piece of contradictory advice. But no! "God cannot make Antonio Stradivari's violins without Antonio."

That is the noblest trust in God,-to trust him in the strength of our own arms, the stubbornness of our own wills, the warmth of our own beating hearts. Then, and then only, is our salvation an accomplished fact when we have masterfully taken to ourselves the countless opportunities and inspirations of the world, and out of them shaped and firmly built together a character of which we have no call to be ashamed in any presence, human or divine.

IX.

LOSS AND GAIN.*

FIFTY years ago Channing was less than two years dead; Dewey, well named, forever fresh and sweet, was in the full tide of his New York ministry, writing sermons full of the greatness of men's opportunity and the awfulness of God; Gannett was forty-three, a bush afire with God, not unconsumed; Furness was forty-two, and had published his 'Remarks on the Four Gospels' and his 'Jesus and his Biographers' eight and six years before; Bellows was just thirty (June 11), and had been for six years the minister of that society which was his life-long joy and crown; Hedge, nine years older, was preaching to the lumber merchants of Bangor, and building sentences massive as Doric columns, rich as Corinthian capitals; Theodore Parker, thirty-four years old, was in Europe, resting awhile after his first great battle, and writing Dr. Francis in the Divinity School letters little, if any, shorter than his West Roxbury sermons, at once the insatiable reader, the eager combatant, and the religious soul; James Freeman Clarke, born in the same year with Parker, was drawing nigh to the great heroism of his life,

* An address suggested by the fiftieth anniversary of the Meadville Theological School, and read before the Middle States Conference at Meadville, Pa., June 12, 1894. The concluding part, as here printed, is from an address before the Western Conference May 17, 1893, upon the Unitarian name.

- that exchange with Parker which cost him the secession of fifteen valued members of his church; Emerson, born the year after Furness (1803), was still preaching here and there in Unitarian pulpits as occasion offered, though he had resigned the charge of the Second Church in Boston a dozen years before. But one of these remains with us to-day,Furness, obedient to the voice at eve, obeyed at prime. Whatever our clear gains, immeasurable the loss of these, and such as these! Of a truth, no man's vacant place is ever filled. New places for new men, and the good work goes on. Does it seem to us that there are none coming up with shoulders broad enough to wear the mantles which the translated ones have left behind? The spirit has its ebb and flow; but to what generation has the real apostolical succession not appeared to fail? What we know is that in 1844 men all unknown-among them Allen, King, Longfellow, Johnson, Frothingham, and Weiss-were standing patiently without, tuning their instruments for a music just as pure and sweet as any that was resonant within or any that had died away. Was Channing's spirit more devout than Potter's, his thought so deep and high, his courage more serene? And we must have a care to notice that not all the work is done, nor the best part of it, by those who are most prominent in the public eye, most welcome to the public ear. Our ordinary standards are as absurd as if we measured the progress of a train or carriage by the rattle of the wheels.

To estimate our loss and gain in these particulars

would be a difficult matter, fraught with invidious comparisons and fruitful of no good result. We mourn the good we miss: we trust we shall not prove unworthy of our sacred trusts. In the mean time how do we stand in point of numbers and efficiency to-day as compared with 1844, and by what processes and ratios have the old facts and figures. been transmuted into the facts and figures of to-day? When the Unitarian controversy, which had long been smouldering, burst out in 1815 into a lively flame, we had more than 100 churches that were Unitarian in everything but name. In 1820 about 130 had joined themselves for good and ill to the Unitarian movement, not one of which, Dr. Allen tells us, bore individually the Unitarian name or, with one exception, has since assumed it, an interesting comment on the seriousness with which the Unitarian name is now sometimes discarded. Probably as few churches were called Christian as were called Unitarian. They were called Congregational,— a name expressive of a polity, not of a doctrine, which never should have been allowed to lapse into a doctrinal significance. After the first ranging in opposing camps, the Unitarian gains were slight from year to year, but very regular, exactly as many being added from 1820 to 1840 as from 1840 to 1860, in each period forty-five, giving us 175 in 1840 and 220 in 1860. Since 1860 the number has a little more than doubled, our churches numbering at present 444, of which only 197 are incorporated as Unitarian. I follow Dr. Allen* in these computations, so that you may trust them perfectly, as you might less

The Unitarian Movement since the Reformation.'

safely do if they were mine. The rate of increase also has doubled, or very nearly, during the same period. These figures do not lend themselves heartily to the proposition, stalest of the stale, that the Unitarians are dying out. But they might easily be understood too flatteringly of our numerical strength. Some of the old New England churches that were once filled with a multitude that kept holy-day have now their

"Seas of silence round each separate star."

A general decline in the habit of church-going is partly to blame for this, but still more the exodus from New England to the West, where the young people, whom the New England churches sadly miss, are the life of the new organizations. But here and there also, it must be confessed, there are churches which have suffered from a succession of preachers unequal to their opportunity,-men who have reaped where they sowed not, and gathered where they have not strewn. I do not know of anything more pathetic than the fidelity with which the men, and still more the women, of these churches have strengthened the things that remained that were ready to die. That which the palmer-worm hath left hath the locust eaten, and that which the locust hath left hath the canker-worm eaten, and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten; but the few whom the Unitarian principle hath chosen and found worthy of itself have gone on hoping against hope, from each fresh disappointment rallying for a fresh endeavor.