was always true to himself, and the friends who came, came because of their respect for his intellectual power, his loyalty to truth, and his unreserved devotion to his great work. The love of those friends moved his heart to its very depths, and for those who, in the days of comparative friendlessness, had had the privilege of extending to him the hand of affection, he never ceased to express the warmest gratitude. Happiness, too, he found, pure and abiding, in his communion with the Heavenly Father, towards whom his love and reverence daily grew in intensity and in depth, and in the influence of the religion of God's well-beloved Son, whose words were to him indeed words of eternal life, and whose religion, in its purity and transparency, its freedom from human alloy, its genuine piety, its heavenly benevolence, its jealous regard for the liberty of the individual mind, was to him man's only hope for the present world, his only guaranty of immortality.

Such were the sources of mental and spiritual happiness open to our friend, and we are not surprised that, having these, he was not cast down in sadness and gloom, even when the ominous cough announced to him, at the time when the early clouds had passed away, and life had become fairest, most beautiful, that he must leave the place of his earthly abode. Very pleasant was that place to him, very enthusiastic the friendship which gladdened his heart and animated his hopes; intensely interesting were the labors to which his whole being

was consecrated, fast-coming and exhaustless the large and noble thoughts which sought expression through his lips and pen; but too deep was his reverence for the Lord of creation to permit a murmur when the angel came to summon him hence. And so he lived, labored, and preached up to the very end, his life losing none of its intensity and earnestness until he was prostrated on the dying bed; and there, as we have seen, he remained but for a few days, and then passed on to that higher life for which his earthly existence had been a constant preparation, and which, he confidently believed, - regarding death as but an incident in being, - would prove, in all essential features, a continuation on a higher plane, and with vastly greater opportunities and powers of development, of the mental, moral, and spiritual life begun and continued here.

Life is the manifestation of character. Such a life as the one we are contemplating reveals a character of no ordinary kind. Our brother had a character of his own. It was marked by courage and decision. The thinking for himself in early youth upon subjects of deepest importance, the coming to conclusions different from those held by the friends whom nature had bound to him by closest ties, the honesty which prompted him to avow those conclusions, however painful the consequences of avowal might be, the willingness to make his unaided way through life, all this indicates a character of rare decision and independence. The independence so early manifested characterized him to the close of his

earthly existence. He thought for himself, he acted for himself. He acknowledged no responsibility for his religious opinions to any body of men, to any system of theology. He felt that he was responsible alone to God and Christ. Christian liberty, the unfettered freedom of the mind, was to him of inestimable value. As St. Paul held fast to the glorious liberty of the sons of God; as he protested against every endeavor of Judaizing believers to narrow the Christian platform, to fetter the individual mind; as he would not for the sake of policy or of peace yield an inch, even to St. Peter, when he seemed ready in some measure to compromise the freedom wherewith Paul felt that Christ has made his followers free; so our brother clung with utmost tenacity to the freedom in which his soul rejoiced, which he felt that God designed as the birthright of every soul, and in which alone Christianity could achieve its perfect triumph. He came to the study of the Bible as a perfectly free man. He studied it for him

self and by himself, and the conclusions which he reached as to its teachings he expressed with perfect openness, with entire unreserve.

He never stopped

to ask whether his conclusions harmonized or not with the popular theology, or even with the theology of that class of Christians the Unitarian with whom he was intimately associated, and whom he warmly loved. Sufficient unto him was it, that he believed them to be right, to be accordant with truth. In the exercise of this mental freedom, he came to conclusions on various points different from those

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commonly held; as, for instance, upon the original unity of the race. So, too, upon the vexed question of slavery, he held opinions not shared by a large portion of his Unitarian brethren, some of whom may have thought that a Southern residence had unduly biassed his mind. Of course no finite mind exists which may not unconsciously be influenced by surrounding circumstances; but the man never lived who was less inclined than our brother to trim or modify opinions so as to make them acceptable to the community in which he lived. His opinions upon this, as upon every other subject, were his own, honestly formed and candidly avowed.

As religious liberty, so Christian union, held a high place in the mind of our brother, the first being regarded by him as the pre-requisite, the essential condition of the other. Without perfect liberty, he felt that there could be no union, and no union did he desire except the genuine, manly, honest union in spirit of men who may differ widely in opinion. The passage of Scripture which oftener perhaps than any other was quoted by him, and which he desired that every body of Christians might adopt as its motto, was, "The unity of the spirit in the bond of peace." Such seemed to him union according to the apostolic, the Christian standard, the only real and enduring union. Union upon any other basis he thought as frail, as foundationless, as the house built upon the sand.

It was because of its irreconcilableness with the great ideas of Christian liberty and Christian union,

as well as because of its dark and gloomy features, that our brother regarded Calvinism with utter aversion. It was to him a cold, gloomy, terrible system. By it the Universal Father was converted into a stern, unjust despot, the embodiment of supreme selfishness, who, arbitrarily and without regard to the eternal distinction between right and wrong, selected a portion of his creatures for ineffable bliss, and doomed the other portion to ineffable and hopeless woe. He felt that the system was directly at variance with justice; that it confused and weakened men's sense of moral responsibility; that it made righteousness technical and artificial, instead of personal, to be thrown over man as a cloak rather than to be formed within him, the life of God in the soul of man; that it made retribution indiscriminating, and therefore robbed it of power; that it was unfavorable to the development of tender, affectionate feeling; and that its influence upon the cause of religion was disastrous in the extreme, causing many sensitive, conscientious minds which received it to become anxious and unhappy, and driving many a bold spirit, which would not receive it, to irreligion and atheism.

Some of us, while our hearts beat in unison with his, and while we heartily joined with him in rejecting Calvin's stern system, felt that probably his utter aversion to it had driven him to the far extreme, and had led him somewhat to overlook or not to attach full importance to that feature of the Gospel which, to Augustine and all who like him