he _all_ of religion. He knocked out every round of the ladder
but the highest, and then, pointing to its hopeless splendor, said to
the world, "Go up thither and be saved!"

Short of that absolute self-abnegation, that unconditional surrender to
the Infinite, there was nothing meritorious,--because, if _that_ were
commanded, every moment of refusal was rebellion. Every prayer, not
based on such consecration, he held to be an insult to the Divine
Majesty;--the reading of the Word, the conscientious conduct of life,
the performance of the duties of man to man, being, without this, the
deeds of a creature in conscious rebellion to its Eternal Sovereign,
were all vitiated and made void. Nothing was to be preached to the
sinner, but his ability and obligation to rise immediately to this
height.

It is not wonderful that teaching of this sort should seem to many
unendurable, and that the multitude should desert the preacher with the
cry, "This is an hard saying; who can hear it?" The young and gay were
wearied by the dryness of metaphysical discussions which to them were as
unintelligible as a statement of the last results of the mathematician
to the child commencing the multiplication-table. There remained around
him only a select circle,--shrewd, hard thinkers, who delighted
in metaphysical subtilties,--deep-hearted, devoted natures, who
sympathized with the unworldly purity of his life, his active
philanthropy and untiring benevolence,--courageous men, who admired his
independence of thought and freedom in breasting received opinion,--and
those unperceiving, dull, good people who are content to go to church
anywhere as convenience and circumstance may drift them,--people who
serve, among the keen feeling and thinking portion of the world, much
the same purpose as adipose matter in the human system, as a soft
cushion between the nerves of feeling and the muscles of activity.

There was something affecting in the pertinacity with which the good
Doctor persevered in saying his say to his discouraging minority of
hearers. His salary was small; his meeting-house, damaged during the
Revolutionary struggle, was dilapidated and forlorn,--fireless in
winter, and in summer admitting a flood of sun and dust through those
great windows which formed so principal a feature in those first efforts
of Puritan architecture.

Still, grand in his humility, he preached on,--and as a soldier never
asks why, but stands at apparently the mos