The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1856-1888, 1870-07-30
[FRon OUR owN coRREsroxpExr.l

NEW YoKK, June 25th, 1870.
Our festival, misnamed a Beethoven festival,
has finished with great flourish of trumpets
and firing of cannon, and loss of $5O,OO0 to Its
projectors; not, however, without having rem
dered the classic airs of 90 Yankee Doodle - and
s. Shoe Fly" as effectively, perhaps, as those
chaste harmOnies were ever given to a refined and
cultivated audience of fifteen thousand Americans.
With the close of the festival the hot weather
came. and the summer visitors are now in full
ti5o coward the country
But before the churches close for their summer
vacation let ne sketch of the ministers
who, during the past season, has appeared as
prominently before the American public as any
other clergyman of New York.
Rev. d. b. Frothingham, the pastor of the
Third Unitarian Church of this city, is the son
of Rev. DIR. rockingham of Boston. who died
during the present year He is known as the
leader OF the more advanced wing of the Unita-
rians and to be in the van of Unitarian thought
in the United States is to occupy position that
closely borders upon the heretical. In London
and in Belfast was forcibly struck by the con-
servative and orthodox form in which British
Unitarianism presents itself. The theology of
James Martineau and of the Irish Unitarians
would be almost too conservative for fashion
able Presbyterian church in New York, or the
Plymouth Congregational pulpit OF Brooklyn.
But American Unitariansm is more radical, and
Mr. Frothinghams 80 Church of the Come
Outers,'' as it is sometimes called, presents
platform broad enough to accommodate the dis
ciples of Theodore Parker himself.
The rockingham family is one of the finest in
New England, one that presents rare combina
ton of character and OF culture. Miss Frothing-
ham, the sister of the subject of this sketch, is
an accomplished German scholar, whose late
translation of Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea
is perhaps the best of its English renderings.
The minister is a man of highly intellectual
ture and presence, of medium stature and the
bilious sanguine temperament, and about fifty
wears of age. He is a speaker of remarkable
culture. No preacher in New York can deliver,
without the use of notes, so finished, graceful,
and fluent discourse. His elocution is perfect.
The charm of manner can hardly farther 60 than
In the delivery of Mr.. Frothingham's Sunday
morning discourse. But the manner of any dis
course is presumably less important than the
matter; and the thought of this eloquent minister
always commands attention 1t is too high and
cool a region of thought, in general, that Mr..
rockingham occupies, to admit the most impas-
stoned displays of oratory. The philosopher does
not readily become an orator; and MIR. Frothing-
ham treats of themes that do not invite the more
fervid flights of rhetoric. His nature, indeed, is
almost too intellectual in Its public expression
he has not the magnetic quality that dictates the
moving eIoquence of the greatest orators; he
gives the results of intellectual processes, but in
fuses them with less of passion than such a
thinker as Theodore Parker habitually poured
into the crucible of his thought. intellectually,
he is a thorough Nationalist, holding that we
have the right of private Judgment in matters of
religion as well as in matters of literature, art,
or science Religion he regards as rather spon-
taneous growth of the human heart, than a
revelation from sources that are mainly external
to it. The Indian, the Chinese, the Mahomedan, !
the Persian forms of faith and worship, he holds
to be intrinsicaly similar to the Christian,
based upon the intrinsic religious nature of man,
and each, though varying from the other in its
degree OF development, representing genuine
spiritual experience ard meeting a vital want of
the races who have accepted it. But each reIi-
glon, argues Mr. rockingham, contains much
that is merely of temporary value; and the de-
Eirability Of really Catholic Scripture.-the
compilation of volume from the sacred writings
OF all the great religions, is therefore favorite
idea Of his. This standard Bible should contain
the best passages of Vedas, of the writings Of
Confncius and Mencius, of the Koran, of the
brshminic and the Hebrew scriptures, and of the
creek and the Roman philOsophie writer's. An