e sublime group who are to accompany
the children of God through their unending life? It is because
without it Faith would be impossible and Charity would be
wasted.

"Hope is that attribute of the soul which believes in the
final triumph of righteousness. It has no place in a theology
which believes in the final perdition of the larger number
of mankind. Mighty Jonathan Edwards,--the only genius since
Dante akin to Dante,--could you not see that, if your world
exist where there is no hope and where there is no love, there
can be no faith? Who can trust the promise of a God who has
created a Universe and peopled it with fiends? The Apostle
of your doleful gospel must preach quite another Evangel:
And now abideth Hate, and now abideth Wrath, and now abideth
Despair, and now abideth Woe unutterable. With Hope, as we
have defined it,--namely, the confident expectation of the
final triumph of righteousness,--we are but a little lower
than the angels; without it we are but a kind of vermin.

"The literature of free countries is full of cheer: the story
ends happily. The fiction of despotic countries is hopeless.
People of free countries will not tolerate a fiction which
teaches that in the end evil is triumphant and virtue is
wretched. Want of hope means either distrust of God or a
belief in the essential baseness of man or both. It teaches
men to be base. It makes a country base. A world wherein
there is no hope is a world where there is no virtue. The
contrast between the teacher of hope and the teacher of despair
is to be found in the pessimism of Carlyle and the serene
cheerfulness of Emerson. Granting to the genius of Carlyle
everything that is claimed for it, I believe that his chief
title hereafter to respect as a moral teacher will be found
in Emerson's certificate.

"But I must not detain you any longer from the business which
waits for this convention. It is the last time that I shall
enjoy the great privilege and honor of occupying this chair.

"Perhaps I may be pardoned, as I have said something of the
religious faith of my fellow Unitarians, if I declare my
own, which I believe is theirs also. I have no faith in fatalism,
in destiny, in blind force. I believe in God, the living
God, in the American people, a free and brave people, who
do not bow the neck or bend the knee to any other, and who
desire no other to bow the neck or bend the knee to them.
I believe that the God who created thi