a narrow and even an intolerant believer in the creed and observances of New England orthodoxy.  Words failed him in 1828 to express his abhorrence of a meeting of professed infidels:  “It is impossible,” he exclaimed with the ardor of a bigot, “to estimate the depravity and wickedness of those who, at the present day, reject the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” etc.  A year and a half later while editing the Genius in Baltimore, he held uncompromisingly to the stern Sabbatical notions of the Puritans.  A fete given to Lafayette in France on Sunday seemed to him an act of sheer religious desecration.  The carrying of passengers and the mails on the Sabbath provoked his energetic reprobation.  He was in all points of New England Puritanism, orthodox of the orthodox.

Subsequently he began to see things in a different light.  As the area of his experience extended it came to him that living was more than believing, that it was not every one who professed faith in Jesus had love for him in the heart; and that there were many whom his own illiberalism had rated as depraved and wicked on mere points of doctrine, who, nevertheless, shamed by the blamelessness and nobility of their conduct multitudes of ardent Christians of the lip-service sort.  Indeed this contradiction between creed and conduct struck him with considerable force in the midst of his harsh judgments against unbelief and unbelievers.  “There are, in fact,” he had remarked a year or two after he had attained his majority, “few reasoning Christians; the majority of them are swayed more by the usages of the world than by any definite perception of what constitutes duty—­so far, we mean, as relates to the subjugation of vices which are incorporated, as it were, into the existence of society; else why is it that intemperance, and slavery, and war, have not ere this in a measure been driven from our land?”

As the months of his earnest young life passed him by, they showed him as they went how horrible a thing was faith without works.  “By their fruits ye shall know them,” the Master had said, and more and more as he saw how many and great were the social evils to be reformed, and in what dire need stood his country of righteous action, did he come to put increasing emphasis on conduct, as the one thing needful to rid the land of the triple curse of slavery, intemperance, and war.  As he mused upon these giant evils, and the desolation which they were singly and together causing in the world, and upon the universal apathy of the churches in respect of them, it seemed to him that the current religion was an offence and an abomination.  And in his prophetic rage he denounced it as “a religion which quadrates with the natural depravity of the heart, giving license to sin, restraining no lust, mortifying not the body, engendering selfishness, and cruelty!—­a religion which walks in silver slippers, on a carpeted floor, having thrown off the burden of the cross and changed the garments