Dr. Brownson in Boston [pp. 466-472]

DR. BROWNSON IN BOSTON.
appearance of a Unitarian minister, wearing no gown and following no ritual. Of course the sermon was the main feature, and
he attracted to hear him a class of men and women who were
thinkers rather than worshippers-persons with whom religion
had run off into pure intellectuality. But it was original thinking. There was more original thinking in that congregation
than in all the rest of Boston put together; and that is saying
not a little. The profound thinkers were there. Most of the
radical minds of Boston sat under Dr. Brownson in those times.
What was the proportion of the sexes? it may be asked. Three
men to one woman, but those women were genuine come-outers;
and, men and women, the assemblage was composed of beings
who did their own thinking.
If the reader should ask me what Brownson called himself I
should be at a loss to answer. He did not call himself anything.
He was on his way to Catholicity, and this was his transition
period. He preached rational religion-that is to say, incipient
Catholicity, or you might call it transition Catholicity. To a
very acute observer it was evident that, consciously or unconsciously, he was aiming at Catholicity. It was also evident that
his own difficulties were not settled; he was gradually settling
them by this very preaching.
The Catholic Church was often mentioned in these discourses,
and sometimes by name. He dwelt especially on the note of
unity-not that oneness which forbids disunion of discipline, doctrine, and worship, and which forms the external organic mark
of the church; but, as he says in The Convert (p. 333), "that divinehuman life, one and identical in all who receive it.... All life is
organic, and consequently all who live this life are moulded and
formed into one body, living one and the same life, the life of
Christ, and therefore rightly termed his body, the church." He
was fast getting the idea of concrete Christianity. He had passed
out of the view that the chief utility of religion was as a social
force; he was getting into the true view of it as a personal force,
its primary, real force. He was showing from pure reason what
has been shown from historical research by a host of authorsthe latest and one of the very best being Mr. T. W. Allies *-that
the church is the organism which effectuates the unitive principle
between God and man.
These views were familiar to me, and were, I think, earlier in
my mind than in his. We had read the same books, but smith me
* See his latest and in some sense ablest work, The Throne of the Fisherman, Catholic
Publication Society Co., New York.
I 887.]
471