avor of sending men and women into missionary fields who showed, by
their physical, intellectual, and spiritual make-up, that they were
fitted for their noble work, whether or not their theology stood the
test of certain arbitrary standards in vogue with a faction in a close
corporation.

Carleton was never averse to truth being tried on a fair field,
whether of discussion, of controversy before courts, or, if necessary,
at the rifle's muzzle. He was not one of those feeble souls who
retreat from all agitation. He had once fronted "a lie in arms" and
was accustomed to probe even an angel's professions. He knew that in
the history of man there must often be a storm before truth is
revealed in clearness. No one realized more fully than he that, among
the evangelical churches holding the historic form of Christianity,
the part ever played and perhaps yet to be played by Congregationalists,
is that of pioneers. He knew that out of the bosom of this body of
Christians had come very many of the great leaders of thought who have
so profoundly modified Christian theology in America and Europe, and
that by Congregationalists are written most of the books shaping the
vanguard of thought in America, and he rejoiced in the fact.

In brief, Charles Carleton Coffin was neither a "mean Yankee," nor, in
his general spirit, a narrow New Englander. He was not a local, but a
genuinely national American and free churchman. He believed that the
idea of the people ruling in the Church as well as in the State had a
historical, but not absolutely necessary, connection with New England.
In his view, the Congregational form of a church government was as
appropriate to the Middle and Western States of our country, as to the
six Eastern States. Ever ready to receive new light and to ponder a
new proposition, he grew and developed, as the years went on, in his
conception of the origin of Congregational Christianity in apostolic
times, and of its re-birth after the release of the Bible from its
coffin of dead Latin and Greek into the living tongues of Europe,
among the so-called Anabaptists. Through his researches he had long
suspected that those Christians, whom prelates and political churchmen
had, besides murdering and attempting to exterminate, so vilified and
misrepresented, were our spiritual ancestors and the true authors in
modern time of church government through the congregation, and of
freedom of the conscience in religion. He often spok