Free Congregational Society

Of Florence, Mass.

This society may perhaps claim the honor of being the first religious body in the United States to organize on a platform of entire freedom of thought and speech. The story of its birth and infancy is brief.

About forty years ago a company of earnest, reformatory men and women, who had the courage of conviction,—some of whom had been driven from the church because of their pronounced anti-slavery sympathies,—tried in this place an experiment of a new form of social life somewhat after the "Brook Farm" experiment, made at about the same time, near Boston. But, like that more famous enterprise, the Florence social venture, for similar reasons, was given up after a few years. The spirit of free inquiry and brotherly helpfulness, however, which especially animated the prime movers of this social experiment, survived the dissolution of the organization and has embodied itself in other forms.

From the first it was the custom of the people, in what are called "The Community times," to hold Sunday meetings, not so much for the "worship of God" in any conventional sense, as for the instruction of man in everything that pertained to human welfare. One of the cardinal principles of these meetings was freedom of discussion. After the co-operative experiment was abandoned, those members of the association who remained in Florence, together with their friends, continued to hold Sunday meetings, though not regularly, down to the time of the formation of the "Free Congregational Society of Florence." In pursuance of the following call, signed by twenty-seven citizens of Florence who had been interested in these Sunday meetings, and who believed that the friends of religious freedom should avail themselves of the strength there is in union and organized effort, a meeting was held at the time and place therein named.