It is not often that Unitarianism is aggressive, or that it seeks the heathen in our streets perishing for lack of knowledge. Apparently it dwells rather on the past than the present, and prefers the select and scholarly few to the unlettered many. Most Unitarian preachers lack popular power; hence it is that their places of worship are rarely filled, and that they seem tacitly to assume that such is the natural and necessary condition of their denomination. It is with them as it used to be with the old orthodox Dissenters in well endowed places of worship some thirty or forty years ago. Of them, I well remember one in a leading seaport in the eastern counties. I don’t believe there was such another heavy and dreary place in all East Anglia, certainly there never was such a preacher; more learned, more solemn, more dull, more calculated in a respectable way to send good people to sleep, or to freeze up the hot blood and marrow of his youthful hearers. Once and but once there was a sensation in that chapel. It was a cold evening in the very depth of winter. There was ice in the pulpit, and ice in the pew. The very lamps seemed as if it was impossible for them to burn, as the preacher in his heaviest manner discoursed of themes on which seraphs might love to dwell. All at once rushed in a boy, exclaiming “Fire, fire!” The effect was electric—in a moment that sleepy audience was startled into life, every head was raised and every ear intent. Happily the alarm was a false one, but for once people were awake, and kept so till the sermon was done. It is the aim of Mr. Applebee in the same way to rouse up the Unitarians, and in a certain sense he has succeeded. He has now been preaching some eighteen months in London, in the old chapel on Stoke Newington Green, where, for many years, Mrs. Barbauld was a regular attendant, and where long the pulpit was filled by no less a distinguished personage than Burke and George the Third’s Dr. Price; the result is that the chapel is now well filled. It is true it is not a very large one; nevertheless, till Mr. Applebee’s advent, it was considerably larger than the congregation. Before Mr. Applebee came to town he had produced a similar effect at Devonport; when he settled there he had to preach to a very small congregation, but he drew people around him, and ere he left a larger chapel had to be built. I take it a great deal of his popularity is due to his orthodox training. It is a fact not merely that Unitarianism ever recruits itself from the ranks of orthodoxy, but that it is indebted to the same source for its ablest, or rather most effective ministers.