new freedom. On the contrary, I feel quite confident that as we realize democracy for women as well as for men, we shall build our women into the structure of society in a more living sense than ever before, and that we shall find that, instead of having lost, we have ultimately gained.

PRESIDENT WENDTE.

INTERLUDE

We are privileged to have with us one of the last links that bind us to the early history of this Association, dear in our memory. Because of his companionship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mr. Alcott, John Brown, and Julia Ward Howe, and of his long connection with this Association, we give warm welcome to the presence and the word of our friend, Mr. Frank B. Sanborn, of Concord.

THE FOUNDERS OF FREE RELIGION IN BOSTON

MR. FRANK B. SANBORN

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I have been all my life a good subject for instruction; and I have learned a great deal in the present session of the Free Religious Association. I have learned many things that do not seem to harmonize very well; perhaps I shall be able to reconcile them better hereafter. Several of the speakers have reminded me of that ancient woman in Connecticut usually place her in Connecticut who complained that the doctrine of total depravity was too much attacked. She said, "What do they attack Total Depravity for? It is a beautiful doctrine if folks would only live up to it." Our ethical teacher

we

and our literary teacher, and perhaps others, have in different terms attacked the same doctrine. Things are going to be worse before they are going to be better."

The doctrine of total depravity, I suppose, originated in that other doctrine, of original sin. I am a native of New Hampshire. We had in our town an Irish doctor, Dr. Matthew Thornton, who signed the Declaration of Independence. He refused to believe in the doctrine of original sin, for this reason: "Original sin," he said, "is either divisible or indivisible. If divisible, my share in it, after being divided among so many millions, is so small that I am not going to pay any attention to it. If indivisible, then it is going in a solid mass to some one person, and the chance that it will ever reach me is so small that I am not going to pay any attention to it." What moral may be drawn from this I cannot say, but I will leave it for your consideration.

My present subject is not a Forward Look, but rather a Backward Look. The founders of the Free Religious Association were not the originators of the movement; they depended, as I did as a young man, upon the leaders in certain growing movements for freedom-freedom of the slave; freedom of women from the restraints which the law then imposed upon them; and religious freedom, the freedom of all persons to follow their own religious opinions and to worship as they believed proper. The founders of this doctrine of freedom in religion I hold to be the Quakers. With their doctrine of the Inner Light they laid before the world strongly and strikingly the foundations of religious freedom.

They were followed in this country by the Unitarians and Universalists, whose great man was Dr. Channing. Dr. Channing was an extremely liberalizing force; he preached and wrote, and became a very strong influence in the direction of religious freedom. He was followed, at his death in 1842, by a young clergyman, Theodore Parker, who had a somewhat different method - he was the missionary of agitation. Dr. Channing could hardly be called an agitator; his methods were gentle, and appealed to the reason and to the affections; but Parker was not averse to a controversy. Between these

two appeared a leader who I suppose has done more for the religious movements of the American people than any one else, namely, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in the character and gentleness of his methods resembled Channing, and in the firmness of his convictions resembled Parker; and he went more profoundly into the philosophy of human nature than either Dr. Channing, who was his teacher, or Parker, who was his contemporary.

Now, most of the founders of this Association, I conclude, were more or less influenced, directly or indirectly, by these four sources of religious freedom — some by the Quakers, some by Dr. Channing, some by Emerson, some by Parker. I happened to be influenced by all four. I am going to read to you presently the names of some of the founders. Two of them have been mentioned to-day. Mr. Potter was a Quaker, and he it was who bred in me the pure doctrine of Quakerism. With the exception of his going to the front when the Civil War came on, I think he remained true to the principles of Quakerism. There was another side to his nature; he was not averse, as some Quakers were, to a little fun now and then. It is one of my most distinct college recollections that I saw Potter afterwards a clergyman and religious reformer -acting a comic part in a play. He looked the character, and acted it extremely well; without a smile on his own countenance he excited laughter in the whole audience. He went abroad to study in Germany — a classmate of Charles Lowell who died in the Civil War. Potter came home in such a state of theological uncertainty that Mr. Lowell said to me, “If you know of any parish in New England that does not believe in a personal God, recommend Potter to that parish."

I am now going to read to you the names of a few of the persons first interested in this Association, because some of them are remembered, while many of them are virtually forgotten as we all shall be in due time.

It often happens to me, since the death of Mrs. Howe and of Colonel Higginson, to be the oldest person present at gatherings of the friends of Freedom in the various directions in which Freedom leads its votaries. When this happens the

mind is naturally led backward to the days when I was but a youth, following in the ranks then led by older men and women advocating the various causes of which I have already spoken. It was to defend the right of private judgment in religious matters, or what we called Freedom in Religion, that our present Association was formed, in 1867, though several of those whom we may call its real founders were dead before that date. I have spoken briefly of the Quakers, and of Channing, Emerson, and Parker. I shall mention some of those who joined in our first meetings, but have one by one preceded us to that other world which most of us, I suppose, have in confident if not in very clear view.

Parker had died, worn out by excessive labors, in 1860, twenty years before his vigorous life should have ended; but Emerson was living through the anxieties and crises of the Civil War, in which he upheld the only true solution of that political conflict — the total uprooting of Negro slavery. The fervor of feeling aroused by the struggle brought together in a sort of union religious sects that in my boyhood hated each other, as a New Hampshire wit said, "with a pure heart, fervently." This of itself promoted the formation of our Association, as it had made feasible the formation of the American Social Science Association in 1865, and, a few years later, the National Conference of Charities, which now includes almost all our States in its broad organization.

The persons most active in forming the Free Religious Association and the Radical Club (originated about the same time) were Wentworth Higginson, Octavius Frothingham, Charles Norton, John Weiss, Mrs. Howe, Mrs. Cheney, W. J. Potter, Frank Abbot, and, in a more humble capacity, David Wasson, Edwin Morton, and myself. Several of these persons had been intimately associated with Theodore Parker, either as members of his congregation, speakers from his pulpit, biographers, or executors of his last Will—a function which I performed along with John R. Manley and Frederick May. It was therefore natural for such persons to take part in what Parker would have regarded as one branch of the vast work he had undertaken, and which had overmatched him.

It is singular, but worth noticing on this occasion, that of the seven or eight persons who were cognizant of the final plans of John Brown for uprooting Negro slavery in the United States, and who furnished him with the money for carrying out those plans, three men were active, each in his own way, in the Free Religious Association - Higginson, Sanborn, and Morton; and two women, Mrs. Howe, and Mrs. Mary Stearns of Medford, though not acquainted with Brown's plans, were his constant and effective friends, and were also deeply interested in this Association. Parker, as I have shown in one of the fourteen volumes of his collected writings, was one of the first to whom Brown imparted these later plans, and one of those most firmly and deliberately convinced that they would ultimately result in the great end aimed at, but which came much earlier than any of us except Parker had expected. Parker, more than any other American, and more than any European save Victor Hugo, saw and felt the underlying forces that made the desperate attempt of Brown in Virginia the beginning of the end of that fatal institution which was eating out the heart of the great Republic of the West. Abraham Lincoln also saw the evil, and was so placed under Providence that he could and must, with his unsurpassed statesmanship, carry out to its established conclusion the purpose of Brown and of Parker. Higginson, with equal earnestness but with a less practical mind, aided in the initiative, and, like so many of Brown's friends and kindred, exposed his life in the war that followed; and in the effort to civilize the slave States he was ever faithful to the pledges given by Lincoln to the enslaved race, whose service made the victory of Freedom possible.

In these days, when so many citizens, in their beneficent wish to obliterate the animosities of half a century ago, are also forgetting the cause and the course of those animosities, I have thought it well to make these statements. It was the cause of Freedom political, religious, and social which was at stake in the Civil War; and in that war Liberty, Civilization, and Abraham Lincoln were victors.