as the only one located east of the centre, was in a very prosperous condition.  By the talent, popularity and piety of its minister, as his church and congregation believed, he had filled the church to overflowing.  There were no slips to be bought in that church.  We heard this minister say that he could spare thirty families from his congregation to build up a new church.  In view of all the facts, I started a subscription paper, in as good faith as I ever did anything in my life, for the raising of funds to build an edifice.  The subscription was headed by myself with five thousand dollars and many large sums were added to it.  A number of wealthy men lived near the contemplated place of building the new church, who belonged to other churches.  It was supposed, by what their ministers had said in public and in private, that they would use their influence in advancing this good work, and to have some of their members join in it; but for some reason they changed their minds.  I heard that the minister of the church located in the eastern section (which I mentioned before,) had got up a subscription paper to raise ten or twelve thousand dollars to beautify the front of his church, raise a higher steeple, and make some other alterations that he thought important.  I was told that he called on the men who lived in the locality where we proposed erecting the new church, with his subscription, and that they subscribed to carry out his plans.  Some of those who had subscribed to build the new church, after he had made these calls, wrote me that they wished their names crossed off from my paper—­Others came and told me the same thing, and wished their names erased.  I began at this time to understand that there were influences working against our enterprise and that this way of building a church must be given up.  I however, went forward myself, as is very well known, and built a church second to none in New England.  I should have built one that would not have cost one half of the money, had I acted on my own judgement, but I was influenced by a few others differently.  I paid more than twenty thousand dollars out of my own pocket into this church.

Public opinion in the community was, that if the several ministers had given their influence in favor of this matter, a church would have been built by subscription.  They could very easily have influenced their friends in that part of the city to unite in this enterprise without detriment to their own congregation.  Had this course been taken, it is evident that by this time it would have been a large and prosperous church.

A correspondent of the Independent in writing upon the growth of Congregationalism, in New Haven, had a great deal to say about the Wooster Place church—­calling the man that built it, “a sagacious mechanic, who built it on speculation etc.”  Yet; added “if they had called a young man for its Pastor from New England, it might have succeeded after all.”