Recollections and Impressions, 1822-1890Frothingham, Octavius Brooks
Religion
Recollections and Impressions, 1822-1890
Frothingham, Octavius Brooks
Frothingham, Octavius Brooks, 1822-1895; Unitarians -- New England -- Biography
common eyes; and often the splendor of the exposition hid the keenness
of the logical temper, as a sword wreathed with roses lies unperceived.
But the tempered steel was there and they who examined closely felt its
edge.
He was a man of undaunted courage, being an idealist who lived out of
the world, and a living soul animated by overwhelming convictions, which
he was anxious to convey to others as of immense importance. He
believed, with all his heart, in the doctrines he had arrived at, and,
like a soldier in battle, was unconscious of the danger he incurred or
of the wounds he received, being unaware of his own daring or fortitude.
He was an anti-slavery man from the beginning. At a large meeting held
in Waltham in 1845, to protest against the admission of Texas as a slave
State, Mr. Weiss, then a minister at Watertown, Mass., delivered a
speech in which he said: "Our Northern apathy heated the iron, forged
the manacles, and built the pillory," declared that man was more than
constitutions (borrowing a phrase from James Russell Lowell), and that
Christ was greater than Hancock and Adams. To his unflinching devotion
to free thought in religion, he owed something of his unpopularity with
the masses of the people, who were orthodox in opinion, though his
failure to touch the general mind was probably due to other causes. The
class of disbelievers was pretty large in his day and very
self-asserting. Boldness never fails to attract; and brilliancy, if it
be on the plane of ordinary vision, draws the eyes of the multitude, who
are on the watch for a sensation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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