formance of duties more useful to society or honorable to himself. Confidence in the fulfilment of obligations, of pecuniary trusts, is only merited by a life of the purest integrity. The many who reposed it in him, during the long course of his active career, had cause to congratulate themselves, when reflecting how much shifting sand was visible always around them, that they had built their house upon a rock." After quoting both these characterizations, in March, 1874, the President of the Society, the Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, continued in the following words:

The Hon. William Minot was born in the homestead of his father and grandfather, in what is now known as Devonshire Street, Boston, opposite the New Post-Office, on the 17th of Sept., 1783; and he took his Bachelor's Degree at Harvard University with the distinguished class of 1802, a few months after his father's death. He was admitted to the Bar of Suffolk County in 1805, and entered at once on the professional pursuits in which his father had been so eminent. To those pursuits he perseveringly adhered; only abandoning them when compelled to do so by the infirmities of old age. He was particularly devoted to the Law of Wills and Trusts. A man of the purest life, of the highest principles, of the most scrupulous and transparent integrity, his counsel was eagerly sought, during a long term of years, by those who had estates to bequeath, or trusts to be arranged and executed; and no one enjoyed a greater share than he did, in these and all other relations, of the esteem and confidence of the community in which he lived.

Among other funds committed to his care, was that bequeathed to the town of his birth by Benjamin Franklin, with a primary view of encouraging young and meritorious mechanics. This fund was placed in Mr. Minot's hands by the authorities of Boston in 1804, and was gratuitously administered by him for the long period of sixty-four years; and when it had increased from four thousand to one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, the City Government did not fail to enter upon its records a grateful acknowledgment of the eminent prudence and probity with which the fund had been managed.

Naturally of a retiring disposition, Mr. Minot never sought public office, and very rarely yielded to the solicitation of friends by accepting it. He served his native place for a year or two, when it was first incorporated as a city, as the presiding officer of one of its wards; and he served the Commonwealth, for another year or two, with fidelity and honor, as a member of the Executive Council, during the administration of Governor Everett. He rendered valuable services also to the community for a considerable time as an Inspector of Prisons. But his tastes were for pro

1 Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc. for June, 1873, xiii. 49.

fessional and domestic life, and he resolutely declined all further public employment.1

Some notice has been already given of the family of THOMAS BULFINCH, second of the name, long honorably connected with the annals of King's Chapel.2 We add here a few particulars concerning him and his family, from other sources: 8

THOMAS BULFINCH was the son of Adino Bulfinch, who came to this country from England about the year 1680, was actively engaged in commercial pursuits in Boston, and was chosen by that town Surveyor of Highways in 1700. His son, the subject of this memoir, was born in 1694. He did not receive a college education, but obtained the rudiments of medical instruction under Dr. Zabdiel Boylston. Letters from him still extant show that he studied anatomy and surgery in London under the famous Cheselden in 1718, and afterwards completed his medical studies at Paris in 1721. Dr. Boylston wished him to join him in partnership, which he declined, as at the time of the invitation he had not completed his regular course of lectures. On his return to Boston he married the daughter of John Colman, a distinguished merchant, brother of Dr. Benjamin Colman, first pastor of Brattle Street Church.

4

THOMAS BULFINCH, the only son of the preceding, was born in Boston in 1728,5 and fitted for college in the Latin school under Mr. John

1 A memoir of William Minot is given in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proceedings for March, 1874, xiii. 255-259.

2 Ante, p. 343. See also p. 379, post. 8 Taken from Thacher's Medical Biographies, i. 209-211. See also Dr. Ephraim Eliot's reminiscences of the physicians of Boston, in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proceedings for November, 1863, vii. 179, 180; and Sargent's Dealings with the Dead, ii. 449 et seq.

4 John Colman was "Agent for the Lord High Admiral, and one of the Commissioners for Prizes." (Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, 1678–1706, ii. PP. 537-540.)

In August, 1705, Colman declared himself "Deputed the Honoble John Dod, Esq: the Receiv? of the rights and Perquisites of his Royal Highness, Prince George of Denmark, Lord High Admiral of England & to receive wt might become due to his Royal Highness in these parts." — Mass. Archives, ii. 154. See also Province Laws, viii. 528.

He was baptized at the Church in Brattle Square, to which the family at that time belonged, June 30, 1728. His

connection with King's Chapel, where he afterwards became so prominent, was through his marriage, Sept 13, 1759, with Susan, daughter of Charles Apthorp, Esq. The following notice of her death is taken from a contemporary record:

"On the evening of the 15th Inst. departed this life, Madam Susan Bulfinch, aged 81 years, relict of the late Dr. Thomas Bulfinch, and daughter of Charles Apthorp, Esq., formerly a distinguished merchant of this town. Few persons have acted their part in life more honourably, or left behind them a more revered and cherished memory, than this respectable lady. Nature had given her intellectual powers of uncommon vigour; and she had cultivated them in early life with great assiduity, and adorned them by various reading and by habitual intercourse with improved society. There was a propriety and decorum in her manners, a strength, richness, variety, knowledge of life, candour, and cheerfulness in her conversation, which endeared her to all who had the privilege of her acquaintance. Her reverence for the Supreme Being was un

Lovell; he was distinguished for his classical attainments, and entered college in 1742. The class [of 1746] was small, on account of the troubled state of the times occasioned by the efforts making by the Pretender of the house of Stuart for the recovery of the British crown, consisting of only twelve members, of whom the venerable Dr. Holyoke, of Salem, survived till 1829. After leaving college he entered upon his studies with his father in 1753, and afterwards passed four years in England and Scotland, attending the hospitals in London, and going through a regular course of instruction at Edinburgh, where he took his degree of M. D. in 1757. Being called home by the death of his father, he returned and commenced the practice of medicine at Boston. At the general spread of the small-pox in 1763, he was actively engaged in introducing the antiphlogistic mode of treatment in that disease, which was attended with extraordinary success; and in conjunction with Drs. Joseph Warren, Gardiner, and Perkins, he attempted the establishment of a small-pox hospital at Point Shirley, in Boston Harbor, which was soon relinquished for want of encouragement, the prejudice being very strong against a voluntary and (as it was then called) a presumptuous exposure to disease.1 Dr. Bulfinch lived in the stormy period which led to the Revolutionary war; he was in feeling and principle a decided friend to the rights of the colonies, but remained with his family in Boston while the place was occupied by the British troops in 1775. He was subjected not only to the privations common to the inhabitants, but to the loss of a large quantity of medicine forcibly taken by order of the British general for the use of the troops, without any acknowledgment or remuneration. He had, however, the pleasure of seeing the enemy abandon our shores in March, 1776, and the town immediately occupied by the Patriot army of his fellow-countrymen. After this time he enjoyed an extensive practice, and numbered among his friends Governors Hancock and Bowdoin.

feigned and constant. This principle supported her through severe afflictions, and became the parent of many virtues. She was a Christian from conviction, from a careful study of the Scriptures, from an enlightened and upright mind. She was a Christian too, without an exclusive spirit or bigotry, conscious of her infirmities, and looking to Heaven for light and assistance and forgiveness. In the relations of private life, as a wife, a mother, a friend and patroness of the poor, an attentive consoler of the sorrowful, a friend to all practicable modes of beneficence, she exhibited the divine spirit of Christianity. Her life, thus adorned with moral and intellectual graces, terminated in a serene, dignified, and advanced old age.

"Death advanced slowly, and without

terrors, and this ripe shock of corn was at length gathered in its season." — Boston Gazette, of Feb. 20, 1815. The initials, "S. C.," appended to this notice are probably those of Rev. Samuel Cary.

Dr. Freeman and Mr. Cary both preached Funeral Sermons after Madam Bulfinch's death. These were printed in a volume entitled Funeral Sermons, Preached in King's Chapel, Boston (1820). The Notes to this volume contain reprints of the foregoing Obituary notice, of another (signed "C. B.") from the New England Palladium of Feb. 21, 1815, and of a third notice signed "S. B." 1 "Dr. Bulfinch has petitioned the General Court for leave to open a hospital somewhere [for small-pox] and it will be granted him."- Mrs. Adams's Letters, p. 79, 17 June, 1776.

The character of Dr. Bulfinch was of the same mild and unobtrusive kind as that of his father; he was possessed of the same cheerfulness and goodness of heart, and sincere and unpretending piety. Contented with the love and esteem of his numerous acquaintance, and especially of all who came under his professional care, he avoided every occasion of public display; and when on the formation of the Massachusetts Medical Society he was invited to take a leading part in that institution, he declined it upon the plea that such undertakings should of right devolve on the younger members of the profession. He published only two small treatises, one on the treatment of scarlet fever, in the cure of which he was remarkably successful; the other on the yellow fever, a subject then but little understood, which seemed to baffle at the time all the efforts of medical practitioners. Of an active, healthy frame, and distinguished for an uncommon attraction of person and elegance of manners, he continued in practice until two years previous to his death, which took place in February, 1802. He left one son, Charles, the ingenious architect and superintendent of the public buildings at the City of Washington, and two daughters; all were married during the life of the father, the son to Hannah, the daughter of John Apthorp, Esq.; the elder daughter to George Storer, and the younger to Joseph Coolidge, son of Joseph Coolidge, Esq.

2

Our record has now brought the history of King's Chapel, and that of several of the families most intimately connected with its annals, through the critical period of the Revolution, into the modern era, when the influences that shaped its course and policy were such as are wholly familiar to us of a later day. Before, however, going on with the incidents and the ministries that belong to this later period, it will be instructive to go back and trace, briefly, those conditions in the history of religious opinion, which made the change now impending in its theological position more natural and less revolutionary than has generally been supposed. The immediate antecedents of that change, and the way in which it was brought about, will accordingly make the topics of the two succeeding chapters.

1 In our Burial Register his name appears under date of March 3, 1802.

A notice of the death of Dr. Bulfinch will be found in the Boston Gazette of March 1, 1802. See also footnote in a subsequent chapter (xxi.) on Dr. Freeman's Ministry, p. 379.

2 A record of the family of Joseph Coolidge is in the New-Eng. Hist. and Geneal. Register (1853), vii. 143, where also may be found an account of the Johonnot family, long identified with King's Chapel. See also chapters xxi. and xxiv. post, for notices of the Coolidges.

CHAPTER XX.

RELIGIOUS OPINION IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

HERE can be no doubt that the dogma of a co-equal Trinity had, in the last century, lost its strong hold on the faith of Christians both in England and in America. In the established Church of England, Unitarian beliefs were in many instances publicly professed, and in others well known to exist, and that among the most distinguished divines, and those holding the highest official positions. How they were able to use the liturgy, is their own secret, which perhaps perished with them; but we have no reason to doubt their honesty and integrity of purpose. There are two ways in which their course may be accounted for. In their traditional reverence for forms which they had from infancy identified with the very essence of religion and soul of piety, they may have unconsciously and gradually come to attach to those words meanings which to one unaccustomed to their use they would not bear, pouring the new wine into the old bottles so slowly as not to burst the bottles. The alternate solution, which we should be slow to suppose where it was not professed, is best given in the words of a latitudinarian churchman well known on both sides of the Atlantic, who, when asked how he could with a quiet conscience repeat three creeds neither of which he believed, replied, "An historic church has a right to have its past beliefs recognized in its worship."

Chief among the Unitarian clergy of the English Church was Samuel Clarke, as a philosopher and a theologian second to no man of his time, who compiled a revised liturgy excluding all Trinitarian phraseology, which was adopted, with very slight changes, by Theophilus Lindsey, and published by him for use in Unitarian congregations. As in avowed sympathy with him we might name Whitby, by far the most learned and able English commentator on the New Testament till late in the present century. Bishops Pearce and Hoadly were generally regarded as in the same category, and so was Sykes, whose numerous treatises in defence of Christianity have faded from memory only