Own one of the rarest books in American Christianity! Edward Everett Hale was a Unitarian minister in Boston in the early and mid 19th century, and he later became more famous as an author when he wrote "The Man Without a Country" to boost patriotism during the Civil War. An 1839 graduate of Harvard, Hale later became chaplain of the United States Senate in 1903.

Up for auction is a book which can no longer be found in even the rarest of rare book dealers, "If Jesus Came To Boston". Written in 1895, the book was an answer to one written the previous year by William Stead (If Christ Came to Chicago). In the Chicago book, Stead points to the suffering and poor in the city, and pleads with Christians to take up the call to meet their need. In the book auctioned here, pastor Hale demonstrates a presumptuous if not arrogant view of Boston as free from the dark, seamy side described in Chicago. Hale's work is important for its picture of how the American clergy moved in and out of concern for the poor, and how it found itself struggling through much of the 20th century to paint itself as compassionate.