He escorted me to an entire course of Theodore Parker's lectures, given in Marlborough Chapel.

This was soon after the great preacher had given his famous sermon on "The Permanent and Transient in Religion," when he was ostracised, even by the Unitarians, for his radical utterances, and not permitted to preach in any of their pulpits.

His lectures were deemed still more heterodox than that sermon.
He shocked the orthodox churches of that day--more, even, than Ingersoll has in our times.
The lectures, however, were so soul-satisfying to me that I was surprised at the bitter criticisms I heard expressed.

Though they were two hours long, I never grew weary, and, when the course ended, I said to Mr.Johnson: "I wish I could hear them over again." "Well, you can," said he, "Mr.Parker is to repeat them in Cambridgeport, beginning next week." Accordingly we went there and heard them again with equal satisfaction.
During the winter in Boston I attended all the lectures, churches, theaters, concerts, and temperance, peace, and prison-reform conventions within my reach.

I had never lived in such an enthusiastically literary and reform latitude before, and my mental powers were kept at the highest tension.