And they were. They began successfully, and were steadily and profitably held, up to 1859, during years when these vital moral questions were more intensely considered and debated in New England and throughout our land than at any previous period. Very carefully prepared and able reports were year by year presented to the Association, and resolutions involving the merits of these reformatory topics freely and amicably discussed. Often in other meetings, conventions, associations, conferences, where ecclesiastical matters claimed the chief attention, the introduction of these reformatory subjects would cause uneasiness and elicit much fault-finding on the part of those opposed to the introduction of such agitative themes into these meetings of the church. But at the yearly assemblings of the Reform Association the largest liberty was taken by all who desired to express their opinions on these great questions of the day.
The first meeting was a success. It was held in the Second Universalist Church, School Street, on Thursday, May 27, 1847. Four addresses were given on these subjects, Peace, Criminal Reform, Temperance, and Human Freedom, and appropriate resolutions discussed and adopted. In connection with this session a social festival was held on Friday morning, and was an occasion of unusual enjoyment to all who took part in it. The historian, Richard Frothingham, Esq., presided, and made an admirable opening address. He was followed by others, among them Chapin, then of rising fame. Pretending to have in hand only "skirts and fragments of ideas," he magically forms them into completeness, and endues them with power. He speaks of Christianity and Reform:--
"Christianity has not changed or added anything to itself. But we find in it latent truths; we discern new meaning in old truths. His eye had rested that very morning upon the passage which Jesus read in the synagogue at Nazareth: 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.' What a profound meaning does this passage receive now, in the light of these stirring reforms! How does the truth open before us, vast and deep as the blue heaven over our heads! Christianity authorizes and animates these social movements. Its social spirit and its labors of love make us live more in a year than elsewhere in a lifetime. The early fathers of our faith began their labor in the early morning, when the light of the truth they announced just tinged the mountain-tops; and now, as they are about vanishing from our horizon, the full effulgence shines upon their gray hairs, and makes them a crown of glory!"