THE ORIGINS OF LIBERAL THOUGHT IN 

 AMERICA l 



IN approaching the subject of the origins of 

 liberal thought in America, one cannot help re 

 membering that the discovery of the new continent 

 was itself such a stimulus to free thinking as the 

 world had never before witnessed. From time im 

 memorial, the trade between Europe and the re 

 mote parts of Asia had followed certain customary 

 routes. From ancient days, long before Olympiads 

 were heard of, when Assyrian kings with curly 

 beards commemorated their victories in arrow- 

 headed inscriptions, men had used those same 

 routes. Up the Red Sea, in the early prime of 

 hundred-gated Thebes, came ships from the Indian 

 Ocean, with gems and spices to exchange for 

 Egyptian fine linens arid amulets of amber from 

 the Baltic ; and five thousand years later Venetian 

 argosies at Alexandria were laden with just such 



1 An address delivered at the National Conference of Unitarian 

 Churches, at Washington, D. C., October 23, 1895. 



