Excerpt from History of the Free Congregational Society of Florence, Mass: With Its Articles of Association and by-Laws
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 experi ment 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 fa mous enterprise, the Florence social venture, for similar reasons, was given up after a few years. The spirit of free inquiry and brotherly helpful ness, however, which especially animated the prime movers of this social experiment, survived the dis solution of the organization and has embodied it self 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 instruo tion 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 Flor ence, together with their friends, continued to hold Sunday meetings, though not regularly, down to the time of the formation of the Free Congrega tional 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 re ligious 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.
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