"Our Gift" a gift, indeed

There is a recently released public-domain text of a book released by the Gutenberg Project that you should take note of:

Our Gift by Teachers of the School Street Universalist Sunday School, Boston

This is a charming little reader, compiled in 1851. The School Street church was the one where John Murray, when preaching, was nearly killed (or at least injured) by a large rock being thrown through the back window. Lifting the rock, he gave his famous quip that “the argument is weighty but not convincing” and continued the sermon.

This is the same street that Philocrites and I walked down after lunch at my last visit to Boston. King’s Chapel, facing Tremont Street, is at one end of this street which is little longer than a suburban driveway. There is no vestige of the Universalist church,so when I bought a memory card and batteries at the Radio Shack on School Street, I wondered if I was standing in the same place as the former church.

Walking in Boston is a necessary education of how the “big names” interchanged, or didn’t. Perhaps this explains the continuing family-feel of the UUA, for better and worse.

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