We readily acknowledge that the pretensions of these radical men and women are very great, but they show no great intellectual ability, and are painfully narrow and superficial. The ministers and ex-ministers who figured on the occasion exhibited neither depth nor breadth of view, neither strength nor energy of mind. They proved themselves passable rhetoricians, but deplorably ignorant of the past and the present, of the religions they believed themselves to have outgrown, and especially of human nature and the wants of the human soul. They appeared to know only their own theories projected from themselves, and which are as frail and as attenuated as any spider's web ever rendered visible by the morning dew. They pretend to have studied, mastered, and exhausted all the past systems, religions, and mythologies; they pride themselves on the universality of their knowledge, and their having lost all bigotry, intolerance, or severity toward any sect or denomination. They speak even patronizingly of the church, and are quite ready to concede that she was good and useful to humanity in her day, in barbarous times, and in the infancy of the race; but humanity, having attained its majority, has outgrown her, and demands now a more manly and robust, a purer and broader and a more living and life-giving religion--a religion, in a word, more Christian than Christianity, more Catholic than Catholicity. Ignorant or worse than ignorant of the lowest elements of Catholic teaching, they fancy they have outgrown it, as the adult man has outgrown the garments of his childhood. Their self-conceit is sublime. Why, they are not large enough to wear the fig-leaf aprons fabricated by the reformers of the sixteenth century with which to cover their nakedness. The tallest and stoutest among them is a dwarf by the side of a Luther or a Calvin, or even of the stern old Puritan founders of New England; nay, they cannot bear an intellectual comparison even with the originators of New England Unitarianism.