AT THE SECOND ANNUAL MEETING OF THE FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION, AT TREMONT TEMPLE FRIDAY, MAY 28, 1869

THOU metest him by centuries,
And lo! he passes like the breeze;
Thou seek'st in globe and galaxy,
He hides in pure transparency;
Thou ask'st in fountains and in fires,
He is the essence that inquires.

AT SECOND ANNUAL MEETING OF THE FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION

FR

RIENDS: I wish I could deserve anything of the kind expression of my friend, the President, and the kind good will which the audience signifies, but it is not in my power to-day to meet the natural demands of the occasion, and, quite against my design and my will, I shall have to request the attention of the audience to a few written remarks, instead of the more extensive statement which I had hoped to offer them,

I think we have disputed long enough. I think we might now relinquish our theological controversies to communities more idle and ignorant than we. I am glad that a more realistic church is coming to be the tendency of society, and that we are likely one day to forget. our obstinate polemics in the ambition to excel each other in good works. I have no wish to proselyte any reluctant mind, nor, I think, have I any curiosity or impulse to intrude on those whose ways of thinking differ from mine. But: as my friend, your presiding officer, has asked

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me to take at least some small part in this day's conversation, I am ready to give, as often before, first simple foundation of my belief, that the Author of Nature has not left himself without a witness in any sane mind: that the moral sentiment speaks to levery man the law after which the Universe was made; that we find parity, identity of design, through Nature, and benefit to be the uniform aim: that there is a force always at work to make the best better and the worst good. We have had not long since presented us by Max Müller a valuable paragraph from St. Augustine, not at all extraordinary in. itself, but only as coming from that eminent Father in the Church, and at that age, in which St. Augustine writes: "That which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist from the planting of the human race until Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion which already existed began to be called Christianity.". I believe that not only Christianity is as old as the Creation, not only every sentiment and precept of Christianity can be paralleled in other religious writings, but more, that a man of

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religious susceptibility, and one at the same time.