in her seventy-fifth year, and to the kith and kin before we went up to London. (You go up to London from all over England, never down.) And, when we came home to mother, as we sat about the table, she said, "Children, did you know it was twenty-one years ago this morning since you started on your way to America, the day after your wedding?" We had not remembered, but mother had kept true time: our wedding journey had taken in twenty-one years.

XXV

The chapel where the opening services were held for the May meeting of our brotherhood in London stood in Essex Street near the Strand, the nearest neighbor to Norfolk Street down which I am apt to daunder when I am in London trying to verify "Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings." The Essex Street Chapel was the first in the city to bear our name Unitarian, which was also then our brand, and was built for the ministry of Theophilus Lindsey, a true given name; for my manual 66 it means says a friend of God.” And, as I am still under the spell of talking to familiar friends rather than to "all outdoors," as I was last winter, I would fain put off sermon time to tell you something about the good Theophilus, and how it came to pass that they built the chapel for him in the city of London.

He was the vicar of Cattarick in the north of England, a wild and large parish with a small stipend, for which he had resigned some rich incumbencies in the south where he could

live at ease, with a bishop's mitre and apron dangling in the near distance.

But a man was wanted in the great, rambling parish, who, like Bernard Gilpin, would put his whole soul into the work of winning the people from a sort of semi-paganism to God, and, as the event proved, he was the man.

He went to work with his wife, who was the true helpmeet for her husband, to do the work God had given him to do,- fed the hungry and clothed the naked, started schools where they were needed far and wide in the parish, and helped to maintain them out of their small income. He was also a sort of self-appointed doctor, carrying such medicines as he could safely prescribe in the saddle bags with his Bible and prayer-book, because he could not be content with the cure of souls alone, but must do what he could for the cure of bodies also, and so fulfil the law of Christ.

But, in reading his New Testament one day, those words of Paul suddenly arrested him, "There is but one God the Father," and, as he tells us, sank into his heart, so that he must needs ponder them and strive to find the truth, for his soul's sake, of the Trinity or the Unity. of God. He was a man of excellent learning

and of absolute sincerity of purpose, who must play no tricks with his conscience, but must search the Scriptures painfully to find whether this doctrine of the Trinity was the truth taught in his Bible or was only a dogma of his Church. And in his trouble he made a clean breast of it to a friend in orders, eminent in the Church, to find they were entirely of one mind about the dogma; but his friend gave no sign of distress when he read the formulas of the Trinity on a Sunday from the prayer-book. This was another trouble. And then he says: And then he says: "It seemed

to me at last to be a real duplicity that, while I was praying in my heart to the one God our Father, my people were led by my language to pray to three persons. And, as one great design of Christ's teaching and mission was the worship of the Father, as he himself tells us, I could not think it was right to do what I was doing for the simple-hearted people who worshipped God with me."

Then in the midst of the trouble and perplexity he had a severe fit of sickness that brought him face to face, he says, with death. And, as he began to recover, a book fell into his hands which was written by a man who had given up his living, as he himself had thought he must

do, a book in which he read these words,

"When thou canst no longer continue in thy work without dishonor to God, discredit to thy religion, the loss of thine own integrity, the wounding of thy conscience, the spoiling of thy peace, and the risking of thy soul, then thou must believe that God will turn the laying aside of thy work to the advancement of his gospel." These words also went to his heart, and he made up his mind to resign the living and go forth with the good wife into the world, not knowing as yet where they should go or what he should do.

But, before he left his people, he must meet them face to face and tell them why he could not stay. There were chapels of ease in the great parish for those who lived too far away to attend the mother Church, which dates in some rude fashion from about 627 A. D., when Paulinus, the first missionary from Rome to the northern tribes, "baptized his converts in the river Swale which runs by the village of Catarac," as Beda tells us. He spoke to them as a father to his children, bidding them farewell; and there was sore weeping when they were aware they should see his face no more. They had no trouble about the doctrine or