CORRESPONDENCE.

LETTER FROM OLIVER JOHNSON.

81 COLUMBIA HEIGHTS,

BROOKLYN, June 1, 1880. (

My Dear Friend:-Your very cordial invitation to attend the Yearly Meeting of Progressive Friends was duly received; but, while I am longing to accept it, the way is closed up before me, and I can send you and all the other dear friends who will be gathered together on the joyous occasion the assurance that my heart is still as warmly as ever enlisted in the cause of religious freedom and progress, and I hope the meeting will be imbued with the highest moral and spiritual power.

I sometimes fear that we radicals spend too much time in skirmishing and bush-whacking on the outermost verge of religious and philosophical speculation, and too little in applying the simple token we know to the practical issues of our time. It is far more important for us to appropriate and utilize the truths we really believe than to be perpetually employed in cataloguing and denouncing the errrors which we suppose others to hold. If rational religion is ever to become a power in the world, and supersede the sectarianism we all so much deplore, it must exhibit a sweeter, healthier piety, and a nobler spirit of self-sacrifice, than is found in the sects which we so sharply criticise, and find a way to do more and better work than they in proportion to the means at its commands.

Nothing in all the later history of our movement has cheered me so much as the many indications I have witnessed that the religious spirit-by which I mean genuine reverence for God and goodness, and a serious conscientious devotion to works of practical righteousness-is gaining ground among us. There are signs that the era of mere negation, denial and criticism is passing away, and that radicals are preparing to emphasize, as they have never before adequately done, the positive elements of their faith. The time, it seems to me, has fully come, when, instead of spending our strength in criticism.

of other people's beliefs, we should emphasize and carry out in practice the truths which we ourselves profess to hold, and show what those truths in our hands are capable of doing for the world's benefit. If I should hear that in your meeting this year very little was said of the faults and short-comings of other religious bodies, and that your whole attention had been given to forming and executing plans for practical religious work, I should heartily rejoice that you had thus shown yourselves to be "Progressive Friends" in the best sense of those words.

Let us deal candidly with the sects around us, giving them credit for whatever good they achieve or attempt, and admitting the purity of their motives in regard to many things in which we think them mistaken. If we think our principles higher, our methods more rational than theirs, let us show it less by controversy and more by our works. The institutions of the church are not wholly born of superstition and bigotry. Some of them indeed have a sweet and healthy root, and have become bitter only by perversion. A loving, reverential recognition of our Father in heaven and of the obligations arising from such a faith, appears to me to be in accordance with the highest reason; and, therefore, I hold that there is a true spirit of piety to be cultivated and honored, and which will help us mightily in the work to which we are called. Let us not, in escaping from the superstition of our time, fall into the rude and coarse materialism which casts contempt upon the spiritual nature of man. Above all, let us set our faces. against the spurious "liberalism" which gives the animal passions an easy rein and spurns those refinements which are at once the offspring and protection of virtue.

That the spirit of genuine piety may reign in all your hearts and pervade all your proceedings, is the sincere desire and aspiration of Yours, cordially,

OLIVER JOHNSON.

Wm. Lloyd Garrison.ning.