Boston is slow to recognize new prophets; yet religious belief of every kind is treated with gentleness and indulgence. The preachers of the city might regard Mr. Savage as a teacher of "positive error," but they could not object to the hospitality of Boston, a citizen and preacher of which Mr. Savage became on the footing of democratic fraternity. By the free development of reason and the spread of intelligence Boston has become temperate and tolerant. She will not enslave the understanding or deny anyone one vestige of religious freedom. With her, religion is a practical and spiritual thing rather than a theoretic and ceremonial. The latter helps to stimulate the former to the fullest discharge of duty, but does not in itself constitute religion. The one comes by internal necessity, the other belongs to the sphere of outward operation, of inventive and enterprising minds. Religion is a living mode of thought sustained by personal character, and needs not ambitious terminology or supervision. Boston trusts her instincts, as Emerson has taught her, and asks only ample scope for the imperative working of her religious sentiment and the life of the heart. Under these favoring conditions, by which Boston, like a mother, works out her own character in the spirit and life of her gifted men, the Rev. Mr. Savage was impelled onward in his daring enterprise. With stern fidelity Boston exercised a definite and pervasive influence on Mr. Savage's mind. Although his religious thinking came upon the public like a new birth, he was only reiterating its progressive thought and the stout emphasis it placed on thinking out religion in intelligible terms and in all the breadth of its activities. Instrumental rather than absolute, Boston's versatile and expansive thought furnished the new preacher his coveted opportunity. Her faith failed not, nor did her courage falter. Silently she was assailing the old theology and elaborating the new, in which she has unhesitating belief, and which entered with enlightening and nourishing force into Mr. Savage's broad and free opinions. It came to him as the expression of the abiding atmosphere in which he dwelt and with a beneficent bearing on his ministry. Favored thus by the concurrent voices of those to whom he ministered, and by the general freedom and grace of the entire community, Mr. Savage made a real and salutary advance in his religious work in Boston. And supported by the judgment of an ever widening public, conservative thinkers about him felt his influence on current religious opinion. While he indulged a liberty of speculation, he instilled religious habits of thought and the spirit of worship into many inquiring minds, and enabled them to identify themselves with the highest development of his own religious consciousness. Boston and vicinity became fully appreciative of the distinctiveness of his mission and of his apprehensions of the truth. In recognition, therefore, of the