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[247]
This 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
Houghton and Mifflin Company, 1899.
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