IN THE NEW ENGLAND ATMOSPHERE-1851-1853 533 



thought more upon my reading than had most men of my 

 age in college, and the more I thus read and thought, the 

 more evident it became to me that, while the simple reli 

 gion of the Blessed Founder of Christianity has gone on 

 through the ages producing the noblest growths of faith, 

 hope, and charity, many of the beliefs insisted upon within 

 the church as necessary to salvation were survivals of 

 primeval superstition, or evolved in obedience to pagan 

 environment or Jewish habits of thought or Greek meta 

 physics or mediaeval interpolations in our sacred books ; 

 that most of the frightful systems and events in modern 

 history have arisen from theological dogmatism ; that the 

 long reign of hideous cruelty in the administration of the 

 penal law, with its torture-chambers, its burnings of here 

 tics and witches, its cruelties of every sort, its repression 

 of so much of sane human instinct and noble human 

 thought, arose from this source, directly or indirectly ; and 

 that even such ghastly scenes as those of the French Kevo- 

 lution were provoked by a natural reaction in the minds 

 of a people whom the church, by its theory of divine retri 

 bution, had educated for ages to be cruel. 



But what impressed me most directly as regards the 

 whole orthodox part of the church was its virtual support 

 of slavery in the crisis then rapidly approaching. Excel 

 lent divines, like Bishop Hopkins of Vermont, the Rev. Dr. 

 Parker of New Jersey, and others holding high positions 

 in various sects throughout the country, having based 

 elaborate defenses of slavery upon Scripture, the church 

 as a whole had acquiesced in this view. I had become bit 

 terly opposed, first to the encroachments of the slave 

 power in the new Territories of the United States, and 

 finally to slavery itself; and this alliance between it and 

 orthodoxy deepened my distrust of what was known about 

 me as religion. As the struggle between slavery and 

 freedom deepened, this feeling of mine increased. Dur 

 ing my first year at college the fugitive-slave law was 

 passed, and this seemed to me the acme of abominations. 

 There were, it is true, a few religious men who took high 



