Is Unitarianism then to be the coming religion? I cannot think so. Unitarianism is but a form of Protestantism; the most attenuated form. It is committed to the Bible; held to it indeed by a very fine thread, but still held to it. No doubt it has gained greatly in the last years. The annual circulation of its tracts has risen in twenty-five or thirty years from fifteen thousand to three hundred thousand copies. A quarter of a century ago there was but one Unitarian church on the Pacific coast, now there are eighteen. A generation since it had, in the whole region from the Alleghanies to the Rocky Mountains, only fourteen churches, now there are ninety; and in the same period, sixty-three new societies have come into being in the New England and Middle States. Still, as compared with the great sects, it is very small, and never can be their rival. And this because, however interesting and precious it may be to some people, it lacks, and must ever lack, owing to its critical character, the elements of a great religion, the passionateness that charms the people, and the moral enthusiasm that catches up the few men of genius. The period of "pale negations" is past; but in proportion as the system becomes positive it tends more and more towards the principle that animates the ethical societies, namely, its supreme devotion to the moral law. Thus it stands at the beginning, not at the end, of the line of advance, and has all the work of building up to do, before it can grow in general influence. No, the religion of the future in America must be of the spirit; not merely as being independent of form and dogma, but as cherishing a great hope for the soul, and a great aspiration after perfection. No doubt every spirit must have a form of some kind, but it need not be a fixed, established, dominant imposition. M. Renan touched the matter exactly when commenting on the interview of Jesus with the woman of Samaria: "Woman, the hour is coming and now is, when men shall worship neither on this mountain nor at Jerusalem, but when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth." Renan says: When the Christ pronounced this word, he became really a Son of God, and for the first time spoke the word upon which eternal religion shall repose. He founded the worship without date, without country, which shall endure to the end of time. He created a heaven of pure souls, where one finds what one asks in vain for on the earth, the perfect nobleness of the children of God, absolute purity, total abstraction from the impurities of the world, the liberty which has its complete amplitude only in the world of thought.... The love of God conceived as the type of all perfection, the love of man, charity, his whole doctrine is reduced to this; nothing can be less theological, less sacerdotal, nothing more philosophical, more profound, or more simple.