Cambridge as Village and City 299 



that dialect so sweet to the ears of every true child 

 of New England may still be heard, if we go to 

 seek it ; but in Lowell s boyhood it must have been 

 a familiar sound in the neighbourhood of Elmwood. 

 But the work done in this rustic college com 

 munity, if done within somewhat narrow horizons, 

 was eminently a widening and liberalizing work. 

 The seeds of the nineteenth century were germinat 

 ing in the eighteenth. Two or three indications 

 must suffice, out of many that might be cited. In 

 1669 there was a schism in the First Parish of 

 Boston, brought about by an attempt to revise the 

 conditions of church membership, in order to obvi 

 ate some of the difficulties arising from the restric 

 tion of the suffrage to church members, and the 

 founding of the Old South Church by the more 

 liberal party was a result of this schism. One 

 hundred and sixty years later, in 1829, there was 

 a schism in the First Parish of Cambridge, which 

 resulted in the founding of the Shepard Church 

 by the more conservative party. The questions at 

 issue between the two parties were the questions 

 that divide Unitarian theology from Trinitarian, 

 and the distance between the kind of interests at 

 stake in the earlier controversy and in the later 

 may serve as a fair measure of the progress which 

 the mind of Massachusetts had been making during 



