When Mr. Savage came from the West to Boston, he came "as a stranger," as I myself heard him say. For years he thought and walked and worked alone. He was unpopular, and he felt his unpopularity. All religious sects, even that of his own persuasion, were critical and sceptical. As a preacher he had fellowship nowhere. He was met as a preacher of unwelcome and unwholesome doctrines. But he came as one having a special dispensation, as the witness and repository of new truth, as the representative of no low and paltry type of the Christian ministry, but as a living testimony to the reality and power and excellency of religion and its institutions. He felt the difficulties with which he had to contend. They were manifold, subtle, and fraught with deepest peril to his ministry. Prejudices, precedents, and the theology of the schools--whose only merit seemed to be that it was smitten with a passion to reduce Christian doctrine to logical form--were arrayed in open hostility to him. He was met by the _régime_ of ecclesiastical orders, by men who preached the Gospel according to established and venerable routine, and whose credentials, not their wisdom, were their only power. But although he felt himself to be a _persona non grata_,--another unpopular person to suffer for his beliefs,--he girded himself for earnest uncompromising warfare. He planted against every church his strongest batteries of criticism, satire, and sarcasm. He poured forth his thoughts in words that made men's ears tingle, till the protestations of his adversaries fell from their lips with something of a hollow sound. Half preacher, half assassin, as he was thought to be, repudiating as offensive the doctrines of the Cross, and hating with every drop of his blood the general traditions and faith of the Church, he worked and awaited the day of his triumph. It came.