the Church on the next Communion Sabbath. The serious feelings I had
were well-nigh gone, and I was beginning to feel quite jolly again, and
I did not know what to do. I went home, however, and let them take me
into the Church. A kind of pride and shamefacedness kept me from
saying I did not think I was a Christian, and so I was made a Church
member."

In an editorial in the _Independent_, written in 1862, upon the
disbanding of this old church, the Bowdoin Street--originally Hanover
Street--Church, Boston, he describes this event:

"If somebody will look in the old records of Hanover Street Church
about 1829 they will find a name there of a boy about fifteen years old
who was brought into the Church on a sympathetic wave, and who well
remembers how cold and almost paralyzed he felt while the committee
questioned him about his 'hope' and 'evidences,' which, upon review,
amounted to this: that the son of such a father ought to be a good and
pious boy. Being tender-hearted and quick to respond to moral
sympathy, he had been caught and inflamed in a school excitement, but
was just getting over it when summoned to Boston to join the Church!
On the morning of the day he went to Church without seeing anything he
looked at. He heard his name called from the pulpit among many others,
and trembled; rose up with every emotion petrified; counted the spots
on the carpet; looked piteously up at the cornice; heard the fans creak
in the pews near him; felt thankful to a fly that lit on his face, as
if something familiar at last had come to break an awful trance; heard
faintly a reading of the Articles of Faith; wondered whether he should
be struck dead for not feeling more--whether he should go to hell for
touching the bread and wine that he did not dare to take nor to refuse;
spent the morning service uncertain whether dreaming, or out of the