There is just now progressing in America a great movement, headed by the “Radical Unitarians,” toward “free religion,” or church without creed. The leaders deny that there is sufficient security for the spread of religion in each man‘s individual action: they desire collective work by all free-thinkers and liberal religionists in the direction of truth and purity of life. Christianity is higher than dogma, we are told; there is no way out of infinite multiplication of creeds but by their total extirpation. Oneness of purpose and a common love for truth form the members’ only tie. Elder Frederick Evans said to me: “All truth forms part of Shakerism;” but these free religionists assure us that in all truth consists their sole religion. The distinctive feature of these American philosophical and religious systems is their gigantic width: for instance, every human being who admits that disembodied spirits may in any way hold intercourse with dwellers upon earth, whatever else he may believe or disbelieve, is claimed by the Spiritualists as a member of their church. They tell us that by “Spiritualism they understand whatever bears relation to spirit;” their system embraces all existence, brute, human, and divine; in fact, “the real man is a spirit.” According to these ardent proselytizers, every poet, every man with a grain of imagination in his nature, is a “Spiritualist.” They claim Plato, Socrates, Milton, Shakspeare, Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Luther, Joseph Addison, Melancthon, Paul, Stephen, the whole of the Hebrew prophets, Homer, and John Wesley, among the members of their Church. They have lately canonized new saints: St. Confucius, St. Theodore (Parker), St. Ralph (Waldo Emerson), St. Emma (Hardinge), all figure in their calendar. It is a noteworthy fact that the saints are mostly resident in New England. The tracts published at the _Spiritual Clarion_ office, Auburn, New York, put forward Spiritualism as a religion which is to stand toward existing churches as did Christianity toward Judaism, and announce a new dispensation to the peoples of the earth “who have sown their wild oats in Christianity,” but they spell supersede with a “c.” This strange religion has long since left behind the rappings and table-turnings in which it took its birth. The secret of its success is that it supplies to every man the satisfaction of the universal craving for the supernatural, in any form in which he will receive it. The Spiritualists claim two millions of active believers and five million “favorers” in America.