The secular view of things was more attractive to him than the spiritual. His defence of the drama in 1857 (an oration delivered in the Academy of Music, and which was very bold for that time); his vigorous conduct of the _Christian Inquirer_, a Unitarian paper, which he managed and for which he wrote constantly for four years, advocating an unwonted liberality of sympathy, maintaining, for example, the substantial identity of the Unitarian and the Universalist confessions; his interest in questions of social and philanthropic concern; his lectures before the Lowell Institute in 1857,--all attest his desire to effect a reconciliation between science and religion, between this world and the next. His oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard, in 1853, is an admirable specimen of his treatment of similar themes. The subject of the oration was "The Ledger and the Lexicon, or Business and Literature in Account with American Education"; and its purpose was to assert the claims of popular life against those of scholarship,--to state the case of natural instincts and practical intelligence as the controlling force of our destiny. He says, most truly, at the outset, "Speaking purely as a scholar, I should unaffectedly feel that I had nothing to offer worthy this audience or occasion," and then he goes on with a full, earnest, eloquent plea for the intellectual character of our political and commercial activity. Here is an extract: What History asks from us is not Literature and Art. The world is full of what can never grow old in either. _American_ Literature, _American_ Art! Heaven save us from them! Let us freely use what is so much better than anything one nation can make, the Literature and Art of the whole past and the whole world. History implores us, first of all, to be true to humanity. She begs to see the education, the taste, the sensibility of this great people turned to the serious, vital, universal interest of thoroughly vindicating _Man_ from the scorn of _men;_ of establishing man on his throne as man,--free because man, happy because man, noble and religious because man! Literature and Art will take care of themselves; high education and scholarship will come in their own time; and so, thank God, will everything humanity needs. But for ourselves and the immediate generation, there is no work so worthy as confirming the faith of our people in their own principles; encouraging devotion to Liberty as the supreme interest of Man;--of man sacred in his own eyes, with duties, rights, aims, that are bounded neither by color, nationality, nor law. The love of the race, the liberation of humanity from complexional, material, political, and moral disfranchisements; the elevation of the individual and of every individual; the prostration of all partition-walls that