nt morality of Christendom,
and I rejoiced in the thought that, even in the Rome of the
pre-Christian Caesars, God had not left himself without a witness.

This enlarged notion of the ethical history of mankind might easily lead
one in life's novitiate to underestimate the comparative value of the
usually accepted traditions. I confess that I, personally, did not
escape this error, which I have seen largely prevalent among studious
people of my own time.

Who can say what joy there is in the rehabilitation of human nature,
which is one essential condition of the liberal Christian faith? I had
been trained to think that all mankind were by nature low, vile, and
wicked. Only a chosen few, by a rare and difficult spiritual operation,
could be rescued from the doom of a perpetual dwelling with the enemies
of God, a perpetual participation in the torments "prepared for them
from the beginning of the world." The rapture of this new freedom, of
this enlarged brotherhood, which made all men akin to the Divine Father
of all, every religion, however ignorant, the expression of a sincere
and availing worship, might well produce in a neophyte an exhilaration
bordering upon ecstasy. The exclusive doctrine which had made
Christianity, and special forms of it, the only way of spiritual
redemption, now appeared to me to commend itself as little to human
reason as to human affection. I felt that we could not rightly honor our
dear Christ by immolating at his shrine the souls of myriads of our
fellows born under the widely diverse influences which could not be
thought of as existing unwilled by the supreme Providence.

Antichrist was once a term of consummate reproach, often applied by
zealous Protestants to their arch enemy, the Pope of Rome. As will be
imagined, I intend a different use of it, and have chosen the term to
express the opposition which has sprung up within the Christian church,
not only to the worship of the son as a divine being, but even to the
notion of his long undisputed preeminence in wisdom, goodness, and
power. And here, as I once said that I had taken German in the natural
way, with no preconceived notion of the import and importance of German
literature, so I may say that I first received Christianity in the way
natural to one of my birth and education. I have since been called upon
to confront the topic in many ways. Swedenborg's theory of the divine
man, Parker's preaching, the Boston Radical Club, Frank Abb