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 and 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. 



