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in our Brookline church for thirty-four years, I still long for the Chapel liturgy.

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"It seems to me that when we assemble together to worship God in the bond of love and in unity of spirit, we should all take part in the hymns and in the reading of the Psalms and in the prayers, and not devolve the duty upon the minister alone. Lastly, the church, or more properly the meeting-house, in which I worshipped, the first Episcopal and the first Unitarian church in Massachusetts, - the old King's Chapel, was to me from my earliest years an object of affection. I remember the impressions it made on me, a boy three years old carried into the venerable building in the arms of my father's hired man. How far it is well to burn the lamp of sacrifice in building our churches, I am not prepared to say. The old Puritan meetinghouses were bare, but they were dignified and characteristic; but there were, and are, temples most pretentious and inappropriate for worship. Truth compels me to admit that there were, in my youthful days, some dry and to me wearisome preachers, some whom I dreaded to see mount the pulpit stairs. I remember one poor country clergyman who boarded in a house with me, one room serving for study as well as for chamber for him, his sweet, delicate wife and perpetually crying baby. Emerson says that where there is cinder in the iron, there is cinder in the pay; and so, inversely, where there was weariness in the study, there was weariness in the sermon. There were in those days more predestined clergymen, predestined by their earthly father, and hence more indifferent, incapable preachers than now.

"I went to church when a boy as everybody, young and old, went, as a matter of course. Such was the universal custom, and it was an age of authority, of conformity to custom, few questions asked, — none of the young. It would not be fair, however, to infer that the community was more interested in religion because the attendance on church was more universal. We lived then in walled towns; the walls were not very near, nor were they any more visible than the horizon. The radius of the circuit of the walls was the accomplishment of a one-horse shay; society was restricted by this primitive locomotion; within this compass they must find their resources. Hence an interest in local occasions; - Commencement Day, Election Day, Independence Day, Fast Day, Thanksgiving Day, were the regular holidays; their ceremonies and exercises were attended, and college and school exhibitions and ministers' ordinations were included. One has only to go back a few generations further to find that Judge Sewall found great refreshment in funerals. There might have been meagreness and provincialism in such a limited circle of existence, but there was also much heartiness, much co-operation, much warmth. To me those days of familiar intercourse with everybody, of identification with and interest in every member of a homogeneous native population, of knowledge of and participation in every event, private and public, -seem in retrospect far pleasanter than life. under the present amorphous, alien and inverted conditions.

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"But in comparing the past with the present I am sure that among the preachers of to-day is a more manly, thoughtful and independent tone than then prevailed. I say prevailed, for no preacher of to-day has surpassed the leaders, some of whom I have enumerated. The change in the position of the clergyman since the day of our Puritan ancestors marks the steady progress of humanity. No longer an autocrat, no longer a lawgiver, no longer disputing endlessly about a covenant of faith and a covenant of works, about justification by sanctification, no longer hanging witches or denouncing heretics, his mission now is, according to Phillips Brooks, to bring spiritual influence to struggling humanity, filled with reverence for God and love for man, to be a mediator between God and man, devoting himself to matters of vital importance, to charity, temperance, political reform rather than to theology, and working in concert with men of other creeds, but with the same end in view. The glacier seems to lie as motionless as the rocky walls which enclose it; nevertheless it moves, and the Puritan of the first generation has been slowly evolved into the Unitarian of the present generation. The churches of Boston and of the old towns, with hardly an exception, have become Unitarian. It has been alleged that Unitarianism has not spread, for it has not compassed sea and land to make one proselyte. This is true nominally and false virtually; it has modified all creeds, liberalized all sects; it has enjoined and fostered practical Christianity. If questioned as to their work, the Unitarian pastors might well reply, in the words of their Master: 'The

blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.'

"I have endeavored to explain why I go to church:

"1. I was brought up in the days of the Jewish Sabbath, when attendance was enjoined on all, sick and well, old and young.

"2. Eleven Puritan clergymen among my direct ancestors infused into me the habit and the enjoyment.

"3. I happened to grow up at an interesting period, when the churches were very much alive, and I have since been very fortunate in my pastors.

"4. I believe, with John Adams, that it is one of four institutions to be preserved as the foundation of our liberty, happiness and prosperity, and that it is the part of a good citizen to support them all.

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Why young people do not attend church as their fathers did is partly explained by larger liberty of action and locomotion, by greater weariness after the work of the week, by the increased resources of books, etc., etc.; and I can only further account for it by remembering that every generation is born and bred under new influences not easily analyzed; that the books in which we delighted bore our children, that their habits of thought, their views of life, differ from ours, and that among these differences is this of church attendance. But notwithstanding this apparent indifference to religion, as at times we complain of an apparent indifference to politics, what generation could manifest a greater reverence for and attachment to the four institutions John Adams hoped would be preserved than did this

generation, when our militia, true to the teachings of the church and the school, rallied in every town in our Commonwealth, marched to the defense of their country and for four long years battled for freedom and humanity?

Their fathers' God before them moved

An awful Guide, in smoke and flame.

If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life, also, he cannot be my disciple.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend."

What with business and the Safety Vaults, Harvard College and public affairs, as serious occupations; with studies genealogical and antiquarian, matters dramatic and matters military, and the care of his country seats, as pursuits more purely pleasurable, the list of Colonel Lee's occupations seems longer than that of most of us. Yet he found time for many other tastes. When he was in College the Med. Fac. made him professor of "Miscellaneousness and Gout." The "gout" symbolized his aristocratic tendencies, which in later years remained quite visible, though always in tranquil subjection to his sound sense and good taste; the "iniscellaneousness" abode with him, in luxuriant development, all his days.

He was very fond of music, and had a fair knowledge of it. When a young man he played upon the flute; he also had a good voice and sang very well. His strong feeling for hymns, as sung in the churches, to which he alludes as affecting him in his boyhood,

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