It is to be noticed, however, that his papers in the “North American” are not merely graver and more prolonged, but less terse and highly finished, than those in the “Atlantic”; while in the development of his mind they show even greater freedom of statement. He fearlessly lays down, for instance, the following assertion, a very bold one for that period: “So far as the most intelligent portion of society at the present day is concerned, the Church in its actual constitution is an anachronism. Much of the deepest and most religious life is led outside its wall, and there is a constant and steady increase in those who not only find the claims of the Church inconsistent with spiritual liberty, but also find its services ill adapted to their wants.... It becomes more and more a simple assemblage of persons gathered to go through with certain formal ceremonies, the chief of which consists in listening to a man who is seldom competent to teach.” It must be remembered that the expression of such opinions to-day, when all his charges against the actual Church may be found similarly stated by bishops and doctors of divinity, must have produced a very different impression when made forty years ago by a man of forty or thereabouts, who occupied twenty pages in saying it, and rested in closing upon the calm basis, “The true worship of God consists in the service of his children and devotion to the common interests of men.” It may be that he who wrote these words never held a regular pew in any church or identified himself, on the other hand, with any public heretical organization, even one so moderate as the Free Religious Association. Yet the fact that he devoted his Sunday afternoons for many years to talking and Scripture reading in a Hospital for Incurables conducted by Roman Catholics perhaps showed that it was safer to leave such a man to go on his own course and reach the kingdom of heaven in his own way.