Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/122

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EAKLY TRANSCENDENTALISM
99

such a horizon except in eternity. It was a model life.

Living with him at one time were Mr. and Mrs. Octavius B. Frothingham, and they added a great charm to that pretty rectory, corner of Twenty-first Street and Fourth Avenue, of which one of the doctor's witty brothers-in-law, Mr. Fred Nevins, said that it was too handsome for a "dissenting minister." Mr. Frothingham's wit, eloquence, and peculiar belief drew around him a set of worshippers of his own; he had for many years a large following. His excellent compendium Transcendentalism in New England is a most valuable book, being a thoughtful, scholarly history of that strange, mystical liberalizing of religious thought which swept over New England for forty years, doing much good and very little harm. It brought out such men as Theodore Parker, C. A. Bartol, John Weiss, the younger Channing, James Freeman Clarke. Emerson may be said to have been its Luther.

Dr. Washburn used to say of these transcendentalists, "They opened a window and let in a fresh breeze, cleansing the close garret of New England theology." This from a churchman was great praise, but Dr. Washburn could afford it. He was one of the great lights of the Church.

I am amused to remember now how much of my reading, when I was very young, was polemical. It was not intolerant, for I was surrounded by those transcendental philosophers. Articles by Colenso, Arnold, Temple (now Archbishop of Canterbury), Stanley, the Tracts for the Times, Pusey and Newman, elbowed Carlyle, Goethe, and Schleiermacher, Wordsworth, Southey, Byron, and Coleridge, with the oncoming dessert of Thackeray and Dickens, who are not polemical. Fortunately for me, I