History of the First Universalist Church in Somerville, Mass. Illustrated; a souvenir of the fiftieth anniversary celebrated February 15-21, 1904

The blood of the martyrs has ever been the seed of the church, and the seed of great reforms. Garrison, as an abolitionist, was led through the streets of Boston with a halter about his neck. Lovejoy was shot. The Wesleys were mobbed, as Methodists. Massachusetts banished Roger Williams the Baptist, and we flogged and hung the Quakers.

Our fathers and mothers also suffered from this intense prejudice, bitter persecution, and absolute hatred because they believed in the living God, who is the Saviour of all men.

My memory goes back to something of this attitude of the public, for I was born and brought up in my father's home, a Universalist clergyman of the earlier years of our history, and as a boy I heard it talked about.

And those of the younger ministry and younger laymen know but little, only as they have read, of the almost hand-to-hand fight in which our fathers were engaged. They toiled, and we have entered into their labors. Every inch of ground had to be persistently disputed, and then to keep it the soldiers of the great salvation had to stand upon the field with their armor on, and their spiritual weapons sharpened for the conflict.

Those were days of controversy, and sometimes of even fierce dispute. That to uproot the errors of men should have been sometimes construed into personal attacks, and that this should have drawn upon them the ill — will and the slanders of the bigots, that they writhed under the severe castigation, and sought in the retaliation of personal abuse what they could not answer by argument and reason cannot be thought strange by those familiar with the religious history of the world. It needed just such stalwart blows as were struck by those of the earlier time of our church. It needed such men