are going to believe anything, 
 is that the universe is a single system. Now it is a system 
 whose forces are convertible; you can begin at the bottom 
 and say it is matter all through, or you can take it at the top 
 and say it is spirit all through, but matter won’t solve it 
 and spirit will solve it. And philosophy says it is spirit all 
 through, one single, thrilling system of mental life. And 
 that is enough. That again gives a giant’s power to 
 religion. 
 
 And take ethics. There was a time when ethics could 
 
 5° 
 
all be written in precepts, when it was a kind of individual 
 cook book—if you wanted anything you got the recipe and 
 dressed it up. Now nothing is traditional or conventional, 
 nothing is so simple, it is all complicated. Even in personal 
 life we have to be original and make our own discoveries and 
 ventures. 
 
 But take ethics in business, take ethics in the relation of 
 law to the delicate and subtle questions of the day; in the 
 relation of diplomacy and international policy throughout 
 the world; and there never was such a call for acumen in 
 ethics, for intuition of moral truth, for superb self-sufficiency 
 in ethical judgment—one man against a world of evil custom 
 —as there is to-day. Ethics in relation to science fighting for 
 its life, and ethics in relation to art fighting for principle and 
 purpose, gaining dignity and decency everywhere, are not 
 these splendid opportunities forthe modern interpreter ? He 
 is not to tell you to be good, but to tell you how to be good, 
 what to do to be good, and to point the truth andsendit home 
 to you, to let you see in detail, and not in broad, fine generaliza- 
 tion, what your duty is. He has to knowit and feel it, and 
 make you know it and feel it. It has to shine from him as 
 heat and light from white-hot steel. And it is no light task 
 for him, and it is no light task for you. It is a privilege, but 
 also an obligation of great weight and responsibility. It is 
 something new, and it is as large, compared with the ancient 
 ethics, as the new heavens are compared with the star-spangled 
 dome of prehistoric times. 
 
 Now, to sum up and not to take too much of your time, 
 what has Unitarianism stood for and what does it stand for 
 to-day in increased measure? Now, surely it was born ra- 
 tional; it was not wholly informed, but it was born rational. 
 It attained ideals in its earliest manhood which it does not 
 need to abandon now, and which require all the courage and 
 comprehension it possesses. It has led in thought, and it has 
 endeavored to apply its thought to life. 
 
 Channing made usthe great challenge. He said it ought 
 to be the leading trait of a Unitarian, his distinguishing 
 mark, his specific characteristic, that he labor with all his 
 powers to elevate and educate the oppressed classes of what- 
 soever condition. He said it ought to be given in all 
 
 51 
 
our auxiliary institutions, ought to be the main business of 
 our Association—to undertake this redemption of man in his 
 intellectual, moral, spiritual and religious nature. He said 
 we should brightly and conspicuously wear that stamp, that 
 our task is nothing less than the regeneration of the world. 
 Theodore Parker was identified with that thought and that 
 movement in theology, which now has moved all theology up 
 to his fighting line. These are rare privileges to possess as 
 our inheritance; they are a summons to the destiny which we 
 are to go on to and reap. 
 
 And now what is the word of the age in regard to religion? 
 This idea easily sums itself up into three things: This is an 
 age of scientific advance, of historical criticism, which is 
 another branch of science; of humanitarian effort, and of 
 individual perfection, which task is always with us. The 
 great teachers on every side seek to welcome and develop 
 science, that is one great thing—our duty toward Nature. 
 To promote the schemes of social emancipation, that is 
 another great thing—our duty toward man in outward rela- 
 tions and in developing spirituality, not in morbidness and 
 mawkishness, but the manhood of man, the manliest thing in 
 man, that is our task always set for us as individuals or per- 
 sons. This is the appeal of the future tous. It comes in 
 the shape of a new social spirit that is now laid upon us, and, 
 as Cadmus sowed the dragon’s teeth and men sprang up, so 
 are champions springing up in every section of the world 
 pledged to settle the rights of man, to teach him his privi- 
 leges, to train him to his duties, to lead him into his deliver- 
 ance. That, I believe, is the work of the twentieth century— 
 that man of every class shall be given his rights, and his first 
 tight is to live a human life, and then this shall be extended 
 to beneficent and just relationships of nations toward one 
 another, and then will the task of the century on which we 
 are entering not only be outlined but achieved. ‘This is the 
 future for us: to accept and promote science and apply it to 
 the ethical and spiritual life, to identify ourselves with social 
 causes wherever apparent and bring them to their full, com- 
 plete fruition in all just expression, and consecrate ourselves to 
 that form of spiritual religion without which these words are 
 cankered in blossom and wormeaten at the root, but with 
 
 52 
 
which the strength of God flows through them and keeps the 
 truth forever green. 
 
 Mr. CHapDwick: 
 
 ‘* Now let the curtain fall. 
 We better know than all 
 How little we have gained, 
 How vast the unattained.” 
 
 The evening’s situation reminds me of a story told by 
 Mr. Washington about an old colored man who went down 
 from Virginia to Alabama with some of his relatives. Mr. 
 Washington asked him how many there were of them, and he 
 .said, ‘‘Me and my brother and two mules.” I do not wish 
 to reflect upon the personal character of my friends, but I 
 will say that some of them have shown a certain obstinacy in 
 their refusal to conduct their remarks this evening upon the 
 lines which I laid down for them in advance. As expressions 
 of their affection their words have been music in my ears. 
 As statements of fact, so far as I am concerned, they might 
 have been less liberal and more exact. But when Mr. Curtis 
 thought himself overpraised for anything he had done, he 
 used to say to his friend, Charles Eliot Norton, ‘‘ Well, 
 Charles, we must try hard to deserve all this.” So I will say, 
 ‘‘Well, John, and Robert, and Thomas, and Daniel, and 
 Merle, I must try to deserve the good things you have said 
 of me to-night.” 
 
 Especially do I thank these gentlemen for the good praise 
 they have given tomy people. But the grand defect of all 
 their speech has been that they did not give them half or 
 quarter of the credit they deserve. Even the little good that 
 I have done has been made possible by their loyalty, their 
 unwavering fidelity to me and mine. We shall go on a little 
 while longer together, the cloud of witnesses, thick as the 
 angel faces around Raphael’s loveliest Madonna, encouraging 
 pastor and people to ‘‘lay aside every weight and run with 
 patience the race set before us.” 
 
 ‘‘ From the eternal shadow, rounding 
 All our sun and starlight here, 
 Voices of our loved ones sounding 
 Bid us be of heart and cheer; 
 
 Through the silence, down the spaces, 
 Falling on the inward ear. 
 
 53 
 
“Let us draw their mantles o’er us 
 Which have fallen in our way, 
 Let us do the work before us 
 Bravely, cheerily, while we may, 
 Ere the long night silence cometh 
 And with us it is not day.” 
 
 CHOIR: “Be Thou Exalted.”—JBayley, 
 
 HYMN. Tune: Hummel. 
 
 One holy Church of God appears 
 Through every age and race, 
 Unwasted by the lapse of years, 
 
 Unchanged by changing place. 
 
 From oldest time, on farthest shores, 
 Beneath the pine or palm, 
 
 One unseen presence she adores 
 With silence or with psalm. 
 
 Her priests are all God’s faithful sons, 
 To serve the world raised up; 
 
 The pure in heart, her baptized ones, 
 Love her communion cup. 
 
 The truth is her prophetic gift, 
 The soul her sacred page; 
 
 And feet on mercy’s errands swift 
 Do make her pilgrimage. 
 
 O living Church, thine errand speed; 
 Fulfil thy task sublime; 
 With bread of life earth’s hunger feed; 
 Redeem the evil time! 
 —Samuel Longfellow. 
 
 BENEDICTION. 
 
 54 
 
LETTERS. 
 
 The following letters are selected somewhat arbitrarily 
 from a larger number that were sent to Mr. Chadwick, or, 
 through him, to the Society: 
 
 zo ELMWooD AVE., CAMBRIDGE, April 9, 1gor. 
 
 My Dear Chadwick: 
 
 I salute you, and if it is not assuming too much, I salute 
 the church that celebrates its Fiftieth Anniversary. Iam the 
 more confident and bold in this my congratulation because 
 the church in its very earliest days invited me to become 
 their minister, when events and circumstances compelled me 
 to decline, and thus in the order of time and Providence to 
 give place to you. 
 
 The ministers of your church have been unique men, of 
 fine personal independence, spiritual experience and insight, 
 poets and prophets. 
 
 The late Samuel Longfellow was one of the most inter- 
 esting persons I ever knew—in whom clear spiritual vision 
 vindicated faith, the existence of which is evidence of things 
 unseen. 
 
 I salute you, my dear Chadwick. Your ministry has 
 been unique and characteristic, and altogether worthy of you; 
 you have spoken from the level plain of your mind, from its 
 valleys of mystery and shadows, and from the heaven-pierc- 
 ing summits of poetic thought and imagination; from foun- 
 tains inexhaustible you have poured forth streams mingled of 
 philosophy, morals, religion and poetry, that have made 
 many desert places of thought bloom into beauty, and en- 
 tiched many minds. You have a kind of chemical affinity 
 for truth that is the only true ground for independence of 
 
 55 
 
mind, and your intellect is as honest as your conscience.’ 
 Such are the sentiments which I have entertained for you 
 through all these years of your ministry; some things which 
 you have done are perpetual—the song which you have set 
 to the tune of ‘‘ Auld Lang Syne”’ will struggle in the human 
 heart as long as emotions of sorrow, love and gratitude are 
 the expression of the profoundest realities of our being, and 
 the poem ‘‘ My Father’s Quadrant” will guide men across the 
 trackless seas when the creeds will have crumbled and fallen 
 in ruins, the hiding-place of the bats, the owls and the foxes 
 of old superstitions. 
 
 There are some aspects of our life and experience around 
 which there gathers the melancholy of disappointment, and 
 what we are does not correspond with what we feel we might 
 have been, but the truly noble mind rises above all despond- 
 ency, and we take ourselves for what we are and lean our 
 human heart upon the Eternal Love. 
 
 Yours really, 
 Horatio STEBBINS. 
 
 SALEM, Mass., April 12, 1gor. 
 My Dear Brother Chadwick: 
 
 I received to-day the programme for your Fiftieth Anni- 
 versary and thank you heartily for thus keeping me in your 
 kind remembrance. It is to be a marked day indeed for 
 our churches in Brooklyn. How I wish I could be there and 
 join with the old friends and new in the interesting occasion! 
 What able, earnest and devoted ministers your church has had, 
 and what a wealth of pure and beautiful sacred songs two of 
 them, at least, have given to the Church Universal! I con- 
 gratulate you on your long and faithful ministry, and send my 
 love to your dear people, and give it abundantly to you and 
 
 yours. Ever faithfully, 
 A. P. PuTNaAM. 
 
 2427 CHANNING Way, BERKELEY, CAL., April 8, 1901. 
 
 Dear Chadwick: 
 I wish I could be present at the jubilee of the Second Uni- 
 tarian Society next Sunday in response to your note, just re- 
 56 
 
ceived. I know that an honored past and a no less honorable 
 present will combine to make the occasion one of high thought 
 and inspiring fellowship, this last reaching within the veil. I 
 congratulate the Society; I congratulate its minister whose 
 service with his people covers three-quarters of the half-cen- 
 tury, and whose ministry beyond his immediate congregation, 
 through his printed word, read and sung, has been wider than 
 
 he can know. 
 Sincerely yours, 
 
 F. L. Hosmer. 
 
 SouTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, BROOKLYN, N. Y., April 12, 1901. 
 
 My Dear Dr. Chadwick: 
 
 On behalf of the South Congregational Church as well as 
 for myself I would acknowledge most heartily the fraternal 
 and neighborly courtesy of your recent note of salutation to 
 us upon the occasion of our recent Fiftieth Church Anniver- 
 sary, almost coincident in time with the similar glad occasion 
 in the history of your own honored Society. Let me give you 
 **a Roland for an Oliver,” in the same fine, fraternal fashion 
 which now, thank God! has taken the place of the ancient 
 acrimony, and therefore mutual misjudgment, of theological 
 debate. 
 
 We of the South Church, your neighbors and friends, con- 
 gratulate you and your people upon the completion of this 
 your strenuous and successful half-century. We congratulate 
 you personally upon your brilliant and noble record of thirty- 
 seven years of continuous pulpit and pastoral service, and we 
 lift our prayers to God—our common Father—that the happy 
 auspices, both personal and public, under which you celebrate 
 this your approaching Golden Jubilee, may herald and insure 
 many, many years still to come of prosperity and blessing 
 in those efforts for the causes of truth and justice among men, 
 which, however our particular methods differ, still and always 
 make brothers of us all. 
 
 ‘Faithfully yours, 
 ALBERT T. Lyman. 
 
 57 
 
tor WILSON STREET, BROOKLYN, N. Y., April 15, 1901. 
 
 My Dear Mr. Chadwick: 
 
 I am deeply disappointed that I could not be at your 
 services last evening, and that a previous engagement from 
 which I find it impossible to extricate myself will keep me 
 from your home to-morrow evening. But I want to assure 
 you of my hearty congratulations and my very best wishes 
 for you and yours. It is amost happy anniversary, in which 
 you will reap the fruits of long fidelity and noble sacrifices. » 
 May you and your people derive some returns for your pioneer 
 work in this still howling wilderness of mingled worldliness and 
 orthodoxy, from the sentiments expressed by those who have 
 been the gainers by your works. And may you personally, 
 with Mrs. Chadwick, long be spared to Brooklyn, and Brook- 
 lyn to you. May God bless you! 
 
 Ever sincerely yours, 
 Joun CoLemMan ADAMS. 
 
 New York, April 26, gor. 
 Dear Brother Chadwick: 
 
 Gladly at this time do I bear my witness to the value of 
 your services as an advocate of the freedom of the human 
 mind and the worship of truth in the soul’s highest concern— 
 the relation to the Infinite. No better proof of my apprecia- 
 tion could I give than the fact that from the day of our first 
 acquaintance to this (more than twenty years lie between the 
 two points), not a line of your printed utterances, in sermon 
 or book, have I left unread, if they came within my reach; 
 and I did read, not ‘‘as one who runs,” but as one who de- 
 sires to enter into spiritual communion with the speaker, that 
 he may ‘‘hear, learn and inwardly digest” any message the 
 words were intended to convey. That my love for the 
 speaker had a share in this desire I will not deny; but it 
 would not have been sufficient to carry one through so many 
 years had I not been at the same time convinced that John’s 
 Apostleship always deserves the open ear and attentive mind. 
 To say, however, that I always said ‘‘/a und Amen” to your 
 conclusions would be rank flattery. On the contrary, not 
 
 58 
 
seldom I stamped my foot on the ground (a bad habit of mine 
 which I am now too old to change), crying, in tones not quite 
 inaudible: ‘‘ Pity he wrote this down; I wish I had him here to 
 argue the point with him!’ But—dissent never created a 
 feeling of distance, and so, I trust, it will remain even to the 
 end between us. To all human calculations many years of 
 unimpaired usefulness are still before you, which, I am confi- 
 dent, will be marked by the same breadth of thought and 
 good will toward all men which breathes through your work 
 in the past. God has placed you among a people who know 
 their leader and follow him willingly, and with your heart 
 planted and nourished in a blessed home, the new period 
 opens under conditions that make all your friends and well- 
 wishers of the cause of light and peace among men to rejoice, 
 and among them, I am fully assured, you number 
 Yours, in brotherly affection, 
 G. GOTTHEIL. 
 
 UNITARIAN CONFERENCE OF THE MIDDLE STATES AND CANADA. 
 
 New York, N. Y., April 13, 1901. 
 Dear Mr. Chadwick: 
 
 To what an interesting event you invite me! A semi- 
 centennial of any church stirs in me more than a common in- 
 terest. I presume this is because of my acquaintance with 
 every step by the way which many of our young churches 
 have taken. I have never organized one of these humanizing 
 institutions without a devout hope that it will survive all the 
 storms and become an efficient and honored power for good 
 in the community. This the Second Unitarian Church, in 
 Brooklyn, has done in an eminent degree. And what a rich 
 history it has had! I send you my hearty congratulations 
 and felicitations over the completion of this first half-century 
 in the history of your church, which has been, from the be- 
 ginning, marked by the very exceptional character of its 
 ministry. I know of no church in which it has been sur- 
 passed and few in which it has been equaled. It rarely falls 
 to the lot of any church to be served consecutively by three 
 such ministers as have filled the pastorate of your church— 
 
 59 
 
Longfellow, Staples and Chadwick. How much do those 
 names signify in our denominational history! What an hon- 
 orable distinction do they confer upon the church thus suc- 
 cessively served! The high spiritual quality of Longfellow’s 
 ministry is known and honored among all our churches. His 
 hymns have enriched the hymnology of all churches. The 
 moral earnestness and enthusiasm of Staples’s ministry is one 
 of the most cherished traditions of your church, while your 
 own work as poet, preacher, biographical writer and literary 
 critic during your long pastorate of thirty-seven years is so 
 widely known and so heartily appreciated as to have made 
 the Second Unitarian Church famous wherever rational 
 thought and spiritual religion are known. 
 
 Surely with such a splendid history as this your church 
 merits the warmest appreciation and the heartiest congratu- 
 lations of all who are in accord with the best and ripest 
 thought of the age in all matters pertaining to religion. 
 Please accept for yourself and your church my most cordial 
 felicitations, and believe me, 
 
 Ever faithfully yours, 
 D. W. MoreHouse. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 7, 1gor. 
 Dear Mr. Chadwick : 
 
 It would be a great pleasure and satisfaction to Mrs. 
 Janes and myself if we could participate in the celebration of 
 the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Second Unitarian Society of 
 Brooklyn, but it is a pleasure that we must forego. We shall 
 nevertheless be with you in spirit, with grateful hearts for all 
 that the pulpit teaching and friendly associations of the little 
 chapel have meant to us. 
 
 Better fifty years of Chadwick than acycle of obscurantism. 
 If the present minister may not claim all the glory of these 
 fifty years, he has grandly fulfilled the promise of Longfellow 
 and Staples: there has been no break in the consistent sin- 
 cerity of the pulpit teaching. 
 
 All that we owe to this teaching can never be expressed 
 in words. For nearly half of these fifty years the Second 
 
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Unitarian Society has been at once our university and our 
 spiritual home; we look back to it as graduates to their Alma 
 Mater. 
 
 Greetings and congratulations, dear friends! The benefi- 
 cent influences of your associated life are not limited to five 
 decades, nor to a fraction of two centuries. They are your 
 bequest to generations yet to be. 
 
 Lewis G. JANEs. 
 
 ROCHESTER, N. Y., il 9, : 
 Dear John: Re ree 
 
 Greeting from our Church Home to your Church Home 
 and yourself in your festival hour! 
 
 I think of your little church as a small, strong spring of 
 very living water, whose brook has flowed far through our 
 parish fields, and always as a quickening, enriching, 
 brightening influence. We ministers all have often bent and 
 borrowed from the stream—as we still do, and more than 
 ever expect to. Few of our churches during these fifty rest- 
 less years can show record of such continuous pulpit bene- 
 faction as the names Longfellow, Staples, Chadwick suggest. 
 I have seen Longfellow’s ‘‘No Good Thing is Failure, No 
 Evil Thing Success” carved over the mantel of our livest 
 church in the West; in his old Milwaukee meeting house have 
 had Staples held up to me as type of a minister’s success; 
 and for many years no Easter service has seemed quite ful- 
 filled in its tenderness without Chadwick’s ‘‘ It Singeth Low.” 
 Two of the three, because they had brothers born to them, 
 are known almost as well by their first names as their last, 
 and the other one, because he has made many brothers, has 
 his ‘‘ John” just as securely homed in our hearts. May the 
 people who have shared you all so widely with others, long 
 know no other than their three—and Annie! 
 
 Truly yours, 
 W. C. GANNETT. 
 
 61 
 
POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 On Tuesday evening, April 16, the celebration of the anni- 
 versary ended with a reception at No. 626 Carlton Avenue, 
 Mr. Henry W. Maxwell, president of the Board of Trustees, 
 joining in this with Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick. There was an 
 overflowing company of happy friends, and the parlors were 
 transfigured with the beauty of abundant flowers, roses and 
 others coming by fifties in token of the fifty vanished years. 
 Mrs. Vincent Coryell added a perfect grace to the occasion 
 with her violin. It is impossible to individualize the thanks 
 which are due to all those who contributed to the success of 
 the celebration. But it seems only right to mention Mr. 
 Maxwell’s carte blanche for the floral decoration of the church 
 and for the printing of this publication. Our ‘‘ Thankoffer- 
 ing,” amounting nearly to five hundred dollars, has replen- 
 ished the Flower Fund and that of the Post Office Mission, 
 and part of it will go upon such errands as Richard Henry 
 Manning loved and did while he was our living friend, and 
 in his honored name. The stenographic work of Mrs. Brock- 
 way and Miss Sessions has been already mentioned as deserv- 
 ing thanks and praise. Last, but not least, our organist and 
 chorister, Mr. J. Lawrence Erb, with each member of the 
 choir, might well receive some grateful recognition were it 
 not that they are so vitally a part of the Society that thanks 
 to them would be not only to but from themselves. 
 
 ‘‘That which becomes us, embosomed in beauty and 
 wonder as we are, is cheerfulness and courage and the en- 
 deavor to realize our aspirations. Shall not the heart which 
 has received so much trust the Life by which it lives? May 
 it not quit other leadings and listen to the Soul which has 
 guided it so reverently and taught it so much, secure that 
 the future will be worthy of the past?” 
 
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