and impede its use. Such impediments certainly surrounded the church forty years ago. Happy are we now that we can meet on one broad platform, that we can join hands in one great endeavor. Our individual beliefs remain, much purified and enlightened, but beneath them lies the foundation of a deep agreement. We recognize religion as a primitive and normal human trait, and no longer as an exceptional and superhuman endowment. Religious genius is as rare as other descriptions of genius, but religious power is inherent in the soul of man, and all of its sincere attainments are precious. I cannot say half I wish I could upon this theme, but I will ask leave to close my few words with a verse or two of my own: I sat beside life's ebbing tide With my life's fabric close at hand, And thought how planned in marble pride Held me to reason and reflect. "O Master! I have wrought so ill, Would Heaven I had not wrought at all; So petty my devising skill, My measures so unjust and small!" "But didst thou build for God?" asked He; [Applause.] THE CHAIRMAN. I think you will all agree with me that this is an appropriate time to sing the second of the hymns on the programme, - a hymn by our friend, Rev. William C. Gannett, "He hides within the lily." - THE CHAIRMAN. It has been said by some one that every well-regulated Boston household contains three things: the first is an author, the second is a rubber-plant, and the third I have forgotten [laughter]; which reminds me of the story of the man who said that he had the wretchedest of memories. There were three things he could not remember: the first was names, the second was dates, and he had forgotten what the third thing was. [Laughter.] However that may be, and in spite of the fact that not all Boston households are as well regulated as they ought to be, we are all glad in Boston to meet an author; and there is no much greater pleasure than finally to meet and to hear a man whose books we have learned to know and to appreciate. One of my greatest pleasures in coming here to-day, besides meeting all of you, was the fact that I should have the pleasure of meeting Mr. Henderson, whose books I have read with much enjoyment; and I am sure that here to-day we all consider ourselves among "The Children of Good Fortune." It gives me the greatest pleasure to introduce Mr. C. Hanford Henderson as the next speaker. [Applause.] REMARKS OF C. HANFORD HENDERSON, PH. D. THE MODERN PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. Mr. Chairman, — Ladies and Gentlemen: I feel very much honored to be allowed to share so notable an occasion. I might reasonably have a doubt about the fitness of taking any audible part in your celebration, because at the last religious association I attended I met an experience that might have been discouraging to any one less optimistic than myself. It was out at Omaha, at the time of the meeting of the Congress of Religions, and it was my pleasant duty to speak on that occasion. I had a paper on "The Social Conscience," which I thought at the time was rather good. You know that a poet is said to like his verses when they are redhot, and it is also true of those of us who are less fortunate and have to write prose. When I came down from the platform I met a tall, lean, earnest farmer from some place in Illinois. He took me by the hand very cordially, and said in a friendly way, "I am very glad to see you. I have read everything that you have written, I mean to read everything that you write, but I am disappointed in you as a public speaker." [Laughter.] I think he would be fit material for the Free Religious Association, because he could certainly be trusted to express his opinion. I might have another serious doubt, inasmuch as it has not been my fortune to render more than very junior service in the cause that we have come to-day to commemorate; but Mr. Mead, your President, says that although it is an anniversary we want to look both ways. Apparently he has selected me as a man who is no longer young and who is not yet quite old, and who therefore may stand between the past and the future. Possibly, if I have the good fortune to follow the honorable example of some of our distinguished members, I may be able forty years hence to edify another audience by memories of this occasion and anecdotes of those who addressed it. I want, however, before looking toward the future, to look back for one moment at something which seems to me worthy of record. It is difficult for us, who stand on the vantage ground of the present toleration, to know what a spiritual loosening of the bonds came through work that has been already accomplished. I myself was educated in a very conservative city — in Philadelphia. I should like to reverse the career of my distinguished townsman, Mr. Benjamin Franklin; having been born in Philadelphia I should like to die in Boston. In that city of Philadelphia my own department of study was geology. At the time I came upon the stage, we were all of us deeply interested in the newly-formulated doctrine of evolution. Those of you who go back in your scientific thought twenty-five years will remember that this doctrine came to us with such liberating power that we made the mistake of giving it too much importance. some of the younger men at least that it ex We felt plained, where we now know that it only formulates. In that city of Philadelphia there was no middle ground at that time between the old, orthodox faith and this newer, radical faith, and I think the younger men let the pendulum go too far; finding it impossible to be orthodox, they rather gloried in the fact that they were very heterodox. But when this movement of freedom crept over the whole United States, and some of us awoke to the fact that we were free to doubt, then, my friends, we began truly to believe. Your Association has done no greater work than to make aspiring souls feel that they are free to doubt. One of our speakers has touched upon the basal question of immortality, and I am going to use that as an illustration of what I mean. When one breaks away from the old thought that for one's salvation, in fact for one's decent standing in the community, one has to believe in immortality, - when one breaks away from that thought and begins to experience the facts of life, and to say, quite independently, "Well, since I may disbelieve, shall I?" the answer of life comes to him more and more distinct. And for me and I quote this not because it has any importance as my own particular belief, but only because I passed through this rather typical experience in going through the scientific path to actual disbelief for me, when I was free to disbelieve, there came a great abiding faith in the life which is unending. I have said that my own province is to look both ways. Here in Boston and you know that in any faith the convert is the most ardent believer, and so the citizen who elects this honorable city is perhaps the warmest in his affection for it — I think those who come here from other climes are attracted first of all by the tremendous hospitality to thought, by the tremendous advance that we have here in toleration. I think. we pay, however, one penalty for that, and that in considering the rest of the country we are apt to think that our influence has reached farther than it has. Those of you who have lived in other and less tolerant communities will, I think, bear me witness that if we are true to our privilege of spreading toleration, of spreading free religion, the next forty years ought to |