The Lure of Utopia

Every morning when you picked up your paper you would read of some new scheme for saving the world [...] soon all the zealots, all the Comeouters, all the transcendentalists of Boston gathered at the Chardon Street Chapel and harangued each other for three mortal days. They talked of non-resistance and Sabbath reform, of the Church and the Ministry, and they arrived at no conclusions. "It was the most singular collection of strange specimens of humanity that was ever assembled," wrote Edmund Quincy, and Emerson was even more specific: "Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Philosophers, all came successively to the top and seized their moment, if not their hour, wherein to chide, or pray, or preach, or protest [...] There was something artificial about the Chardon Street debates, there was a hothouse atmosphere in the Chapel. There was too much of suffering fools gladly, there was too much talk, too much display of learning and of wit, and there was, for all the talk of tolerance, an unchristian spirit.[p.68 →]

— Henry Steele Commager, Theodore Parker