notable lectures on Natural Theology.  Most of all to Dr. E. A. Chapin, his father’s successor in the Universalist Pulpit at Charlestown, Mass.  Dr. Chapin — but ten years King’s senior — was then just beginning his eminent career as pulpit orator and popular lecturer.  He recognized the undeveloped genius of his young friend, he knew of his earnest student-ship, he delighted to open the doors of opportunity to him.  It was a gracious and honorable relation and most advantageous to the younger man.  Writing to a good Deacon of a neighboring church Chapin said:  “Thomas has never attended a Divinity School, but he is educated just the same.  He speaks Greek, Hebrew, French, German, and fairly good English as you will see.  He knows natural history and he knows humanity, and if one knows man and nature, he comes pretty close to knowing God.”

In 1846 Chapin was called to New York, and through his influence Starr King, then twenty-two years old, was installed as his successor in the pastorate of the First Universalist Church of Charlestown.  If his preparedness for an important New England pulpit is questioned it must be admitted that he entered it wholly without academic training, but we need not be distressed on that account.  From the first he had adopted a method of study certain to produce excellent results, thorough acquaintance with a few great authors, and reverent, loving intercourse with a few great teachers.  Little wonder that the “boy preacher” made good in the pulpit from which his honored Father had passed into,the Silence, and wherein the eloquence of Chapin had charmed a congregation of devoted followers.

Two years pass and he is called to Hollis Street Church in Boston, a Unitarian Church of honorable fame but at the time threatened with disaster.  It was believed that if any one could save the imperilled church, King was that man.  Not yet twenty-five years of age, established as minister of one of Boston’s well known churches; a co-laborer of Bartol, Ballou, Everett, Emerson, Theodore Parker and Wendell Phillips, - surely he is to be tried and tested as few men so young have ever been, here in the “Athens of America,” the city of beautiful ideals and great men.

It is certain that King regarded the eleven years he gave to Hollis Street as merely preparatory to his greater work in California.  Writing playfully from San Francisco to Dr. Bellows in Boston he said:  “At home, among you big fellows, I wasn’t much.  Here they seem to think I am somebody.  Nothing like the right setting.”  The record shows that even among the “big fellows” Starr King was a very definite somebody, for although crowds did not attend his preaching in Boston as in San Francisco, he was able to congratulate himself upon the fact that he preached his last sermon in Hollis Street Church to five times as many people as heard his first.  Nor do we need to await the judgment of California admirers to be convinced of his ability as a preacher or his popularity as a lecturer.