him to his first regular settlement in Methuen, Mass., the legibility of his chirography being the determinative influence! For once, at least, the selecting in haste was not followed by repentance at leisure. In the November following, having accepted the call, he was installed. pastor of the Methuen Universalist Church, and so began, in due form, his great work as a Christian preacher and pastor, in the Universalist branch of the Church of Christ on earth.

The pages which follow will make it appear that the distinct mission of Alonzo Ames Miner was administrative. Whatever his talents as thinker, whatever his abilities as a champion of the Universalist belief, — in both of which regards he stood high,—the two Hosea Ballous take the chief place as the constructors and shapers of Universalist opinion. All his life Mr. Miner was conservative, accepting new beliefs, or modifications of old beliefs, cautiously and slowly. But as respects the Universalist denomination, its intrinsic institutions and its auxiliaries, he was a leader among his brethren, opening up new paths, early discarding methods seen to be effete, and pushing boldly, at times to the discomfiture of his brethren, into experiment, and in the end usually justifying his courage by success.

At the opening of the Methuen pastorate Mr. Miner appears as a recognized and approved defender of the faith, and a champion of the ways and purposes of the Universalist denomination. It seems a needful preliminary to anything like an intelligible statement of Dr. Miner's life-work, that the antecedents and causes of the Universalist belief of the time, of the character

of the Universalism of the time, and the historic, and, in important respects, the logical, relations of Universalism to the older, particularly the Calvinistic, creeds, be briefly and succinctly outlined. Essentially, what was theological Universalism in 1840? Out of what had it come? What did it take with it from the other beliefs? and, as respects these, what did it discard? To the older Universalists an answer to these questions may not be needed, yet the answer will be quite sure of their interested attention. To younger Universalists the facts which a just answer must present are indispensable if they would rightly apprehend the service which Dr. Miner rendered both the theology of Universalism and the denomination of Universalists. The statement shall be as compact and brief as may seem practicable, yet considerable of detail is indispensable.

CHAPTER VI.

ANTECEDENTS OF MODERN UNIVERSALISM.

ONE who has shown greatness in leadership, in the

having and the effectively using the talent to influence and practically to command his associates in an endeavor to accomplish an end deemed needful by all, cannot be understood except as he is seen in relation to the exigencies that have controlled him. In his "Life of Napoleon Bonaparte," Sir Walter Scott could not intelligibly give even the name of his hero until he had described, in considerable detail, the causes and initial operations of the French Revolution. The flower and fruitage must be studied with careful reference to the roots and fibres of the organism that finally buds and bears. But this most needful phase of biography involves serious difficulties. It is not an easy task to so reproduce an epoch that its character shall be made. distinct and impressive to a generation that has had little or no contact, much less sympathetic relations, with the particular past. If these pages are to have any success in delineating the spirit, aims, and lifework of Alonzo A. Miner, they must at least make a strenuous effort to picture the particular, in some regards the peculiar, religious and social state of so

ciety in which he first appeared, and which made upon him a deep and durable impress.

Had Martin Luther been born in the fourteenth or in the eighteenth century, the Luther of history as we now know him could have had no existence. The great leader of the Reformation was himself not simply as God made him, but as the dominant ecclesiastical and political agencies of his time moulded and directed him. The national conditions of our times make impossible another Cromwell, another Napoleon, another Washington. It is quite conceivable, it is within the limits of intelligible possibility, that a child shall be born with the same mental and moral qualities as had Hosea Ballou or William Ellery Channing, but in the new conditions of the theological and religious world another Ballou or another Channing, as we know or know of them, is an impossibility. Had A. A. Miner made his appearance a half century earlier or a half century later than his actual natal day, there can be little doubt that his impress and leadership would have been felt in his day and generation; but there could not have been even an approximation to the presence and character that now rise before our inward vision at the mention of his Dr. Miner is the joint product of the boy and youth Miner, and the very marked religious beliefs, even systems of belief, that literally infected the atmosphere in his earlier, and also in his later days.

name.

It is not till after considerable reflection that the present chapter and the one which immediately succeeds have been written; for the author began and continues his work with, at least, the intention of giving no place

to matters that, in his own judgment, will not, directly or remotely, present in clearer characters and in complete outline the life he has undertaken to portray. Theological disquisition and ecclesiastical and sectarian annals have no rightful place here except as they are needful to a more intelligible and just biography of Alonzo Ames Miner. But a theologian and ecclesiastical and denominational worker and leader cannot be isolated from the disquisitions and annals which in large degree made him what he was, and which in turn and later were in good measure made by him.

The juncture at which this history has now arrived, the formal beginning of a work that was to lead, extend, in some regards mould, a great phase of Christian doctrine and life, seems to make needful a condensed sketch: first, of the Antecedents of Modern Universalism ; second, a statement of Essentials of Modern Universalism, and third, The Phases of Administration which it has Developed- -no small part of which A. A. Miner was.

It may not in the first impression seem much, when it is said that the doctrine of "Salvation by Grace" was the corner-stone of, in fact a pervading element in, the popular theology of New England up to the middle of the present century; the words of that dogma are even now in most of the creeds of the American churches, but the spirit has, in many communities - not in all, however1-largely departed therefrom. And again, it

1 Wise and well-informed persons greatly differ in estimating the extent in which the nominal champions of the older creeds have departed from their spirit and letter. To not a few, the prestige of the New Orthodoxy, and of Andover as its principal support, is regarded as proof that the Old has become effete in the general community. To others, it