Precisely where the president of the Free-Religious Association stands, to what definite truths he assents as undeniable, and what convictions he holds as settled, is not to be gathered from any of his sermons, tracts, speeches, and several published books. He seems to be laboring under the impression that he has a mission to bring forth a new religion, but thus far he or his associates in this illusive idea have given to the world no new word in religion, or in morals, or in philosophy, or in politics, or in social life, or in art, or in science, or in method, or in anything else _scibile_. Mr. William R. Alger has ventured to predict to his free-religionist brethren in their last annual gathering a new incarnation and its gospel, in which we fail to see anything new or important, if true. “The spirit of science,” such are the words of his prophecy, “enriched with the spirit of piety, is the avatar of the new Messiah.” Francis Ellswood Abbot, a conspicuous member of the Free-Religious Association, as well as one of its active directors and the editor of the _Index_, a weekly journal which is in some sort the organ of the free-religious movement, has, among other notable things, come to the front and publicly impeached Christianity. His indictment contains five counts against the Christian religion: “human intelligence, human virtue, the human heart, human freedom, and humanitarian religion.”[19] Here are his charges: “Christianity,” he says, “no longer proclaims the highest truths, inculcates the purest ethics, breathes the noblest spirit, stimulates to the grandest life, holds up to the soul and to society the loftiest ideal of that which ought to be.”[20] But this is neither new nor original; for what is the Christianity which Mr. Abbot so boldly impeaches? Why, in all its main features it is that disfigurement of Christianity which he has inherited from his Calvinistic progenitors, and which the Council of Trent impeached, and for the most part on the very same grounds as he does, more than three centuries ago; so that in each of his articles of impeachment every Catholic to-day will heartily join, and to each of his charges say: Amen; _Anathema sit!_ What is surprising to Catholics is that there should be intelligent and educated men living in this enlightened nineteenth century who have found out that Calvinism is false, and have not yet discovered in the intellectual environment of Boston that Calvinism is not Christianity. “They do not attack the Catholic Church,” said Daniel O’Connell, in speaking of a similar class of men, “but a monster which they have created and called the Catholic Church.”