358 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 



much ado, to select in place of their ancestral faith some creed 

 or form of worship which they find socially or aesthetically more 

 congenial. Sectarian differences nowadays certainly do not dis- 

 play themselves in obvious differences of character; and with 

 people of ordinary parts, I take it, this has generally been the 

 case at all times. With really serious natures the case is dif- 

 ferent. Those few people in any generation who seem instinct- 

 ively aware of the tremendous seriousness of religion — the 

 people whose presence in this world was perhaps the real basis 

 of the Calvinistic doctrine of Election — are inevitably affected, 

 often permanently, by the religious doctrine that surrounds their 

 early years. Whatever else Whittier was, he was a profoundly 

 religious man, who could not help taking life in earnest. To 

 understand him at all, then, we must know something of the 

 peculiar religious views which he never relinquished. 



The Friends in New England, writes a gentleman who is 

 now an earnest member of the Religious Society in question, 

 "were Orthodox, in that they believed in God as Father, Son, 

 and Holy Spirit; in Christ as truly one with the Father, yet 

 also very man, and in the efficacy of His atonement for the for- 

 giveness of sins. But the term 'Orthodox ' in New England is 

 usually taken to mean the tenets of the Westminster Confes- 

 sion. Whittier was trained to regard the extreme views of this 

 Confession with aversion. He drank in the truth of the uni- 

 versal love of God to all men in Christian, Jewish, or Pagan 

 lands; that God so loved the world that He sent His Son; that 

 Christ died for all men, and His atonement availed for all who 

 in every land accepted the light with which He enlightened 

 their minds and consciences, and who, listening to His still small 

 voice in the soul, turned in any true sense towards God, away 

 from evil, and to the right and loving. Whittier thus drank in 

 a spirit of universal love, a sense of oneness with all men, that 

 fitted him to espouse and advocate the cause of the ignorant, 

 the weak, the outcast, — the slave, the Indian, the heathen. It 

 gave him sympathy with all loving saintly souls like Fenelon, 

 Guion, and other Roman Catholics of like spirit, and nerved his 

 manly indignant scorn of hard and cruel men that professed the 

 name of 'Christian.' Whittier was trained to have a great 

 reverence for the Bible. . . . He had read much in the journals 

 of Friends. He had steeped his mind with their thoughts, and 

 loved them because they were so saintly and yet so humbly 

 unconscious of it. 



