This request confers upon me a certain right to express my opinion on this weighty subject without fear and without reproach even from those who might be ready to take offence at one of the laity for meddling with pulpit questions.  It shows also that this is not a dead issue in our community, as some of the younger generation seem to think.  There are some, there may be many, who would like to hear what impressions one has received on the subject referred to, after a long life in which he has heard and read a great deal about the matter.  There is a certain gravity in the position of one who is, in the order of nature very near the undiscovered country.  A man who has passed his eighth decade feels as if he were already in the antechamber of the apartments which he may be called to occupy in the house of many mansions.  His convictions regarding the future of our race are likely to be serious, and his expressions not lightly uttered.  The question my correspondent suggests is a tremendous one.  No other interest compares for one moment with that belonging to it.  It is not only ourselves that it concerns, but all whom we love or ever have loved, all our human brotherhood, as well as our whole idea of the Being who made us and the relation in which He stands to his creatures.  In attempting to answer my correspondent’s question, I shall no doubt repeat many things I have said before in different forms, on different occasions.  This is no more than every clergyman does habitually, and it would be hard if I could not have the same license which the professional preacher enjoys so fully.

Number Five and I have occasionally talked on religious questions, and discovered many points of agreement in our views.  Both of us grew up under the old “Orthodox” or Calvinistic system of belief.  Both of us accepted it in our early years as a part of our education.  Our experience is a common one.  William Cullen Bryant says of himself, “The Calvinistic system of divinity I adopted of course, as I heard nothing else taught from the pulpit, and supposed it to be the accepted belief of the religious world.”  But it was not the “five points” which remained in the young poet’s memory and shaped his higher life.  It was the influence of his mother that left its permanent impression after the questions and answers of the Assembly’s Catechism had faded out, or remained in memory only as fossil survivors of an extinct or fast-disappearing theological formation.  The important point for him, as for so many other children of Puritan descent, was not his father’s creed, but his mother’s character, precepts, and example.  “She was a person,” he says, “of excellent practical sense, of a quick and sensitive moral judgment, and had no patience with any form of deceit or duplicity.  Her prompt condemnation of injustice, even in those instances in which it is tolerated by the world, made a strong impression upon me in early life; and if, in the discussion of public questions, I have in my riper age endeavored to keep in view the great rule of right without much regard to persons, it has been owing in a great degree to the force of her example, which taught me never to countenance a wrong because others did.”