"As I look abroad in the community, I see two extreme types of religious faith. One is represented in the Roman Church, the great principle of authority. That church has been, and, I think, will always be, the grandest and the greatest embodiment of Christianity in social life. It is worthy of profound respect; and I, for one, yield it profound respect. It took an infidel, Auguste Comte, to portray fairly the service done to the world by the Christian Church--the great Catholic Church--of the middle ages; and we radicals are false to our principles, if we do not do homage to every thing that is great and good and serviceable in its season, even although we think its day of usefulness may have passed. The fundamental principle of the Roman Church is authority, pure and simple. The theology of Rome carries that principle out to the extremest degree. Its hierarchy embodies it in an institution; and, from beginning to end, from centre to periphery, the Roman Catholic Church is consistent with itself in the development of that one idea in spiritual and social and ecclesiastical life. "At the other pole of human thought and experience, I see a very few persons--indeed, so few that I might, perhaps, almost count them on the fingers of one hand--who plant themselves on the principle of liberty alone; who want nothing else; who stand without dogma, without creed, without priesthood, without Bible, without Christ, without any thing but the Almighty God working in their hearts. These two principles of authority and freedom have thus worked out for themselves, at last, consistent expression. Here are the two extremes--Romish Christianity and free religion; and between these two extremes we see a compromise, Protestant Christianity--the compromise between Catholicism and free religion. Every compromise is weak, because it contains conflicting elements. Protestant Christianity is like the image with head of gold and feet of clay. It cannot stand for ever. Either Christianity, as embodied in the Roman Church, is right, or else free religion is right. Have we not learned yet to give up these combinations of opposites, contraries, and incompatibles? Has the war taught us nothing? Are we still trying to make some chimerical mixture, some impossible union of freedom and slavery? I trust not. For my own part, I stand pledged to liberty, pure and simple; and I have come to view all compromises alike, and to cast them utterly away, whether they clothe themselves in the garments of Geneva, or in the last expression of Dr. Bellows and the Unitarian Church." (Pp. 32-33.)