THE SOUTH CHURCH. I'i^ 



is fuller now tliau it was then — fuller of conveniences, of luxuries, 

 of engagements, pleasures, religious activities, and perhaps also of be- 

 nevolences. " But," as Bishop Potter has recently suggested, " whether 

 life is really fuller, in the sense that it is richer and more wortliily in- 

 telligent and more generally aspiring, is a very different question." 

 Our possessions are greater, o\ir resources are more varied, our 

 numbers have increased, the range of our living has been immeasurably 

 widened, and we spread ourselves over a vaster field; but we may 

 still learn from the past, lessons of virtue and equity, of righteous- 

 ness and purity, both in private and in public life, and pause to ask 

 ourselves whether, with our larger experience and greater wealth and 

 wider influence, we have made a corresponding advance in the nobility 

 of our aims and the sincerity of our devotions. 



And, moreover, we shall make a great mistake if we suppose that 

 the life of fifty years ago was uneventful and monotonous. On the 

 contrary, there has been no decade in the present century so prolific 

 in influences affecting the social conditions of our national life as the 

 decade immediately preceding the organization of this Church. It was 

 a generative and an originating period — a period pregnant with new 

 ideas, fruitful in new enterprises, excited, restless, ambitious, effervesc- 

 ing — a kind of hot-bed period, when the germs of a new social order 

 w^ere energetically nourished and forced forward into rapid expansion. 



Our political institutions had, by that time, become well established. 

 Our struggle for independence and recognition among the nations of 

 the earth had come to a successful issue. We had won the respect of the 

 world. It was natural, therefore, that attention should be given to do- 

 mestic affairs and to the development of our internal life. The thought 

 of the people turned upon themselves, and the spirit of the times was 

 that of enterprise and self -improvement. 



The introduction of steam power and new inventions in machinery 

 was. just then beginning to revolutionize the industries of the land. 

 Railroads were being started. The road from Hartford to New Haven 

 was finished in 1839, but was not extended to New York until 1848. 

 The locomotive whistle was heard for the first time in this village in 

 1850. No telegraph line existed till 1844; and none for us till several 

 years after that. The influence of these marvelous discoveries and inven- 

 tions has been often discoursed upon, and cannot well be exaggerated. 



