te, Boston's versatile and expansive thought furnished the new
preacher his coveted opportunity. Her faith failed not, nor did her
courage falter. Silently she was assailing the old theology and
elaborating the new, in which she has unhesitating belief, and which
entered with enlightening and nourishing force into Mr. Savage's broad
and free opinions. It came to him as the expression of the abiding
atmosphere in which he dwelt and with a beneficent bearing on his
ministry. Favored thus by the concurrent voices of those to whom he
ministered, and by the general freedom and grace of the entire
community, Mr. Savage made a real and salutary advance in his religious
work in Boston. And supported by the judgment of an ever widening
public, conservative thinkers about him felt his influence on current
religious opinion. While he indulged a liberty of speculation, he
instilled religious habits of thought and the spirit of worship into
many inquiring minds, and enabled them to identify themselves with the
highest development of his own religious consciousness. Boston and
vicinity became fully appreciative of the distinctiveness of his mission
and of his apprehensions of the truth. In recognition, therefore, of the
unmeasured praise and enthusiastic acceptance which he received from
the public, he was honored, at the close of his ministry in Boston, with
the degree of Doctor of Divinity at Harvard University. Harvard thus
expressed her highest confidence in the truth and permanence of his
ministry. This famous institution of classic, scientific, philosophic,
and sacred learning attested the sanity of the mind and doctrines of
this once obscure and despised but now noted preacher.

II.

Another condition of the Rev. Minot J. Savage's influence and popularity
as a preacher is his ethical intensity.

In the preceding section I have spoken of what has actually taken place.
I have there shown the favoring conditions under which Mr. Savage
labored in the city which was to him both friend and teacher, and where
he has done his most efficient work as a preacher. The particular type
of religious thought represented by him in the pulpit has not been
brought about by his or any man's device. For generations it has been
pouring itself forth from mind to mind in philosophy, science, poetry,
and religious thought. He did not initiate any distinctive movement; he
only helped to popularize and make permanent doctrines which already had
fou