Nothing can roll out of the heart of nature but nature itself; and hence, in order to derive Christianity from within, Mr. Emerson eliminates whatever is supernatural and external and reduces it to simple nature, which every man from the beginning to the end of the world carries within him, and of which he cannot divest himself. He unchristianizes Christianity, makes it an element of human nature, confounds it with the natural laws of the physicists, and then tells us it is as old as creation, which is about as much as telling us man is as old as--man, or nature is as old as--nature. Well may Mr. Emerson be called the Sage of Concord, and be listened to as an oracle. All the speakers, with three exceptions, seemed anxious to have it understood that the Free Religious Association has some great affirmative truth which is destined to redeem and save the world. Colonel Higginson, the successor of Theodore Parker, tells us with great earnestness: "If this movement of ours means any thing, it means not a little petty denial, not a little criticism, not a textual discussion, not a sum in addition or subtraction, like Bishop Colenso's books, not a bit of historical analysis, like Strauss or Renan. These are trivial things; these do not touch people; these do not reach the universal heart. The universe needs an affirmation, not a denial; and the religious movement that has not for its centre the assertion of something, would be condemned already to degenerate into a sect by the time it had the misfortune to get fairly born." (P. 58.) And again: "Affirmation! There is no affirmation except the belief in universal natural religion; all else is narrowness and sectarianism, though it call itself by the grandest name, compared with that. It impoverishes a man; it keeps his sympathy in one line of religious communication; it takes all the spiritual life of the race, and says, 'All of this that was not an effluence from Jesus you must set aside;' and so it makes you a member in full standing of some little sect, all of whose ideas, all of whose thoughts, revolved in the mind of some one narrow-minded theologian who founded it. It shuts you up there, and you die, suffocated for want of God's free air outside." (P. 59.)