Inscribed

ΤΟ

THE UNITARIAN FAMILY ON EARTH AND IN HEAven, and ESPECIALLY TO THOSE MEN OF FORCE AND GENIUS WHO HAVE BEEN MY TEACHERS FROM MY YOUTH up, and

TO THOSE FRIENDS OF MY SOCIETY IN BROOKLYN

WHO FOR THIRTY YEARS HAVE GIVEN ME

SO FREELY OF THEIR TRUST AND LOVE.

THE chapters of this book, with the exception of the first and last, were written for my Brooklyn congregation as a series of monthly lecture sermons during the season extending from November, 1893, to May, 1894. The interest which they awakened and the satisfaction which they gave have seemed to justify their publication, and I have thought that a book containing them might mark appropriately the conclusion of my thirtieth year with a people whose generous loyalty to me has been more beautiful than words can say. While none of the chapters is as good as I could wish, some of them, I know, are not so good as others, because of slacker health and spirits and more serious interruptions than the common run. But I have gone over them all with care, and tried to better what I could not radically change. In matters of pure fact I have sought to follow the most excellent authorities, verifying every particular of which I had any doubt.

some of my Unitarian brethren will demur at my conception of Unitarian progress and my measure of its rate. In such estimates we are all of us more or less liable to what Emerson called "the subjective twinkle"; but I have never consciously allowed my wish to be the father of my thought. If there is one thing which I hope my book will do over and above all others, it is that it may furnish some correction of a very general impression in the Unitarian mind that Unitarianism is "the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.” We make much of the changes which other creeds have undergone, and sometimes think and speak as if we had ourselves been mainly influential in bringing these changes about. Something we have done, no doubt; but in the mean time the same Time Spirit which has been at work on the other creeds has been at work upon ours also, and the changes it has undergone have not been less than theirs. But so much more unifying, in the long run, is intellectual liberty than dogma, prescription, and authority, that it may well be doubted whether any Protestant sect is so well agreed at present on the main lines of its belief and faith as "the unsectarian sect called Unitarians."