is absence of fashion rather commended the place to me; for I had had
in my life enough and too much of that church-going in which the
bonnets, the pews, and the doctrine appear to rest on one dead level of
conventionalism.

Mr. Clarke's preaching was as unlike as possible to that of Theodore
Parker. While not wanting in the critical spirit, and characterized by
very definite views of the questions which at that time were foremost in
the mind of the community, there ran through the whole course of his
ministrations an exquisite tone of charity and good-will. He had not the
philosophic and militant genius of Parker, but he had a genius of his
own, poetical, harmonizing. In after years I esteemed myself fortunate
in having passed from the drastic discipline of the one to the tender
and reconciling ministry of the other. The members of the congregation
were mostly strangers to me, yet I felt from the first a respect for
them. In process of time I came to know something of their antecedents,
and to make friends among them.

After some years of attendance at Williams Hall, our society, somewhat
increased in numbers, removed to Indiana Place Chapel, where we remained
until we were able to erect for ourselves the commodious and homelike
building which we occupy to-day.

Our minister was a man of much impulse, but of more judgment. In his
character were blended the best traits of the conservative and of the
liberal. His ardent temperament and sanguine disposition bred in him
that natural hopefulness which is so important an element in all
attempted reform. His sound mind, well disciplined by culture, held fast
to the inherited treasures of society, while a fortunate power of
apprehending principles rendered him very steadfast, both in advance and
in reserve. In the agitated period which preceded the civil war and in
that which followed it, he in his modest pulpit became one of the
leaders, not of his own flock alone, but of the community to which he
belonged. I can imagine few things more instructive and desirable than
was his preaching in those troublous times, so full of unanswered
question and unreconciled discord. His church was like an organ, with
deep undertones and lofty, aspiring treble,--the master hand pressing
the keys, the heart of the congregation responding with a full melody.
Festivals of sorrow were held in Indiana Place Chapel, and many of
them,--James Buchanan's hollow fast, a day of mourning for John Brown,