With outspoken braveness Doctor Holmes rejects "the mechanical doctrine which makes me," he says, "the slave of outside influences, whether it work with the logic of Edwards, or the averages of Buckle; whether it come in the shape of the Greek's destiny, or the Mahometan's fatalism."
But he claims, too, the right to eliminate all mechanical ideas which have crowded into the sphere of intelligent choice between right and wrong. "The pound of flesh," he declares, "I will grant to Nemesis; but in the name of human nature, not one drop of blood,—not one drop."
And this leads us to speak of Doctor Holmes' religious views. He attended King's Chapel, and is classed among the most liberal-minded of the Unitarian creed.
When chairman of the Boston Unitarian Festival, in 1877, he gave the following list of certain theological beliefs that he has always delighted to combat.
"May I," he begins, "without committing any one but myself, enumerate a few of the stumbling blocks which still stand in the way of some who have many sympathies with what is called the liberal school of thinkers?
"The notion of sin as a transferable object. As philanthropy has ridded us of chattel slavery, so philosophy must rid us of chattel sin and all its logical consequences.
"The notion that what we call sin is anything else than inevitable, unless the Deity had seen fit to give every human being a perfect nature, and develop it by a perfect education.
"The oversight of the fact that all moral relations between man and his Maker are reciprocal, and must meet the approval of man's enlightened conscience before he can render true and heartfelt homage to the power that called him into being, and is not the greatest obligation to all eternity on the side of the greatest wisdom and the greatest power?
"The notion that the Father of mankind is subject to the absolute control of a certain malignant entity known under the false name of justice, or subject to any law such as would have made the father of the prodigal son meet him with an account-book and pack him off to jail, instead of welcoming him back and treating him to the fatted calf.
"The notion that useless suffering is in any sense a satisfaction for sin, and not simply an evil added to a previous one."