To Miss Lucy Osgood.
Wayland, 1865.
I received a letter last week from William H. Channing, in acknowledgment of funds sent to the freedmen in his department.
He is the same infinite glow that he was when he took my heart captive twenty years ago. He writes: “You ought to have been in Congress on the ever-to-be-remembered 31st of January 1865.1 Such an outburst of the people's heart has never been seen in the Capitol since the nation was born.
It was the sunrise of a new day for the republic.
I was standing by John Jay, and as we shook hands over the glorious vote I could not but say, ‘ Are not our fathers and grandfathers here with us?
They surely must be here to share our joy in thus gathering the fruit of which they planted the seed.’
Yes! and our blessed, great-hearted Theodore Parker was there, with a band of witnesses.
Selah!”
1 The day on which the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery in the United States, passed the House of Representatives, and (having previously passed the Senate) went to the Legislatures of the several States for ratification.
[189]
Yesterday I walked up to see Mr. and Mrs. S., where I have not been for a year.
He is full of the great Convocation of Unitarians at New York, to which he is sent as delegate.
He seems to think it will be very easy to settle “a few fundamental principles, in which all can agree, while sufficient room for progress will be left in unsettled minor opinions.”
But his very first “fundamental principle” concerning the divine origin of Jesus puts up a bar that stops the chariot wheels.
There is a large class of minds that cannot see in Unitarianism a mere half-way house, where spiritual travellers find themselves well accommodated for the night, but where they grow weary of spending the day. And many of them will not even spend a night there, when they discover a new road, so shortened and straightened, that when they want to call upon the Father, they are under no necessity of going roundabout to call upon the Son. 