sunlit eyes of his, and not a word to be drawn from him." So might we all kiss that table, thinking our thought of Martin Luther.

SOME OLD UNITARIAN WORTHIES *

THE paper I shall read to you this evening was suggested by a visit to a fine old library in London, founded by one of the worthies of our faith and a forefather, Dr. Williams, and endowed with some of the wealth which came to him through his marriage to two rich wives. The library was opened in 1729, contains now about 40,000 volumes and among these a Bible done with white ink on black paper for an old London merchant who was going blind, and another in shorthand done by a man more than two centuries ago who feared that the last of the Stuarts, then on the throne, was bent on burning all the Bibles printed in the English tongue that he might reestablish the Church of Rome. There is a great store of manuscripts also, which belong to the daydawn of our faith in the motherland, and among them many from the hand of Richard Baxter who was on the Commission authorized to draw up the terms for the Westminster Confession and who, when his paper was read and they said to him, "But if we adopt these terms we shall have to let in the Socinians," answered, "Then so much the * Read before the Unitarian Club of New York.

better, gentlemen, and so much the fitter "; and the paper was rejected.

You find there also many portraits of the great and good men of the Puritan Reformation Flavel, Baxter, Howe, Watts, Milton, and many more whose names are growing dim now in the mists of time. These portraits from the life are replete with a living interest to us for many reasons. But this is what touches you especially as you glance at those who were nearest of kin to us in the old Presbyterian faith and order from which our churches sprang. There is a light in the eyes and a winsome look on the face which suggests the thought that their faith in God and man has been growing sweeter and more wholesome in their hearts, and are men after the pattern of pious and prayerful Mr. Perkins, of whom Fuller says that "in the earlier years of his ministry he would pronounce the word damn so that it left an echo in your ears for a good while after, and so expounded the ten commandments that your heart sank down and your hair stood up to hear him, but he became much milder as he grew older" and said his damn with a difference. They are the portraits of men who have been walking more and more in the sunshine and less in the shadows of their time and are exchanging the fetters of the spirit for the budding forth of wings, or, as Lowell says, "beginning to twist the tough old iron of Calvin into love knots." They seem to be well men and well-favored men, whose

faith appears to agree with them much better than the faith of many all about them, and to be indeed in fair measure the bread of life and the water or the wine.

I have thought of this again in glancing at the portraits of our own good divines in Salem and Boston and otherwheres in New England. There you may notice this change from the shadows toward the sunshine in the men who hold some gleams of radiance in the heart of them which can not be slain even by the deplorable portraiture of their day and generation. For as it was over in the motherland so it was over here. It was a long time by our human reckoning before the dawning light in their eyes and the more winsome look on the faces of these men found its way fairly into their Sunday sermons and their weekday speech and life, while for this, as it seems to me, there was good reason in men of their make and mold. The old Puritan manhood had done a mighty stroke of work after all on its black bread and waters of Marah, and there was plenty of iron and lime in these, or had been. Why, then, should they be in haste to change the well proven diet for another which might be the mother milk of all enervation to them and their people? The terms of their faith had been settled by the saints and seers who had subdued kingdoms and wrought righteousness, and their Saint John of Geneva had plowed those deep lines to the right and the left of God's eternal love. How then or

why should they overpass these lines or try to blot them out?

But as it was well said of the good Bishop Berkeley that "he proved by pure logic what no man in his right mind could believe," so this was what befell the fathers of our faith in New England. The time came when the things they had held for the truth of God against all comers could be held no longer in their grim integrity. It was not sun-up but the day was breaking, and then they could not preach the old doctrines as men like Edwards preached them, with such a deep conviction that once on a time his hearers clutched the pillars of the meeting house in solid affright lest their feet should slide down swift into hell. Notes of interrogation, as I think of them, would lurk in their eyes or gleam through their spectacles when they cited some dogma dedicated to despair, as Bacon says, and a pause would follow more eloquent than their speech, but that would be all they didn't say. Then on some happy Sunday there would be a sermon tender to tears, when the shadows would be to the light only as those you see sweep over the meadow grass and grain in the summer time, to be taken back perhaps in part on the next Sunday, and then another which would not be taken back, and then there would be an answering light in the eyes and on the faces of those in the pews who were waiting for the bugle to sound the morning's march away from the old dark dogmas, and forever.