JUL 30 1921 
 
 BX 9841 .R35 1920 
 Reccord, Augustus P. 1870 
 Who are the Unitarians'' 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
v>'" 
 
 JUL 30195 
 
 WHO ARE W,, 
 THE UNITARIANS 
 
 BY 
 
 AUGUSTUS P. RECCORD 
 
 Eight sermons delivered at the request of and 
 published by the Board of Trustees of the 
 First Unitarian Church of Detroit, Michigan. 
 
 THE BEACON PRESS 
 
 25 Beacon Street 
 BOSTON, - - - MASS. 
 
Copyright, 1920 
 By the beacon PRESS 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The exclusion from the Interchurch 
 World Movement of the Unitarian churches, 
 in common with the Universalist, has 
 prompted the question, "Who are these 
 Unitarians? What is their origin and his- 
 tory and belief that they should not be per- 
 mitted to participate in one of the most 
 ambitious religious movements of today?" 
 The admission that the exclusion was based 
 upon policy rather than upon principle, upon 
 expediency rather than upon conviction, has 
 not lessened the popular interest in the above 
 questions. The sermons included in this 
 little volume are an attempt to give a partial 
 answer. They were delivered at the request 
 of the Board of Trustees of the First Uni- 
 tarian Church of Detroit, Michigan, and are 
 published by that same board, with the hope 
 and expectation that they will be welcomed 
 by thoughtful, broadminded people in all 
 denominations. While it is impossible for 
 
PREFACE 
 
 any one person, whether minister or layman, 
 to commit the entire Unitarian fellowship, it 
 is believed that these sermons express, with 
 reasonable accuracy, the consensus of opin- 
 ion among an increasing number of Uni- 
 tarians. 
 
 Augustus P. Reccord. 
 
 Detroit, Michigan, 
 May, 1920. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction: The Unitarian Movement . 1 
 What Unitarians Believe 
 
 I God 17 
 
 II Jesus 8S 
 
 III The Holy Spirit 53 
 
 IV The Bible 69 
 
 V Prayer 83 
 
 VI Salvation 99 
 
 VII The Future Life 115 
 
 Conclusion; Are Unitarians Evangelical? . 130 
 
Where the spirit of the Lord is, 
 there is liberty. 
 
 2 Corinthians III, 17. 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 THE UNITARIAN MOVEMENT 
 
 AS an organized movement Unitarianism 
 is of recent origin. As an attitude of 
 mind toward the things of the spirit it is as 
 old as Christianity itself. It commends it- 
 self to the thoughtful, not as a body of doc- 
 trine, but as a method of apprehending re- 
 ligious truth, the method of free and unfet- 
 tered observation and reflection. Over the 
 door of every Unitarian church might be in- 
 scribed the words of Isaiah, *'This is the way, 
 walk ye in it." 
 
 It is sometimes claimed that the church of 
 the first two or three centuries was Unitar- 
 ian. It was Unitarian only in the sense 
 that it was not Trinitarian, The doctrine of 
 the Trinity had not yet been formulated. 
 Many of the teachings of the church were as 
 
 [1] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 far removed from our conceptions of reli- 
 gious truth as from the strictest orthodoxy. 
 The chief thing that we have in common 
 with it is the right of private judgment in 
 matters of belief or conduct. Gradually 
 this right was wrested from the people by the 
 steady encroachment of the growing Cath- 
 olic church until not a vestige of it remained. 
 For the devout believer, the decrees of the 
 church usurped the place of both reason and 
 conscience. The reformers of the sixteenth 
 century threw off one yoke only to assume 
 another. They emancipated themselves 
 from bondage to the church but substituted 
 for it an equally oppressive bondage to the 
 letter of the Bible. Unitarians, through- 
 out their history, have refused to recognize 
 these or any other purely external authori- 
 ties in morals or religion. They have asked, 
 with Jesus, "Why, even of yourselves, judge 
 ye not what is right?" And so whoever, 
 throughout the ages, has dared to raise his 
 voice in protest against the authority of a 
 divinely instituted church or a divinely in- 
 spired book and in the interest of the di- 
 [2] 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 vinely given reason and conscience, may be 
 regarded as the spiritual forerunner of the 
 Unitarian movement. 
 
 It was not until a century ago that this 
 movement took definite form here in Amer- 
 ica. At the beginning of the century which 
 brought the Pilgrim Fathers to Plymouth, 
 English Unitarianism was confined to cer- 
 tain individual thinkers who were hated and 
 persecuted by Catholic and Protestant alike. 
 One could hardly expect to find many traces 
 of Unitarian thought among the founders of 
 New England and yet, in spite of their rigid 
 Calvinism, they brought with them the 
 germs, at least, of a larger and more humane 
 theology. They craved simplicity, and this 
 led them to omit all creed tests from their 
 church covenants. They loved liberty, reli- 
 gious as well as political, and while they 
 acknowledged their dependence upon the 
 Bible, they insisted upon their right to use 
 their reason in its interpretation. It has 
 been well said that "In the broad and pro- 
 phetic spirit of John Robinson, in the in- 
 tense love of liberty of Sir Harry Vane, in 
 [3] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 the sturdy sense and rational judgments of 
 John Winthrop, ... in the fidelity to toler- 
 ation of Roger Williams and his keen insight 
 into the meaning of soul liberty, what is now 
 called Unitarianism had its beginnings." 
 
 Two events hastened the birth of Ameri- 
 can Unitarianism as an organized movement. 
 One was the adoption of the half-way cove- 
 nant; the other was the Great Awakening. 
 Previous to 1662 only church members were 
 allowed to vote in civil affairs. This meant 
 the disfranchisement of five-sixths of the peo- 
 ple and provoked bitter complaint. The 
 half-way covenant was an attempt to allay 
 the discontent of the disfranchised. It 
 sought to counteract the growing disinclina- 
 tion to become members of the church by 
 making the conditions easier. It set aside 
 the idea of a converted membership and ad- 
 mitted all who had been baptized in infancy, 
 were of good moral character and did not 
 openly deny the teachings of the church. 
 Such membership conveyed the right to vote 
 in affairs of state but not in affairs of the 
 church. The result was the admission of 
 [4] 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 many who had not experienced conversion 
 and had little sympathy with the doctrinal 
 position of the church. The presence of 
 these half-way members was viewed with sus- 
 picion. It seemed to cast discredit upon the 
 essential character of conversion. In 1735 
 Jonathan Edwards, then minister of the 
 Northampton church, inaugurated a revival. 
 Later his efforts were reenforced by the 
 arrival of the English evangelist, Whitefield. 
 The churches were aroused from their 
 lethargy, the half-way covenant was abol- 
 ished, and a converted church membership 
 restored. 
 
 The Unitarians of today are the spiritual 
 descendants of those who refused to be 
 "awakened." At first they were not known 
 by this name. They constituted the liberal 
 wing of the Congregationalist body. The 
 situation was not unlike that in the Congre- 
 gationalist church today. Had the same 
 spirit of toleration prevailed then that pre- 
 vails today there would have been no divi- 
 sion. If the same spirit of intolerance pre- 
 vailed today there would be another break. 
 [5] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 Tolerance, however, was not characteristic of 
 that day. The conservative ministers pre- 
 cipitated the crisis by refusing to exchange 
 pulpits with their more liberal brethren. In 
 1805 they were filled with consternation by 
 the appointment of Henry Ware, a man of 
 Unitarian convictions, to the HoUis profes- 
 sorship at Harvard College. This made him 
 the moral and religious instructor of the stu- 
 dent body and demonstrated that the college 
 was in the hands of the representatives of 
 the new faith. Andover Seminary was 
 founded at once to counteract the growing 
 tendency toward liberalism. One hundred 
 years later, almost to a day, this Seminary 
 was moved to Cambridge and affiliated with 
 the Harvard Divinity School as coordinate 
 parts of the University. 
 
 At first the liberal leaders met this out- 
 break of fanatical opposition with silence. 
 They were disinclined to controversy and 
 dreaded a division in the Congregational 
 body. But as the breach between the two 
 wings became wider and the relations be- 
 tween them more strained they were forced 
 [6] 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 to the conclusion that such a division was 
 inevitable. Disfellowshipped by their bro- 
 ther ministers and denounced from the more 
 conservative pulpits, they felt constrained to 
 speak. They found a spokesman in Wil- 
 liam Ellery Channing, then minister of the 
 Federal Street church in Boston. In 1819 
 he was invited to preach the sermon at the 
 ordination of Jared Sparks, in Baltimore. 
 Taking as his subject ^'Unitarian Christian- 
 ity," he contended for a rational interpreta- 
 tion of the Bible as a human document, 
 written by men and for men, and subject to 
 the ordinary methods of interpretation. He 
 then stated the views to which such an inter- 
 pretation must inevitably lead, the unity and 
 moral perfection of God, the humanity and 
 spiritual leadership of Jesus and the dignity 
 and worth of human nature. Ultimately 
 these came to be known as the three great 
 affirmations of Channing Unitarianism. 
 
 The die was cast. Henceforth there could 
 
 be no concealment or evasion. Lines were 
 
 sharply drawn and ministers and churches 
 
 were compelled to take sides. As one 
 
 [7] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 church after another issued its declaration of 
 faith, it was found that more than one hun- 
 dred and twenty-five New England churches, 
 among them the oldest and strongest, had 
 declared for the new faith. A glance at the 
 Unitarian Year Book will reveal the fact 
 that the old first churches of Plymouth, Bos- 
 ton, Cambridge, Dorchester, Roxbury, Con- 
 cord, Lexington, Salem and twenty-six other 
 Massachusetts communities, all founded in 
 the seventeenth century, are now Unitarian. 
 The Berry Street Conference of Ministers 
 was formed in 1820, and the Christian Regis- 
 ter founded in 1821. There organization 
 lingered. The adherents of the new faith 
 shrank from the thought of founding another 
 denomination. They preferred to think of 
 themselves as an *' unsectarian sect," hesi- 
 tated to take the Unitarian name, and re- 
 garded themselves as the representatives of a 
 religious movement rather than a religious 
 body. But there can be no movement un- 
 less there is something to move. Organiza- 
 tion does not mean necessarily stagnation 
 and inertia. And so in 1825 the American 
 [8] 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Unitarian Association was formed and or- 
 ganized Unitarianism was born. 
 
 The Association's initial task was one of 
 the most difficult and perplexing that any 
 group of religionists ever faced. It was that 
 of organizing liberty so as to make it effec- 
 tive. Otherwise the churches of the new 
 order were destined to remain but httle more 
 than a group of ''jostling independencies." 
 The task is not yet complete. For conveni- 
 ence we can divide the first century of the 
 denominational history into three periods. 
 The first was one of affirmation and denial, 
 affirmation of the new faith and denial of 
 the old. It was dominated by William 
 EUery Chamiing. Once grant his three 
 great affirmations and then demand that all 
 theological doctrines and religious beliefs be 
 thrown into the arena and judged by their 
 conformity to these great principles, and, no 
 matter how tenaciously the old dogmas cling 
 to their places, the door is thrown wide open 
 for a religion purified from superstition and 
 undefiled by dogma. It was Channing's 
 mission to open this door. 
 [9] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 The second period was one of emancipa- 
 tion. It was dominated by Theodore Parker 
 and Ralph Waldo Emerson. There are still 
 those who pride themselves upon being 
 Channing Unitarians, who believe as Chan- 
 ning did a century ago, not as he would be- 
 lieve if he were here today. The same type 
 existed then. From the beginning the new 
 faith tended to become stereotyped. It be- 
 gan to acquire that rigidity of form against 
 which Channing uttered his warning and 
 which he characterized as "Unitarian Or- 
 thodoxy." Parker and Emerson, each in his 
 own way, stripped off the shell which was 
 gradually encasing the new faith and de- 
 stroyed the last vestige of the old super- 
 naturalism. They freed religion from its 
 accidental character and grounded it in the 
 moral and spiritual nature of man. Emer- 
 son sounded the key note of the impending 
 change in his Divinity School Address, de- 
 livered in 1838. Three years later Parker's 
 ''Transient and Permanent in Christianity" 
 heralded the coming of the church univer- 
 sal: 
 
 [10] 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 "Whose temple shall be all space; 
 Whose shrine shall be the heart; 
 Whose creed shall be the truth; 
 
 Whose ritual shall be works of love and usefulness; 
 Whose profession of faith shall be divine life; 
 Whose constant aspiration shall be to be perfect as 
 God is perfect/* 
 
 Today we are glad to claim these men as 
 among the richest fruits of the liberal faith, 
 and yet we find a striking commentary upon 
 the Unitarianism of that day in Dr. Everett's 
 pathetic statement that "of the two men who 
 were to do more than any others to shape its 
 future history, one turned his back upon 
 Unitarianism and upon the other Unitarian- 
 ism turned its back." Today both of these 
 names are included in our Unitarian hall of 
 fame. 
 
 The third period has been one of recon- 
 struction and readjustment. Its watchword 
 has been organization for efficiency. It has 
 been dominated by no one or two men. It 
 has been the result of a common spirit and 
 purpose gradually taking possession of the 
 whole bodv. Channing and his successors 
 
 [11] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 fought the battle of intellectual freedom. 
 Emerson and Parker compelled a recogni- 
 tion of the supreme authority of truth. 
 Their successors realized, as one of their 
 number expressed it, that what the world 
 really needs " is not merely truth and free- 
 dom but truth, freedom and usefulness." 
 And so it has been upon usefulness, service- 
 ableness, devotion to the common weal, that 
 the churches of this latter period have placed 
 the chief emphasis. The immediate result 
 has been a pronounced impetus toward 
 church extension. Of the three hundred and 
 forty-four churches founded during the last 
 century, two hundred and thirty-one were 
 organized during the last forty years of it. 
 These are all free churches, made up of "the 
 Lord's free people." In common with all 
 others of the Unitarian faith they recognize 
 no external authority in belief or morals. 
 Every church is free to formulate its own 
 belief and to determine its own practice and 
 it grants the same freedom to each individual 
 member. And yet, through their efforts for 
 a more positive and constructive faith, a more 
 [12] 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 effective organization and a larger recogni- 
 tion of the responsibilities of freedom, there 
 has been achieved, by these free churches of 
 America, a unity of belief and a unanimity 
 of purpose which are without parallel in any 
 of the churches which have relied upon the 
 constraint of theological creeds or ecclesiasti- 
 cal forms. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln, when asked why he had 
 never joined a church, replied: "Because I 
 have found difficulty in giving my assent, 
 without mental reservations, to the long and 
 complicated statements of Christian doctrine 
 which characterize their articles of belief and 
 confessions of faith. When any church will 
 inscribe over its altars, as its sole qualification 
 for membership, the Saviour's condensed 
 statement of the substance of both law and 
 gospel, *Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
 with all thy heart and with all thy soul and 
 with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thy- 
 self,' that church will I join with all my heart 
 and all my soul." This is substantially the 
 position of our Unitarian churches today. 
 We accept the religion of Jesus a§ summed 
 [13] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 up in love to God and man, and welcome to 
 our fellowship all who are in sympathy with 
 our purpose and practical aims. Never 
 were we so united in spirit and purpose; 
 never so efficiently organized for practical 
 Christian work; never so assured that what- 
 ever may be the name of the future religion 
 of America, it will be essentially Unitarian in 
 spirit and purpose. The only church for a 
 free people is a free church. The only reli- 
 gion for a democratic people is a democratic 
 religion. 
 
 [14] 
 
Have we not all one Father? 
 Hath not one God created us ? 
 
 Malachi II, 10. 
 
 To us there is one God, the Father, 
 of whom are all things and we unto Him. 
 
 1 Corinthians VIII, 6. 
 
GOD 
 
 THE problem of the centuries has been 
 how to secure an adequate conception 
 of God. Primitive rehgion was based upon 
 the assumption of a localized deity. Pres- 
 ent day religion depends for its very life 
 upon the thought of God as everywhere pres- 
 ent and everywhere operative in the world 
 that he has made. These two conceptions 
 differ by almost the whole diameter of being. 
 The transition from one to the other has been 
 made with great difficulty and to many it has 
 seemed to involve the complete overthrow of 
 the foundations upon which all religion rests. 
 The poets are often our best theologians. 
 They apprehend through intuition what 
 others attain only through the slower pro- 
 cess of reasoning. The Epilogue to Brown- 
 ing's "Dramatis Personae" contains more 
 and better theology than many a theological 
 treatise. It reports a supposed discussion 
 between King David and Renan, with the 
 [17] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 poet standing by as arbiter and judge and 
 rendering the final verdict. David speaks 
 for Hebrew supernaturalism. He pictures 
 the pomp and splendor of the ancient temple 
 worship, with its stately ritual and elaborate 
 ceremonial. The discussion takes place at 
 the time of the feast of dedication. The 
 robed priests and the Levites give the signal 
 for the hosts of Israel to assemble. Moved 
 by the sound of the music and the spectacle 
 of the smoke and the flame of the sacrificial 
 fires, the people bow before the visible pres- 
 ence of Jehovah. 
 
 "Then the temple filled with a cloud, 
 
 Even the house of the Lord; 
 Porch bent and pillar bowed; 
 
 For the presence of the Lord, 
 In the glory of the cloud, 
 
 Had filled the house of the Lord." 
 
 To Renan, the skeptic, all this savored of 
 the superstition of a past age. He had 
 drunk deep of the springs of scientific know- 
 ledge and, for him, the last spark of the an- 
 cient faith had been extinguished. The face 
 which seemed, to others, to materialize amid 
 [18] 
 
GOD 
 
 the smoke of the altar and was so real that 
 it called forth the worship of an adoring mul- 
 titude, had been swallowed up in darkness. 
 The star, which once shone so brightly, had 
 "lost itself in the multitude of lesser lights." 
 He tried to pierce the heavens, but in vain. 
 He longed for the return of the ancient s}an- 
 bols, but to no avail. The mood of faith had 
 departed and he was left alone with his skep- 
 ticism and despair. Nowhere can we find 
 a truer expression of the sense of loss which 
 attends the dissipation of one's childhood 
 faith under the withering touch of science 
 than in Renan's last lines. 
 
 *'0h, dread succession to a dizzy post, 
 Sad sway of sceptre whose mere touch appals, 
 Ghastly dethronement, cursed by those the most 
 On whose repugnant brow the crown next falls." 
 
 Such is the inevitable result when God is 
 banished from his universe and man becomes 
 monarch of all he surveys. 
 
 Then speaks the poet. To a world thus 
 mentally and spiritually distraught he de- 
 livers his message. David and Renan, piet- 
 [19] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 ist and skeptic, both have erred, — one in the 
 materializing of faith, the other in the aban- 
 donment of faith. God will not reveal him- 
 self in response to the pomp and splendor 
 of ritual worship. Neither will he abdicate 
 his throne at the behest of science. The 
 world throbs and pulsates with his life and 
 is informed by his spirit. The face, which 
 once looked out from the smoke and the 
 flame, now tabernacles within each human 
 heart. The star, which once illumined the 
 heavens, now shines in the firmament of each 
 human soul. One whose universe is thus 
 filled with God has no need of a temple 
 made with hands. One who is conscious of 
 the presence of God in his own soul does 
 not need to scan the heavens for miracle or 
 sign. As Browning says: 
 
 "Why, where's the need of a Temple, when the walls 
 
 O' the world are that? What use of swells and falls, 
 
 From Levites' choir, Priests* cries and trumpet calls? 
 
 That one face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
 
 Or decomposes but to recompose, 
 
 Becomes my universe that feels and knows." 
 
 We shall look far for a finer expression of 
 [20] 
 
GOD 
 
 religious faith. A universe that feels and 
 knows, that is conscious and intelligent, is 
 itself God and every constituent part of it is 
 an expression of the life of God. The poet's 
 verdict is confirmed by the reasoned judg- 
 ment of mankind. 
 
 The first question which one is prompted 
 to ask concerning this God who is at once 
 immanent and transcendent is, "Is he real? 
 Or is he the invention of priestcraft and su- 
 perstition?" This question never presented 
 itself to our fathers, with their tiny universe 
 and their tinier God. He was simply a 
 magnified type of the world emperor, and 
 his sway was as arbitrary and irresponsible 
 as that of any earthly ruler. As long as 
 this conception survived, it made possible all 
 sorts of schemes for mediation and interces- 
 sion. It fixed a great gulf between God and 
 man. He could be approached only at 
 stated seasons, through prescribed function- 
 aries and after suitable propitiation. All 
 the conventional machinery of medieval 
 court circles was duplicated in the traditional 
 theology. It was a great day for priest- 
 [21] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 craft and ecclesiasticism ; but a sad day for 
 pure and undefiled religion. 
 
 Such a conception could endure only as 
 long as the circle of ideas which gave it birth. 
 We live in a world which is immeasurably 
 larger than that which was known to our 
 fathers. Its dimensions have been pushed 
 out through all space and yet we know that 
 beyond the remotest star which the telescope 
 has revealed there are worlds without num- 
 ber. Its history has been pushed back 
 through all time and yet we know that at 
 the earliest authentic date which the historian 
 can discover the world was hundreds of 
 millenniums old and human society in com- 
 paratively an advanced state of development. 
 Can we wonder that men have been so over- 
 whelmed by this sudden enlargement of the 
 universe that their faith in God has been 
 shaken and sometimes completely destroyed? 
 In a real universe, reaching back through 
 infinite time and out through infinite space, 
 what becomes of God? Can we think of 
 him as real, as actually existing, and espe- 
 cially as interested in the activities and 
 [22] 
 
GOD 
 
 watching over the welfare of the inhabitants 
 of what, at best, is but a second rate planet 
 in one of the smaller solar systems? 
 
 Such questions are not academic; they are 
 real. And yet they are not flattering to the 
 human intellect. Why should the larger 
 universe demand a smaller God? Or why 
 should it be able to subsist with no God? 
 Science has not accounted for the world 
 when it has succeeded in explaining its laws. 
 A law accounts for nothing. It simply des- 
 cribes a mode of operation. Back of all the 
 affirmations of science we find the same ques- 
 tions which baffled our fathers. Who first 
 established the world? Who ordained its 
 laws? Who assigned its destiny? To such 
 questions there is but one answer, and that is, 
 "God." We may call him by different 
 names or by no name at all, but in the last 
 analysis we are obliged to seek an explana- 
 tion of the universe in the existence of some 
 supreme and sovereign power. Instead of 
 dispensing with God, we have simply taken 
 him from his tiny throne in the heavens and 
 allowed him to enthrone himself in the uni- 
 [23] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 verse. Without him the world is unintelli- 
 gible. It cannot be explained as a chance 
 collocation of atoms or as a haphazard con- 
 catenation of blind forces. Its progress can 
 be understood only in the light of an intelli- 
 gent and controlling purpose. But intelli- 
 gence and purpose are attributes of conscious 
 personality, not of material atoms and physi- 
 cal forces. The highest affirmation of mod- 
 ern science is the fundamental assumption of 
 all religion,— the affirmation of the universe 
 as the expression of the ceaseless activity of 
 an intelhgent and purposeful Being, To 
 the eye that sees, as to Mrs. Browning, 
 
 "Earth's crammed with heaven 
 
 And every common bush aflame with God." 
 
 Can we think of this God as personal? 
 Our answer will depend upon what we un- 
 derstand by personality. To many it sug- 
 gests finiteness. H. G. Wells pictures his 
 Invisible King as having a definite beginning 
 in time, struggling ever toward perfection 
 and summoning us to assist him in the strug- 
 gle. Otherwise, writes Mr. Wells, he could 
 [24] 
 
GOD 
 
 not be a person, for *'to be a person is to have 
 characteristics and to be limited by charac- 
 teristics." Such a conception springs from 
 the fact that we know personality only in its 
 finite, human form. It exists unlimited and 
 complete only in God. Instead of being 
 finite, he is the only being who is infinite. 
 Instead of being limited, he is the only being 
 who transcends all limitations. It is just 
 this absence of finitude and limitation that 
 makes him God. We could not long stand 
 in awe of one who is only a little more power- 
 ful than ourselves. Nor bow in reverence 
 before one who is only a little wiser and 
 better. Personality implies thought, feel- 
 ing, will, and these are known to us only as 
 they are embodied in human form. Raise 
 these to infinite power and we have an infi- 
 nite personality. We have God. The 
 heart and soul of all religion is the conscious- 
 ness that we live 'under his eye and by his 
 power." We can still "smile" when we 
 think that "His Greatness flows around our 
 incompleteness, round our restlessness His 
 Rest." 
 
 [25] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 But can we claim such a God as our 
 Father? In the thought of his magnitude, 
 do not all fatherly quahties disappear? 
 Can we think of an infinite Father consent- 
 ing to the late war with all its horrors? Or 
 standing complacent in the midst of our 
 present industrial strife? Such questions 
 betray a mistaken conception of infinitude. 
 Even an infinite being cannot create a uni- 
 verse of law and order and then set at naught 
 the laws which he has ordained. He cannot 
 endow men with free wills as evidence of 
 moral capacity and then stand between them 
 and the consequences of their misdeeds. 
 Even an earthly father sometimes chastises 
 his children and the Heavenly Father is not 
 freed from this necessity. "Whom the Lord 
 loveth, he chasteneth." Wliether or not 
 God is our father depends, not upon the 
 magnitude of his world, but upon the rela- 
 tionship which he sustains to his children. 
 The essence of fatherhood is community of 
 nature. This community of nature has not 
 been disturbed by our enlarging conception 
 of the world in which we live. The life that 
 [26] 
 
GOD 
 
 thrills our being is still his life. The love 
 that gives meaning and worth to life is still 
 the reflection of his love. The will that gives 
 to love its effectiveness is still an expression 
 of his power. The conscience which gives 
 to the will its direction and aim is still the 
 shadow of his goodness. These are all dif- 
 ferent phases of the life of God in the souls 
 of men. Who but a father imparts his life 
 to his children, shields them with his love, 
 prompts them to do the right and rebukes 
 them when wrong? The Fatherhood of 
 God, instead of being lost in this larger uni- 
 verse, is revealed for the first time in all its 
 fullness. All human experience points to 
 the presence of a living, loving, benevolent 
 and beneficent personality who holds the 
 worlds in his embrace and is not far from 
 any one of us. He is our Father in Heaven 
 and our ever present friend and helper upon 
 the earth. 
 
 Why has this conception been so slow in 
 
 winning the acceptance of the religious 
 
 world? Why is it that even now it is so 
 
 often called into question ? Largely because 
 
 [27] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 of the traditional attitude of the church. 
 Instead of faith in God it has emphasized 
 certain beliefs about God. It is no longer 
 necessary to discuss the attempt of our 
 Trinitarian friends to confine God within 
 the limits of a mathematical formula. To- 
 day this formula is either repudiated or ex- 
 plained away by the descendants of those 
 who first framed it. The effectual argu- 
 ment against Calvinism is not mathematical 
 but moral. Its real offense was not that it 
 promulgated certain conceptions of God 
 which affronted the intellect, but that it as- 
 cribed to God certain attributes which af- 
 fronted the moral sense so that good men re- 
 volted from them in horror. We have a 
 right to demand that God shall be as good 
 as the best of men, and yet we should hesi- 
 tate to ascribe to the worst of men conduct 
 which the old theologj^ ascribed to God. As 
 one of our liberal thinkers once said to a 
 Calvinistic friend, "Your God is my devil." 
 He was not a father but a fiend. Worship 
 implies worth. Where there is no worth, 
 worship is impossible. 
 
 [28] 
 
GOD 
 
 If we seek the highest revelation of God, 
 we must look for it in the highest product 
 of creative evolution, man himself. To re- 
 ceive the hest revelation, we must sit at the 
 feet of the best of men. This is what makes 
 Jesus the supreme revealer of God. Others 
 had thought of God as their father, but with 
 them the relationship was purely physical. 
 God was a sort of prehistoric ancestor, a 
 mythical parent, from whom the tribe or 
 clan traced its descent. With Jesus the re- 
 lationship was purely spiritual. Seizing 
 upon a word which symbolizes one of the 
 most familiar of human relationships, he 
 made it the expression of his own best 
 thought concerning God and his relation to 
 men. With him God was not the All- 
 mighty King, nor the All-righteous Judge; 
 he was the All-loving Father. We acknowl- 
 edge our debt to Jesus, not because he was 
 the first to invent the phrase or to discover 
 the relationship, but because he was the first 
 to make it the central feature of his religious 
 teaching. In the words which were most 
 often upon his lips, "Our Father," we have 
 [29] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 the most fundamental fact in human experi- 
 ence expressed in the simplest and most in- 
 telhgible form. Beyond that we do not need 
 to go. It is the highest conception that the 
 human intellect can reach or the human heart 
 desire. As Unitarians we are content to sit 
 at Jesus' feet and learn of his Father and 
 our Father, his God and our God. 
 
 [30] 
 
What think ye of Christ? 
 
 Matthew XXII, ^2. 
 
 Born of the seed of David according to the flesh and 
 declared to be the Son of God, with power, according 
 to the spirit of holiness. 
 
 Romans I, S—J^. 
 
JESUS 
 
 WHAT think ye of Christ? This is 
 one of the most absorbing questions 
 of Christian history. It is the one question 
 which remains to differentiate evangeHcal 
 from non-evangehcal Christianity. Other 
 questions which once divided men have been 
 answered satisfactorily or relegated to an 
 oblivion from which they ought never to be 
 recalled. This remains as the most widely 
 apphed test of Christian fellowship. Mem- 
 bership in the Young Men's and Young 
 Women's Christian Associations, the Fed- 
 eral Council of the Churches of Christ in 
 America and the Interchurch World Move- 
 ment is conditioned by it. Men are judged 
 by their opinions about Jesus, not by their 
 success or failure in appropriating to them- 
 selves the spirit of Jesus. It is this that 
 gives peculiar significance to the Unitarian 
 answer. 
 
 Unitarians believe, with St. Paul, that 
 Jesus was born of the seed of David accord- 
 [33] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 ing to the flesh and declared to be the Son of 
 God according to the spirit of hoHness. In 
 other words, he was born a purely human 
 child and revealed his divine origin by the 
 purity of his life and the nobility of his char- 
 acter. They also believe, with the great 
 apostle, that God was in Christ reconciling 
 the world to himself. These beliefs however 
 are not peculiar to Unitarians. They are 
 accepted by all Christian people. All admit 
 that God was incarnate in Jesus. They 
 differ only as to the nature and extent of 
 this incarnation. Is it an accomplished fact 
 or a continuous process ? Was God present 
 in Jesus alone or is he present in all human- 
 ity? If he was present only in the one his- 
 toric figure, Jesus of Nazareth, we have no 
 right to call him "Father." If he is pres- 
 ent in humanity at large, we have no right 
 to call him anything else. Thus the whole 
 question of our fihal relationship to God and 
 our fraternal relationship to one another de- 
 pends upon our conception of the incarna- 
 tion. It is a doctrine fundamental to Chris- 
 tianity. 
 
 [34] 
 
JESUS 
 
 Historically this doctrine is an outgrowth 
 of human experience. The early Christians 
 were compelled to account for the character 
 and personality of Jesus and for his wonder- 
 ful influence over the hearts and lives of men. 
 True children of their age, they attributed 
 them to the fact that God was present in 
 him in a manner which could not be affirmed 
 of other men and then sought to account for 
 this miraculous presence. One group of 
 writers found the explanation in the peculiar 
 circumstances which attended his birth. 
 They asserted that the Holy Spirit usurped 
 the place of a human father, and conse- 
 quently that Jesus was miraculously con- 
 ceived and miraculously born. Another 
 group of writers found this explanation 
 puerile and unsatisfactory. They sought 
 another by resort to philosophic speculation. 
 They affirmed that Jesus was the incarnate 
 Logos, or Word, which had become flesh and 
 dwelt among men, full of grace and truth. 
 This is the fundamental distinction between 
 the first three gospels and the fourth. The 
 Christian church has accepted and perpetu- 
 [35] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 ated both of these explanations, notwith- 
 standing the fact that they are mutually con- 
 tradictory and destructive. If Jesus was the 
 child of Mary through the agency of the 
 Holy Spirit, he was not the incarnate Logos. 
 If he was the incarnate Logos, the Holy 
 Spirit could have had nothing to do with his 
 coming into the world. 
 
 It is the consciousness of this discrepancy 
 which has led to the reopening of the whole 
 question. A study of the New Testament 
 records for the purpose of ascertaining the 
 facts concerning Jesus' birth has made con- 
 fusion worse confounded. St. Paul and two 
 of the gospel writers maintain an absolute 
 silence concerning it, while the two who men- 
 tion it, Matthew and Luke, are in hopeless 
 disagreement. Both give the genealogy of 
 Jesus, but they differ in the number of gen- 
 erations between him and David and in the 
 names of those through whom the descent 
 was maintained. Both trace that descent 
 through Joseph, which would be absolutely 
 meaningless if Jesus were not his son. Both 
 contain an annunciation, but in one it is to 
 [36] 
 
JESUS 
 
 Mary and in the other to Joseph. Both lo- 
 cate the birth in Bethlehem, but in one the 
 parents live in Nazareth and are summoned 
 to Bethlehem at an opportune moment, while 
 in the other they live in Bethlehem, but flee 
 to Nazareth in order to escape the wrath of 
 Herod. When we turn from these birth 
 stories to the main portions of the gospels, 
 we find nothing in the words of Jesus or 
 Mary or any of the disciples to indicate that 
 Jesus had ever lived in Bethlehem, or that 
 his birth had been different from that of 
 other Hebrew children of that period. 
 
 A candid examination of these birth stories 
 proves conclusively that the writers were 
 indulging their fancy and not recording 
 facts. They were trying to account for the 
 impression which Jesus made upon his 
 fellows, and they did it in the only way in 
 which the men of that day could account for 
 a personality which seemed to transcend the 
 limits of humanity. With their conception 
 of human nature as essentially depraved and 
 corrupt, they were obliged to attribute to 
 him superhuman origin and supernatural 
 [37] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 power. The history of ancient peoples and 
 of primitive rehgions affords many a paral- 
 lel. In Egypt, Apis was said to have been 
 born of a virgin and to have been the incarna- 
 tion of Osiris. Chang Tao Ling, in China, 
 Krishna and Buddha in India, and countless 
 heroes of Greek and Roman mythology were 
 similarly honored. With our better under- 
 standing of the dignity and worth of human 
 nature, we are no longer under the necessity 
 of resorting to such crude methods of ex- 
 plaining the exceptional among our fellow- 
 men. We no longer regard the birth of 
 Jesus as in any way supernatural or miracu- 
 lous. We cannot believe that we add to its 
 impressiveness by removing it from the cate- 
 gory of normal human births. To assume 
 that the Saviour of the world must enter life 
 by some other channel is an insult to human 
 motherhood which could have been perpe- 
 trated only in an age which cherished a low 
 estimate of human nature. It is the work of 
 those who, in the words of Sir Edwin Arnold, 
 
 "Dimly see thy godlike self and take 
 True glory from thee for false glory's sake." 
 
 [38] 
 
JESUS 
 
 The explanation found at the beginning 
 of the Fourth Gospel fares little better at 
 the hands of the New Testament critics. It 
 is possible today to trace it directly to its 
 varied sources. It is a crude mixture of 
 Hebrew mysticism, Greek philosophy and 
 Alexandrian metaphysics. The achieve- 
 ment of the author of this gospel was made 
 possible by the Hebrew custom of personify- 
 ing wisdom. The book of Proverbs states 
 that Jehovah, by the aid of wisdom, founded 
 the earth; also that wisdom was brought 
 forth before the world was made and was 
 present at the time of its creation. In his 
 letter to the Corinthians, Paul speaks of 
 Jesus as the wisdom of God. There was a 
 similar tendency to personify the divine 
 word. Isaiah puts into the mouth of Je- 
 hovah the declaration, "My word shall not 
 return unto me void, but it shall accomplish 
 that which I please, and it shall prosper in 
 the thing whereto I sent it." 
 
 A parallel effort to personify the attri- 
 butes of deity had been made among the 
 Greeks. Plato conceived of the universe as 
 [39] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 a living, rational being, who revealed himself 
 to the human reason through a series of ideas 
 or words. This conception was taken up by 
 the Stoics and made one of the great agencies 
 for the intellectual and moral advancement 
 of the Greco-Roman world. To Philo, the 
 Alexandrian Jew, belongs the credit for fus- 
 ing the Stoic philosophy and the Hebrew 
 metaphysic into a theological system which 
 would not be repugnant to the strict mono- 
 theism of the Jews. He identified the He- 
 brew Wisdom with the Greek Logos or 
 Word, and affirmed that it was the agent of 
 creation and the instrument of revelation. 
 "The Word was with God and it was God. 
 Through him all things were made and in 
 him all things consist." 
 
 Although Philo personified this Word of 
 God, he never conceived of it as incarnate in 
 an historic human personality. For this step 
 we are indebted to the unknown author of the 
 Fourth Gospel. He was the first to identify 
 the Logos with the historic Jesus. To Paul 
 and the earlier gospel writers, Jesus was the 
 Son of God. To Philo, the Logos was the 
 [40] 
 
JESUS 
 
 Son of God. The author of the Fourth 
 Gospel, proceeding upon the assumption 
 that things that are equal to the same thing 
 are equal to each other, identified Jesus with 
 the Logos and ascribed to him its unique at- 
 tributes and powers. "In the beginning was 
 the Word, and the Word was with God and 
 the Word was God." This is the voice of 
 Philo, the Alexandrian Jew. "And the 
 Word became flesh and dwelt among men." 
 This is the contribution of the gospel writer. 
 It is the first clear expression of the embodi- 
 ment of the Logos in Jesus and constitutes 
 the scriptural basis of the doctrine of the 
 incarnation. The eternal Logos or Word 
 had become incarnate in a finite human be- 
 ing. It was no longer a philosophical ab- 
 straction; it had become an object of faith 
 and love. 
 
 The importance of the service rendered by 
 this conception cannot be overestimated. 
 The Greek mind thought of God as imma- 
 nent in his universe. The Hebrew mind 
 thought of him as dwelling apart from his 
 universe. It was constitutionallv unfitted 
 [41] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 to receive the conception of an immanent 
 God except as it was mediated through an- 
 other being. Thus far the doctrine served 
 a beneficent end. It preserved the doctrine 
 of a divine humanity at a time vi^hen men 
 could conceive of it in no other terms. At 
 the same time, by removing Jesus from the 
 sphere of humanity and endowing him with 
 superhuman attributes, it made it impossi- 
 ble for him to be conceived of as humanity's 
 ideal. The Jesus of the Fourth Gospel is 
 devoid of almost every human attribute. 
 The story of his life is robbed of almost every 
 human characteristic. There is no baptism, 
 no temptation, no proclamation of the com- 
 ing kingdom, no agony in the garden, no cry 
 of despair on the cross. All these are incon- 
 sistent with the dignity of the incarnate 
 Logos. The prolonged discourses which 
 the author puts into the mouth of Jesus 
 make it certain that he thought of him as es- 
 sentially different in nature from other men 
 and sustaining different relations with the 
 Father. The ideal which he exemplified was 
 impossible of either imitation or realization 
 [42] 
 
JESUS 
 
 by them. And so, as the thought of the di- 
 vine immanence came to be more widely ac- 
 cepted and better understood, this concep- 
 tion went the way of its predecessor. It lost 
 its power of appeal. As men learn to ap- 
 preciate the essential oneness of the Hfe of 
 the universe, they turn from the mythical 
 Christ of the Fourth Gospel, to the Jesus of 
 the other three, only to find that the moral 
 and rehgious value of his life is not lessened, 
 but enhanced, by the recognition of its purely 
 human character. 
 
 But what of the incarnation? Shall it be 
 eliminated from the scheme of Christian doc- 
 trine? Not at all. The experience out of 
 which it grew is as valid as ever. The im- 
 pression which Jesus' life and character 
 make upon Christian men and women has 
 grown stronger with each succeeding genera- 
 tion. If we reject the traditional explana- 
 tion of his influence over the hearts and lives 
 of men, we are morally bound to find some 
 explanation of it which shall be more in ac- 
 cord with the facts. The modern man is 
 compelled to translate the old doctrine into 
 [43] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 the terms of the new theology and of the new 
 science. It is God in Christ appealing to the 
 God in us, which accounts for the growing 
 power of the Christ ideal. The defect of the 
 older conception was not that it claimed too 
 much for Jesus, but that it claimed too little 
 for humanity. What it affirmed of him, we 
 affirm of the race. Instead of putting him 
 in a class by himself, too remote from us to 
 be spiritually helpful, we welcome him as the 
 first born of many brethren. And the dis- 
 tinctive merit of this larger conception is that 
 it does justice to all concerned. It does not 
 degrade God by assuming that he could em- 
 body himself in a single historic personality. 
 It does not degrade Jesus by reducing him 
 to the level of a "mere man." It does not 
 degrade humanity by assuming that it is sep- 
 arated from God by a gulf which Christ 
 alone can bridge. The grace that was in 
 Jesus is latent in us. The divine love and 
 wisdom revealed through him are constantly 
 seeking expression through us. 
 
 Such a conception may seem to be a wide 
 departure from the traditional doctrine, but 
 [44] 
 
JESUS 
 
 it is the only conception which science makes 
 possible. Belief in an immanent God makes 
 it necessary to assume that the life of God 
 is manifest in every part of his creation. 
 The form and magnitude of this manifesta- 
 tion is conditioned by the nature and capac- 
 ity of the medium through which it is re- 
 vealed. In stock and stone, in plant and 
 tree, in the conscious life of the lower ani- 
 mals, we behold the varying manifestations 
 of the life of God. In one it is force, in an- 
 other vital energy, in another consciousness, 
 and yet, 
 
 "God is seen God, 
 
 In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, ... in the 
 
 clod." 
 
 Let us assume that, throughout the 
 ages, there has been a constant increase in 
 this capacity to receive and show forth the 
 life of God, until, at last, there appears a 
 creature capable of standing erect, turning 
 his gaze heavenward and reflecting not only 
 the power and the glory of God, but also his 
 goodness and wisdom and love. For ages 
 God had been waiting patiently for the evo- 
 [45] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 lution of just such a medium. When it ap- 
 peared, he breathed into it his spirit and it 
 became a hving soul. This is the real mira- 
 cle of the incarnation. It is not the incarna- 
 tion of God in the person of one man cen- 
 turies ago, but the progressive embodiment 
 of the life of God in the souls of men 
 throughout the ages. In the words of R. J. 
 Campbell, "All human history is the pro- 
 gressive incarnation of God," and all human 
 life "divine, and eternal, integral to the being 
 of God." 
 
 Let us assume, also, that there has been 
 a constant evolution of this higher medium, 
 until, at length, there appears one with a soul 
 so sensitive to every breath of the eternal 
 spirit and a will so in accord with the divine 
 will that in him men thought that they be- 
 held the Father himself. They said, "This 
 is the Christ, the Son of the hving God." 
 And yet his value for our moral and spiritual 
 life lies in the fact that this Christ never 
 transcends human limits. In him we see 
 humanity at its best. Whatever differences 
 there may be between him and us are differ- 
 [46] 
 
JESUS 
 
 ences of degree and not of kind. What he 
 was, we are destined to become. 
 
 "Progress is the law of life^ man is not 
 
 Man as yet, 
 Nor shall I deem his object served, 
 
 his end 
 Attained" 
 
 until 
 
 "all mankind alike is perfected.' 
 
 Browning is right. Our task on earth will 
 never be accomplished until all mankind is 
 perfected, until all grow into the stature of 
 perfect manhood as revealed to us in Jesus. 
 This is the Unitarian conception of Jesus. 
 He is not a God to be worshipped but a 
 leader to be followed. As President Burton 
 has said: "He was all God could be in 
 human terms." If we would know the ef- 
 fectiveness of such a conception we have 
 only to turn to the lives of those who have 
 cherished it. It has been maintained that 
 the strength of orthodoxy is its loyalty to the 
 personal Christ and its sense of dependence 
 upon him, both of which are supposed to be 
 [47] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITAHIANS? 
 
 confirmed by a belief in his deity. Also that 
 the weakness of liberal Christianity is its 
 failure to inspire this feeling of personal loy- 
 alty and responsibility. But why? Why 
 should the man Jesus exercise a less potent 
 influence for good than the deified Jesus? 
 Why should his appeal to our personal alle- 
 giance be less imperative and strong? Why 
 should we think less of one who is capable 
 of being a real leader than of one who at 
 best is only a play actor on the cosmic stage ? 
 Must intelligence always be purchased at the 
 expense of faith, and independence at the 
 •expense of devotion? 
 
 Today the world yearns as never before 
 for Christian unity. One of the greatest 
 steps toward the achievement of this goal 
 would be the acceptance, by all Christian 
 people, of this humanitarian conception of 
 the person and work of Jesus. At heart the 
 great majority of them accept it today. 
 Evangelical Christians have tried to make 
 the belief in the deity of Christ the sole con- 
 dition of religious fellowship and yet their 
 very language proves that what they have 
 [48] 
 
JESUS 
 
 in mind is not deity but divinity. They 
 criticize the hberal churches for their denial 
 of the divinity of Jesus, when what they have 
 in mind is not divinity but deity. Has not 
 the time come to put an end to this purely 
 verbal controversy, accustom ourselves to the 
 same vocabulary, and unite in such loyal de- 
 votion to one common Lord and Master that 
 all speculation as to his deity or divinity 
 shall be swallowed up in the consciousness 
 of his perfect humanity? Admit, with 
 Tennyson, that he was 
 
 "Most human and yet most divine, 
 The flower of man and God." 
 
 and we can say, with Richard Watson 
 Gilder: 
 
 "If Jesus Christ is a man, 
 
 And only a man, I say 
 That of all mankind I cleave to him 
 
 And to him will I cleave alway; 
 
 If Jesus Christ is a God, 
 
 And the only God, I swear 
 I will follow him through heaven and hell, 
 
 The earth, the sea and the air." 
 
 [49] 
 
Know ye not that ye are the temple of God 
 and that the spirit of God dwelleth in you. 
 
 1 Corinthians III, 16. 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 SECOND only in importance to the be- 
 lief concerning the person and work of 
 Jesus is that concerning the office and func- 
 tion of the Holy Spirit. Both problems 
 have their origin in the gradual disintegra- 
 tion of the traditional doctrine of the Trin- 
 ity. In other days the solution was per- 
 fectly simple. The Holy Spirit was the 
 third member in that Trinity, sharing with 
 the Father and the Son the honor of repre- 
 senting the divine Being. As such he was 
 a distinct personality, with functions quite 
 distinct from those of the other two. Now 
 that we have restored to God his absolute 
 and undivided unity and assigned to Jesus 
 his rightful place among men, what becomes 
 of the Holy Spirit? Can we think of it as 
 an independent personality, contending the 
 absoluteness of the Father? Or as the third 
 member in a metaphysical and wholly incom- 
 prehensible Trinity? Or must we think of 
 [53] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 it as the power of God, working silently 
 but persistently, and conforming all things 
 to his will? It is to this latter view that 
 Unitarians are irrevocably committed. 
 
 The traditional doctrine was the result of 
 a gradual growth. When St. Paul made 
 his second visit to Ephesus, he found there 
 a httle group of Christians, converts of 
 ApoUos, and asked: "Did ye receive the 
 Holy Spirit when ye believed?" They re- 
 plied : "We did not so much as hear whether 
 there is a Holy Spirit." Three centuries 
 later Gregory of Nanzianzus, one of the 
 church fathers, wrote : "Of our thoughtful 
 men, some regard the Holy Spirit as an op- 
 eration, some as a creature, some as God, 
 while others are at a loss to decide, seeing 
 that the Scripture determines nothing on 
 this subject." Shortly before his death Pro- 
 fessor Royce, of Harvard, declared that 
 "The central problem in our present attempt 
 at a theology must be that which traditional 
 Christian theology has so strangely neg- 
 lected, the problem of what the religious con- 
 sciousness has called the Holy Spirit." 
 [54] 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 **Here," he adds, "lies the real central idea 
 of any distinctive Christian metaphysic." 
 These quotations suggest the stages through 
 which the doctrine has passed. First, igno- 
 rance of the Spirit's existence; second, un- 
 certainty as to its nature and function; and 
 third, conviction as to its importance as cen- 
 tral to an intelligent understanding of the 
 Christian faith. 
 
 In the New Testament the Holy Spirit is 
 the medium of revelation and the instrument 
 of the divine activity. In the birth stories 
 it usurps the place of the natural father and 
 Jesus is born of a virgin. At the baptism 
 it descends upon Jesus in the form of a dove. 
 When Jesus is about to leave his disciples 
 he promises to send the Holy Spirit to com- 
 fort them and to guide them into a larger 
 understanding of the truth. The one unfor- 
 givable sin is blasphemy against the Holy 
 Spirit. At Pentecost it was the descent of 
 the Holy Spirit which accounted for the 
 marvellous phenomena which we associate 
 with that day. St. Paul is so convinced that 
 it is the presence of the Holy Spirit which 
 [55] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 accounts for Jesus' power that he does not 
 attempt to differentiate one from the other. 
 He uses the terms interchangeably. Now it 
 is Christ that dwells in the new convert and 
 makes him a new creature and again it is 
 the Spirit. Once he says unequivocally, 
 *'Now the Lord," meaning the risen Christ, 
 not the historical Jesus, "Now the Lord is 
 the Spirit." The apostolic benediction alone 
 attempts a differentiation. That is why 
 it is so often interpreted as a Trinitarian 
 formula. If so it could not have been used 
 by Paul. Whatever else he may have been, 
 he was not a Trinitarian. Writing to the 
 Christians at Corinth he asks that the grace 
 that had been manifest in Jesus might be 
 manifest in them, that the love of God which 
 had been the source of his inspiration might 
 be with them, and that the consciousness of 
 fellowship with the Father through the in- 
 dwelling of his spirit might also be theirs. 
 It requires some imagination to see in this 
 an affirmation of the Trinity. 
 
 The doctrine of the Trinity had its origin 
 in the custom of joining together, for litur- 
 [56] 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 gical purposes, the terms Father, Son and 
 Holy Spirit. A familiar instance is the bap- 
 tismal formula in which Jesus bids his dis- 
 ciples baptize in the name of these three. 
 At first there was no attempt to unite them 
 as separate persons in one Godhead, or to 
 conceive of them as distinct personalities. 
 When, however, the necessity for a definite 
 creed arose, this baptismal formula presented 
 itself as a most convenient skeleton or frame- 
 work. A study of the great creeds of 
 Christendom, the Apostles', the Nicene and 
 the Athanasian, will demonstrate that each 
 is simply the elaboration of this primitive 
 formula. 
 
 Even when the Holy Spirit came to be 
 regarded as the third member in the Trinity, 
 its subordinate position was scrupulously 
 maintained. In the earliest draft of the 
 Apostles' creed, dating from the second cen- 
 tury, twelve words are devoted to God, 
 seventy to Jesus and only six to the Holy 
 Spirit. For six centuries the simple state- 
 ment, "I believe in the Holy Spirit," re- 
 mained practically unchanged. The great 
 [57] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 controversies of the early church raged about 
 the nature of God and the person and work 
 of Christ. BeHef in the Holy Spirit was 
 admitted with no attempt to define its nature 
 or to prescribe its function. Later attempts 
 at definition led to a controversy which rent 
 the church in twain. To this day the chief 
 distinction between the Greek and the Ro- 
 man divisions of the Catholic church is that 
 one believes that the Holy Spirit proceeds 
 from the Father alone, the other that it comes 
 forth from both the Father and the Son. 
 Those who stand wholly outside of the con- 
 troversy cannot understand how, if it is a 
 distinct personality, it can proceed from 
 either. And yet, in spite of these differences 
 of interpretation, a dogma which is unscrip- 
 tural, unscientific and illogical, is still re- 
 tained as a part of the ecclesiastical furniture 
 of certain churches under the assumption 
 that it is essential to the Christian life. The 
 continued existence of our free churches is 
 an emphatic protest against this assumption. 
 One of the characteristics of the newer re- 
 ligious thinking is that it substitutes common 
 [58] 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 sense for metaphysical speculation and clear- 
 ness of thought for an unreasoning faith. 
 After centuries of theological controversy it 
 enables us to say, with St. Paul, "To us there 
 is one God, the Father ; and one Lord, Jesus 
 Christ; and one Spirit, by which we are all 
 baptized into one body." With this change 
 of attitude the Holy Spirit assumes a 
 position of dignity and importance. It is 
 the inevitable corollary of a belief in the di- 
 vine immanence. As long as God was 
 thought of as transcendent, dwelling some- 
 where apart from his world, it was only 
 through the Spirit that he could have inter- 
 course with that world. With an immanent 
 God such mediation becomes superfluous. 
 The Holy Spirit is God himself at work in 
 his world. The divine life has been present 
 in the world from the beginning. Through- 
 out the ages it has expressed itself in ever 
 higher forms of consciousness. In the He- 
 brew people, because of their inherent re- 
 ligiousness, it found its freest channel. And 
 in Jesus Christ, a Jewish peasant, it found 
 its highest expression. It was through this 
 [59] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 indwelling Spirit that he became the supreme 
 revelation of God to man, "all that God 
 could be in human terms." 
 
 This is the only conception of the nature 
 and function of the Holy Spirit which is 
 compatible with that theory of the universe 
 and its relation to God which is the basis 
 of all present-day thinking. Science has 
 taught us to recognize a spiritual force, an 
 infinite personality, at the heart of the uni- 
 verse, animating it and dominating it as the 
 soul animates and dominates the body. It 
 has also taught us that there can be no con- 
 sistent theory of the universe which fails to 
 take account of its highest product, man him- 
 self. If the world is a unity, we must be a 
 part of that larger unity, and the same 
 power which manifests itself in the world 
 at large must throb and pulsate in us. This 
 does not imply that all are reduced to one 
 dead level of uniformity. There is diver- 
 sity even in spiritual gifts. The capacity 
 to receive determines the ability to reveal. 
 One may be a Jesus, another a Paul, an- 
 other the most ordinary type of humanity, 
 [60] 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 but it is the same spirit which fills them all, 
 each according to his capacity. The life 
 which animates us is a part of the life of 
 God. The love which binds us to one an- 
 other is a reflection of his love. The will 
 which keeps us constant to an ever ascending 
 goal is an expression of his purpose. The 
 sense of right and duty which informs that 
 will and helps to determine our conduct is 
 but another name for that "stern daughter 
 of the voice of God" who holds the worlds 
 in her embrace and ^'prevents the very stars 
 from going wrong." 
 
 Thus an attempt to know and to under- 
 stand our common human nature brings us 
 irresistibly to the conclusion that the Holy 
 Spirit is still a constant factor in human life 
 and destiny. The hfe that thrills our be- 
 ing, the love that gives significance to life, 
 the will that enables love to express itself 
 in action, and the conscience that keeps that 
 action clean and pure, are but differing 
 phases of the life of God in the souls of 
 men. They are just as real and just as 
 significant as the energy that drives the 
 [61] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 world on in its course, or the affinity that 
 holds its parts tos^ether, or the force that 
 enables it to do its work, or the system of 
 checks and balances that keeps that force 
 within certain prescribed bounds. All alike 
 point to the presence of a living, loving, will- 
 ing and beneficent personality who in- 
 habiteth the eternities and yet is not far 
 from any one of us. 
 
 "Speak to him thou, for he hears, 
 And spirit with spirit can meet; 
 
 Closer is he than breathing, 
 Nearer than hands or feet." 
 
 Today this conception of the Holy Spirit 
 as but another name for God at work in his 
 world is accepted by many who repudiate 
 the Unitarian name. Nowhere do we find 
 it more clearly expressed than in "The Chris- 
 tian Doctrine of God," by Dr. William New- 
 ton Clarke, an orthodox scholar of ffood and 
 regular standing. He declares that God ex- 
 presses himself not onlv in Christ, but also in 
 the Holy Spirit. " The Spirit is Himself, 
 God within." Its function is to continue, in 
 [62] 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 the individual and the race, the work which 
 Jesus began. "God, through Christ, is 
 normahzing men," bringing them to the 
 proper hfe and character as sons. The 
 Spirit is called holy only in contrast with an 
 unholy world. It is "God in his people." 
 Dr. Clarke concludes: "God himself is the 
 Father; God himself is the divine in the 
 Son; and God himself is the Holy Spirit." 
 Today this is good orthodoxy. It is also 
 good Unitarianism. It is the attitude of the 
 Christian world toward this conception 
 which will determine the religion of the fu- 
 ture. The religion of Jesus was primarily 
 the religion of the Father. It was based 
 upon the family relationship raised to infi- 
 nite power. The religion of the early church 
 was the religion of the Son. It centred in 
 the person and work of Christ. More and 
 more the religion of today is becoming es- 
 sentially the religion of the Spirit. We have 
 given up all questions as to its procession 
 from the Father or the Son. We are try- 
 ing to forget that it was ever the third mem- 
 ber in an impossible Trinity. We are ac- 
 [63] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 customing ourselves to think of it as " the 
 perpetual witness of the life of God in the 
 soul of man." As Dr. Peabody has said: 
 "It is the immanent power of science, the 
 progressive revelation of philosophy, the 
 undeparting and undiminished inspiration of 
 religion." 
 
 This is the conception which must more 
 and more commend itself to thoughtful men 
 and women. Churches may continue to dif- 
 fer in their dogmas and creeds, Christian 
 men and women may differ in their belief 
 and practice, and yet all may unite in the 
 simple but sufficient affirmation, ''We be- 
 lieve in the Holy Spirit." Just as we can- 
 not think of the sun apart from its rays of 
 light and heat, so we cannot think of God 
 apart from that subtle influence which radi- 
 ates from him and gives life and light to the 
 world. It is none other than the spirit of 
 the living God, spiritual because he is Spirit, 
 holy because he is Holy. Science affirms 
 that the world in which we live is a spiritual 
 world; faith assures us that the spirit which 
 upholds and sustains it is the spirit of the 
 [64] 
 
THE HOLY SPIRIT 
 
 living God ; and the experience of every day 
 teaches us that it is that same spirit which 
 dwells in us and makes us his temples. 
 
 "Go notj my soul, in search of him, 
 Thou wilt not find him there, — 
 
 Or in the depths of shadow dim, 
 Or heights of upper air. 
 
 For not in far-off realms of space 
 The Spirit hath its throne; 
 
 In every heart it findeth place 
 And waiteth to be known." 
 
 [65] 
 
Every scripture inspired of God is also profitable 
 for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for in- 
 struction which is in righteousness. 
 
 2 Timothy III, 16. 
 
 [67] 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 THE Unitarian attitude toward the 
 Bible derives its chief importance from 
 the frequent assertion that we do not believe 
 in the Bible. All that this statement means 
 is that we do not accept this or any other 
 book as our sole guide in morals and religion. 
 We regard the Bible as a human document, 
 written by men and for men, and subject to 
 the ordinary rules of criticism and research. 
 Today this attitude is shared by the more 
 scholarly men in all denominations. The 
 Outlook stated recently that "It is clearly 
 worse than futile for clergymen to insist that 
 there has been no such revolution. It is 
 clearly their duty to prepare their congre- 
 gations to meet it by showing them that the 
 religious hfe is not identified with or depen- 
 dent upon the old, unscientific view of the 
 scripture as an infallible rule of faith and 
 practice." 
 
 It would be difficult to find a more glar- 
 [69] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 ing inconsistency than that between the 
 world's estimate of the Bible and its ignor- 
 ance of the Bible. Here is a book which is 
 found upon the pulpit of every Christian 
 church. It is to be seen, often in an excel- 
 lent state of preservation, in almost every 
 Christian home. It is the chief text-book 
 in our schools of religious education. Lists 
 of the world's best literature, coming from 
 the most divergent sources, give it first place. 
 When President EHot was asked why he had 
 omitted it from his six-foot book shelf for 
 Harvard men, he replied that he had as- 
 sumed that it would be found in the pos- 
 session of every Harvard graduate. It has 
 been printed in more languages and cir- 
 culated in more lands than any other book. 
 And yet, over against these facts, testifying 
 to the world's appreciation of its intrinsic 
 worth, we find the most colossal ignorance of 
 its character and contents. There are multi- 
 tudes of people who seem amazed when told 
 that it is not a book at all, but a collection of 
 books, and that its nearest analogy today is 
 not some religious or theological treatise but 
 [70] 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 one of the many libraries of the world's best 
 literature. As to the authorship and dates 
 of the various books of which it is composed, 
 or the growth of its several canons or groups, 
 or its interpretation in the light of present- 
 day criticism, the great masses of men and 
 women are hopelessly uninformed. 
 
 How are we to account for this situation? 
 How are we to reconcile the apparent appre- 
 ciation and the seeming neglect? It is due 
 to the fact that the traditional conception 
 of the Bible and the conventional methods 
 of Bible study have alienated the great ma- 
 jority of thinking people. No arguments 
 based upon intellectual or moral considera- 
 tions have any weight if opposed to one soli- 
 tary proof text. Passages are wrested from 
 their context and twisted in their meaning 
 for the purpose of supporting theological 
 statements which often are irrational and 
 sometimes repugnant to the moral sense. It 
 is this misuse of the Bible which has made 
 it, in the words of Reginald Campbell, "one 
 of the greatest stumbling-blocks to spiritual 
 religion." 
 
 [71] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 This method of interpretation is a heritage 
 from the time when Christianity was eman- 
 cipating itself from the yoke of the Roman 
 church. The Protestant Reformation was 
 undertaken in the name of the individual rea- 
 son and conscience but its leaders did not 
 dare to trust their new-found freedom. 
 They repudiated one authority only to sub- 
 mit themselves to another. In place of a 
 divinely instituted church they installed a 
 divinely inspired book. According to 
 Catholic theory, the inspired book must be 
 interpreted by an infallible church. What- 
 ever errors it might seem to contain could 
 then be explained away by the interpreters. 
 But Protestantism found itself burdened 
 with an infallible book for which there was 
 no such interpreter, and therefore no safe- 
 guard against error. Between these two 
 theories of interpretation, reason and com- 
 mon sense are both on the side of the Roman 
 CathoHc. Either we must abandon alto- 
 gether the fetish of an infallible book, or we 
 must find some way to secure an infallible 
 interpreter. 
 
 [72] 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 Unitarians prefer to abandon the fetish. 
 In common with all thinking people, they 
 recognize but two alternatives. The Bible 
 is either a divine institution or a human docu- 
 ment. Either it is wholly inspired, in the 
 sense that every word is the word of God, 
 dictated and transmitted without error, or 
 it is inspired only in the sense that all truth 
 is from God and that every expression of 
 truth, whatever its source, is a divine revela- 
 tion. To those who are acquainted with the 
 history of the Bible, its different versions, 
 its scientific and historical inaccuracies, its 
 conflicting expressions of moral and religious 
 truth, the first alternative is impossible. It 
 deserves to be laid away with the theory 
 of a geocentric universe and a stationary 
 earth. 
 
 The other alternative affords us all that is 
 needed to inspire a reverence for the Bible 
 as, to quote Abraham Lincoln's words, "The 
 best book God has given to men." It is a 
 record of the thoughts and aspirations and 
 ideals of the most religious people of the 
 ancient world. Nowhere can we find more 
 [73] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 exalted conceptions of the character of God 
 or loftier ideals of the conduct of man. It 
 is not an infallible utterance of moral and 
 religious truth and it cannot be used as an 
 infallible guide to either faith or practice, 
 but rightly interpreted, it nourishes and sus- 
 tains the moral and spiritual life of the race 
 as no other book does or can. 
 
 What has given us this newer method of 
 interpretation? It is the much misunder- 
 stood and much abused higher criticism. 
 There is nothing concerning which there has 
 been so much inexcusable misunderstanding 
 and unreasoning fear. It has been de- 
 nounced as hostile to the Bible and to reli- 
 gion. It has been characterized as destruc- 
 tive of the foundations of faith and morals. 
 And yet it is this which has made the Bible 
 intelligible and helpful to modern men and 
 women. Without it, it would long since 
 have been relegated to oblivion by all who 
 have emancipated themselves from the fet- 
 ters of credulity and superstition. If com- 
 pelled to choose between the Bible as every- 
 where the word of God and no Bible at all, 
 [74] 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 one's choice would be no Bible at all. When 
 permitted to choose between an intelligent 
 understanding of the Bible and ignorance of 
 its profound moral and religious truths, there 
 is but one alternative. 
 
 And what is this higher criticism? How 
 is it differentiated from any other criticism? 
 It is the criticism of the Bible books and of 
 the documents upon which they are based 
 considered as wholes. It is only in this re- 
 spect that it differs from the lower criticism. 
 One is textual, the other documental. One 
 deals with particular words and phrases, the 
 other with whole books or groups of books. 
 One seeks to discover the true reading of the 
 Bible text and to ascertain its original mean- 
 ing; the other seeks to establish its genuine- 
 ness and authenticity and to demonstrate its 
 credibility and trustworthiness. Thus be- 
 tween the two there can be no jealousy or 
 antagonism. They occupy different fields; 
 they deal with different sets of facts; they 
 are directed toward different ends. To say 
 that one is higher than the other in the sense 
 that it calls for the exercise of higher facul- 
 [75] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 ties is to say what would be repudiated by 
 every member of both schools. 
 
 The question is often raised as to whether 
 the higher criticism is constructive or de- 
 structive. Such a query has no significance 
 whatsoever for one who is at all familiar 
 with the processes. In its aim it is neither; 
 in its methods it is both. It is simply the 
 application to the Bible literature of the most 
 approved scientific and critical methods. 
 These methods are destructive only in the 
 sense that the destruction of error is often 
 the necessary preparation for the discovery 
 of truth. The tearing down and the build- 
 ing up are parts of one and the same pro- 
 cess. The same is true of all search for 
 truth. We do not hesitate to destroy old 
 error if thereby some new truth can be re- 
 vealed, and we judge of the process by the 
 end achieved, not by the means employed. 
 When Copernicus demonstrated that the 
 earth revolves around the sun he destroyed 
 forever the old Ptolemaic theory that the 
 sun revolves around the earth. When 
 Columbus proved that the earth is a globe 
 [76] 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 by sailing round it, he destroyed forever the 
 theory that it is a flat surface, with its four 
 corners. The destructive work of the 
 higher critics has been of this sort. It has 
 destroyed, "not the Scriptures, not theology, 
 not religion, but only a wrong interpretation 
 of the Scriptures, a narrow conception of 
 theolog}^ and the pagan features of reli- 
 gion." When it was demonstrated that 
 several different authors collaborated in the 
 composition of the first five books of the Old 
 Testament, it was not necessary for the 
 higher critic to assure us that they could not 
 have been written by Moses or any one Old 
 Testament writer. When it was proved 
 that the second part of Isaiah refers to events 
 which happened more than one hundred 
 years after the death of the great prophet of 
 that name, it required no extraordinary criti- 
 cal power to infer that we have here the work 
 of at least two different men, probably more, 
 living more than a century apart, and all 
 ascribed to a single writer. This is the kind 
 of destructive work which it has been the 
 privilege of the higher critics to do, and for 
 [77] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 which the Christian world ought to be pro- 
 foundly grateful. If any Christian dogma 
 has been destroyed by the process, it is fair to 
 assume that the dogma was wrong. Truth 
 itself cannot be destroyed so easily. When 
 any theory, Biblical or otherwise, is proved 
 to be out of accord with the facts, it is only 
 a mistaken sense of loyalty which insists 
 upon its retention and abuses those who have 
 furnished the proof. 
 
 The Unitarian conception of the Bible 
 rests squarely upon the results of the work 
 of these higher critics. We no longer re- 
 gard the Bible as supernaturally inspired. 
 We no longer look upon it as everywhere the 
 infallible word of God. We no longer turn 
 to it with the expectation of finding precise 
 directions as to our conduct in all possible 
 emergencies. As we comprehend its nature 
 and understand the working of men's minds 
 in unscientific periods, and under circum- 
 stances similar to those which surrounded the 
 Bibhcal writers, we detect the folly of any 
 theory of infallibility or inerranc3\ "It is 
 worth inquiring," writes Professor Youtz, 
 [78] 
 
THE BIBLE 
 
 an orthodox scholar, "whether the very- 
 phrase Holy Bible does not create a wrong 
 mental attitude, an attitude of Bibliolatry, 
 toward a book whose effort is to fix our 
 reverence upon the only One who is Holy." 
 And yet this modern attitude does not lessen 
 our reverence or esteem for the book itself. 
 The fact that it contains historical inaccura- 
 cies and verbal ambiguities does not make 
 it less worthy as a medium for the revelation 
 of the divine will. Because of the lofty 
 character of its moral and religious teaching 
 and the light which it throws upon the origin 
 and character of the best religion the world 
 has yet known, we cherish a reverence for it 
 which we cherish for no other book and we 
 give to it a place in our affection which no 
 other book can occupy. Interpreted as the 
 infallible word of God, there is no book which 
 can so fetter the intellect and retard the 
 moral and spiritual development of the race. 
 Interpreted as the fallible utterance of men, 
 it is still profitable for teaching, for reproof, 
 for correction, and for instruction in right- 
 eousness. 
 
 [79] 
 
And as he was praying the fashion of his counte- 
 nance was altered and his raiment became white and 
 dazzling. 
 
 Luhe IX, 29, 
 
PRAYER 
 
 ONE cannot read the story of Jesus 
 without reahzing the strength of the 
 moral and spiritual impulse which he brought 
 into the world. One cannot analyze his per- 
 sonality without gaining a new insight into 
 the secret of his power. His was primarily 
 a life of prayer. The closer he came into 
 contact with men, the more frequently he 
 sought to enter into communion with God. 
 The more strenuous the demands made upon 
 his time and strength, the more often he went 
 apart to pray. It was during the quiet 
 hours which he spent in the wilderness or 
 upon the mount that he received the moral 
 energy and spiritual power which enabled 
 him to sway the multitudes. At such times 
 he is said to have been so exalted that face 
 and form were alike transfigured. 
 
 It is not surprising that this habit of Jesus 
 should have made a profound impression 
 upon his disciples. They were familiar with 
 [83] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 the perfunctory prayers of temple and syna- 
 gogue, and with the long petitions, stereo- 
 typed in form and empty of effect, by which 
 religious zealots sought to draw attention to 
 themselves upon the street corners, but here 
 was a form of grayer which seemed to do 
 something. It was capable of reviving one's 
 flagging energies, strengthening his purpose 
 and sending him back to his work with new 
 courage and enthusiasm. Can we wonder 
 that they desired to share the privilege ? Or 
 that, upon one occasion, they became suffi- 
 ciently emboldened to exclaim, "Lord, teach 
 us to pray." 
 
 The prayer which was given in response 
 to this request has become a classic among 
 liturgical utterances. Its simplicity, its at- 
 mosphere of trust, its unselfish spirit, all 
 combine to give it a permanent place in the 
 liturgies of the church. And yet it is doubt- 
 ful if Jesus intended to establish a fixed 
 form. He little thought that the words that 
 he uttered would be repeated today as an al- 
 most universal petition among Christian peo- 
 ple. He sought to give his disciples a model 
 [84] 
 
PRAYER 
 
 which they might follow in formulating their 
 own prayers. But the model proved to be 
 so chaste and beautiful that it was treasured, 
 almost word for word, by the disciples, pre- 
 served by two of the gospel writers, and re- 
 mains today one of the most widely recog- 
 nized bonds of Christian fellowship. Catho- 
 lic and Protestant, orthodox and heterodox, 
 can unite in this series of simple petitions ad- 
 dressed to their Father who is in Heaven. 
 Such an experience gives rise to the ques- 
 tion, what is prayer? What is it that has 
 given it its unique place in the religions of the 
 world? Whatever differences we may rec- 
 ognize between them, all are one in their 
 emphasis upon the importance of this habit. 
 It must have a peculiar purpose in order to 
 account for its peculiar power. Prayer may 
 be defined as the response of the soul to its 
 spiritual environment. It is the expression 
 of a desire to come into touch with a Power 
 higher and holier than ourselves. Every 
 soul that is at all sensitive to spiritual reali- 
 ties becomes conscious sooner or later of 
 great spiritual forces which surround us on 
 [85] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 every hand and hold us continually in their 
 embrace. We flatter ourselves that we are 
 free, that we shape and control our own 
 destinies, and we sing with enthusiasm, 
 
 "I am the master of my fate, 
 I am the captain of my soul." 
 
 In the last analysis, however, we are all crea- 
 tures of destiny. The consciousness of our 
 complete dependence upon God is the source 
 of our power. "It is he that hath made us, 
 and not we ourselves." In spite of our ap- 
 parent freedom and self-direction, we know 
 that above us and within us and around us 
 there is a Power over which we have no con- 
 trol and which is constantly influencing our 
 lives for either good or ill. 
 
 From time immemorial men have sought 
 to come into conscious relationship with that 
 power. They have sought to establish some 
 kind of fellowship between themselves and 
 their moral and spiritual environment. Be- 
 ing human and obliged to think in human 
 terms, they have resorted to methods similar 
 to those which they are accustomed to use in 
 [86] 
 
PRAYER 
 
 communicating with one another. Some- 
 times the attempt has taken the form of 
 spoken petition and adoration and in this 
 way have grown up the great prayers of the 
 ages, dating from specific periods and yet 
 voicing the longings and aspirations of all 
 time. At other times it has resorted to a 
 sort of sign language, seeking to express it- 
 self in postures and gestures, in ritual and 
 ceremonial. Occasionally it has ignored 
 both of these methods and contented itself 
 with silent communion or unspoken aspira- 
 tion, with no attempt at outward expression. 
 In each case, however, it has been prayer, 
 and wherever it has proceeded from a sincere 
 motive, an earnest desire to bring the finite 
 soul into touch with the great Over-soul, it 
 has been true prayer. 
 
 Scarcely less conspicuous than the natural- 
 ness and universality of these attempts to 
 estabhsh conscious relationship with some 
 higher power has been their diversity. The 
 attempts have been high or low, worthy or 
 unworthy, according to one's conception of 
 the nature of this higher power. Men have 
 [87] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 prayed to sticks and stones regarded as 
 fetishes or fashioned into idols. They have 
 prayed to the sun and moon and stars and 
 to almost every object of nature. They 
 have prayed to animals and to other men as 
 well as to the spirits of departed ancestors 
 and to the multitudinous variety of gods. 
 They have looked beyond these objects of 
 worship to the power which was manifest in 
 and through them and have sought to come 
 into right relations with that power. It is 
 a far cry from the savage praying to his 
 war -god to give him victory over his enemies 
 to the publican in the temple praying, "God 
 be merciful to me, a sinner," or to the psalm- 
 ist crying, *'Lord, create in me a clean heart 
 and renew within me a right spirit." The 
 gulf is even wider between the imprecatory 
 psalms of the Old Testament and Jesus' 
 prayer in the New, "Father, forgive them, 
 for they know not what they do." And yet 
 these represent varying stages in the evolu- 
 tion of the attempt to give expression to one 
 of the most fundamental instincts of the hu- 
 man soul. 
 
 [88] 
 
PRAYER 
 
 The most casual observer must be aware 
 that there has been a dechne in the habit of 
 prayer. There are many things which have 
 contributed to this dechne. The larger 
 thought of God has led many to shrink from 
 making any personal demands upon his 
 favor. The belief in law as unfailing and 
 immutable has made many of the ancient 
 petitions obsolete. Why agonize in spirit if 
 we cannot hope that, for us, aught of good 
 or ill may be diverted from its appointed 
 path ? Why wrestle with the Almighty if he 
 is unable to alter the workings of a single 
 law that he has ordained ? Furthermore the 
 dread of all pious pretense and an instinc- 
 tive feehng of delicacy have made it increas- 
 ingly difficult for men to expose the spiritual 
 workings of their souls to the gaze of the 
 unsympathetic and even scornful as was the 
 custom among the participants in the old- 
 fashioned prayer meeting. To this may be 
 added the fact that the restlessness and fever 
 of our modern way of living tend to diminish 
 the opportunity for a quiet hour in which to 
 commune with the Father in spirit and in 
 [89] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 truth. And yet it would be a mistake to call 
 this a prayerless age. It is not that men do 
 not pray but that they do not find it as easy 
 to give outward expression to their prayers. 
 The ease and naturalness with which some 
 great emergency brings an involuntary 
 prayer to the lips, so that men pray who 
 never prayed before, proves how close to the 
 surface the prayerful mood lies. 
 
 Thus the present decline in the habit of 
 prayer is largely a decline in outward ex- 
 pression. The prayerful mood remains but 
 we know not how to pray as we ought. Pub- 
 lic prayer, as it prevails in our churches and 
 at certain public functions, has been safe- 
 guarded by tradition and custom, but not so 
 private prayer. It is a fair question how 
 long public prayer can survive if the habit of 
 private prayer is abandoned. We speak of 
 common prayer, but prayer is not common 
 unless it voices the aspirations and longings 
 of those who are present and awakens a re- 
 sponse in their hearts. Public prayer is not 
 a performance to be watched or heard; it is 
 an experience to be shared. And how can it 
 [90] 
 
PRAYER 
 
 be shared unless all are in the prayerful 
 mood? Without a certain degree of pre- 
 paredness common prayer becomes an impos- 
 sibility. The mind is occupied with irrele- 
 vant matters. It lacks that perfect abandon 
 which is a prerequisite. One purpose of 
 what has come to be called the introductory 
 service is to induce the prayerful mood. 
 We have made the mistake of thinking of 
 it as introductory to the sermon. It is not. 
 It is introductory to the prayer. Organ pre- 
 lude, anthem, hymn, scripture reading, all 
 have a common aim, to bring about this 
 spiritual preparedness without which com- 
 mon prayer becomes a misnomer. They 
 have their natural climax in the words, 
 "Let us pray." The impression that some 
 churches are more reverential than others is 
 due in no small degree to the fact that in 
 them the people come in promptly, sit down 
 quietly, and join in a common service of wor- 
 ship; while in others the people straggle in 
 one by one, and thoughtlessly interrupt the 
 devotions of others by nodding to one an- 
 other or whispering or indulging in equally 
 [91] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 reprehensible forms of social intercourse. 
 It may be that none of these constitutes re- 
 ligion ; but they create the atmosphere which 
 is favorable to the prayerful mood and con- 
 sequently to the religious life. 
 
 Now the remedy for unpreparedness is 
 preparedness. The best way to attain the 
 prayerful mood on Sunday is to accustom 
 oneself to it on other days of the week. We 
 speak of God as the gracious giver of every 
 good and perfect gift. Should we allow one 
 day to go by without acknowledging our 
 indebtedness? The soul that does not de- 
 vote a portion of each day to communion 
 with the thinsfs of the spirit will find it in- 
 creasingly difficult to put itself into an at- 
 titude of communion on. Sunday. The oc- 
 casional prayer, the instinctive turning to 
 God at the great crises of life, can never be 
 wholly abandoned. But what of the insti- 
 tution of family worship ? Nothing has been 
 invented which has done more to lift men into 
 the atmosphere of the spirit and to give them 
 an intimate sense of the presence and the 
 power of God than this one institution. The 
 [92] 
 
PRAYER 
 
 elaborate morning prayers of a generation 
 or more ago have gone beyond recall. But 
 the increasing number of families in which 
 the custom is to begin the day by reading 
 some appropriate passage of scripture or 
 some inspiring bit of verse and then uniting 
 in the Lord's prayer is proof that the insti- 
 tution of family worship is based upon the 
 recognition of a spiritual need which the oc- 
 casional public prayer cannot satisfy. It 
 not only serves to pitch the life of each new 
 day at its proper level, but it affords an op- 
 portunity for simple, unostentatious reli- 
 gious expression and so ministers to soul 
 growth. Thus to be helpful, prayer must 
 be habitual. To receive the greatest benefit 
 from public prayer, one must accustom one- 
 self to private prayer. It may be the repe- 
 tition of some familiar petition around the 
 family altar, or the quiet talk with God in 
 the seclusion of one's own closet, but in either 
 case it reenforces the conviction that we are 
 not pilgrims or strangers but children of the 
 household of God. 
 
 And now what of the answer to prayer? 
 [93] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 If we remember that the primary object of 
 prayer is not petition but communion we 
 shall not be seriously concerned about the 
 answer. Some prayers ought not to be an- 
 swered. To attempt to dictate the blessings 
 which God shall bestow, is impiety. To 
 pray that for us the laws of the universe may 
 be set aside, is impertinence. To ask for 
 the things we think we ought to ask for 
 rather than for the things we really desire 
 and for the attainment of which we are exert- 
 ing every effort, is hypocrisy. To ask for 
 specific blessings and then refrain from all 
 personal endeavor, trusting that the Lord 
 will provide, is mockery. Such prayers are 
 never answered. But when we make our 
 prayer the vehicle for expressing our highest 
 aspirations and desires, and then add to our 
 prayer earnest and consecrated effort, it 
 must bring results. The answer may not 
 be the one for which we looked. Our prayer 
 may be answered in a larger sense than we 
 had dreamed. Moses prayed that he might 
 enter the land of promise. Instead he was 
 given the power to relinquish his work into 
 [94] 
 
PRAYER 
 
 other hands confident that in the end God's 
 purposes would be fulfilled. Jesus prayed 
 that the cup might pass from him. Instead 
 he was given the strength to drain it to the 
 dregs and to say, "Thy will, not mine, be 
 done." 
 
 Such prayer can never pass away. In its 
 lowest and simplest form it will always re- 
 main petition, asking for the things we most 
 desire and yet knowing all the while that 
 God will grant only such blessings as are 
 most expedient for us. In another and 
 higher form it will become aspiration and 
 meditation, the yearning for a higher hf e and 
 the desire that we may be given the strength 
 to hve it. But in its last and highest form 
 prayer will always be communion, the blend- 
 ing of the human and the divine, the com- 
 plete identification of our wills with the will 
 of God, the consciousness that we are stand- 
 ing in his presence and that our souls are 
 "in tune with the infinite." Such prayer is 
 its own answer and its own sufficient re- 
 ward. 
 
 [95] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 "More things are wrought by prayer 
 
 Than this world dreams of; wherefore let thy voice 
 
 Rise like a fountain for me night and day. 
 
 For what are men better than sheep or goats 
 
 That nourish a blind life within the brain 
 
 If, knowing God, they lift not hands in prayer?" 
 
 [96] 
 
God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the 
 world but that the world through him might be saved. 
 
 John III, 17. 
 
SALVATION 
 
 A FEW years ago the editor of the Hib- 
 bert Journal sought to indicate the 
 probable effects of the great war upon reli- 
 gion. He stated that there had always been 
 two rival systems of theology, based upon 
 two diverse interpretations of the world and 
 of human life. Wherever the world has 
 been regarded as evil and human life un- 
 worthy, religion has expressed itself as a 
 longing for salvation, a yearning on the part 
 of the individual for redemption from the 
 world and from self. Wherever the world 
 has been regarded as good and human hfe a 
 boon, religion has expressed itself as an ef- 
 fort after moral excellence, an attempt on the 
 part of the individual to play his part in the 
 world and to make some worth while con- 
 tribution to it. Dr. Jacks predicted that 
 which of these two theories should be more 
 popular after the war would depend upon 
 how the human mind should react in the 
 [99] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 presence of this world catastrophe. If it 
 leads men to despair of the world and of hu- 
 man civilization, then the religion of salva- 
 tion will receive an enormous impetus. But 
 if it strengthens the conviction that present 
 evil may result in ultimate good, that God 
 will yet make the wrath of man to praise him 
 while the remainder of wrath he will restrain, 
 then the outlook for the religion of moral 
 excellence will be most encouraging. 
 
 The war is ended, and yet the same uncer- 
 tainty prevails today. It is too early to say 
 whether the war has resulted in the strength- 
 ening of the claims of the old theology or in 
 the renewal of the demand for a more liberal 
 and a more rational interpretation of reli- 
 gion. Unitarians, however, continue to 
 identify themselves with the religion of moral 
 excellence. They still dare to have faith in 
 a good God and in a good world and in the 
 progress of mankind upward and onward 
 forever, and this faith determines their at- 
 titude toward the traditional doctrine of sal- 
 vation. It dictates their conception of the 
 life from which they wish to be saved and 
 [100] 
 
SALVATION 
 
 the life into which they wish to be delivered. 
 The problem of salvation cannot be dis- 
 sociated from that of human sinfulness. 
 Nowhere does the old theology differ more 
 radically from the new. In one, sin is an 
 inheritance from the past; in the other it is 
 an achievement of the present. One bases 
 it upon the ancient doctrine of imputed 
 righteousness and imputed guilt; the other 
 upon the modern conception of human free- 
 dom and responsibility. According to one, 
 men are sinners because of another's trans- 
 gression and they can be saved only by an- 
 other's righteousness ; according to the other, 
 it is one's own act which determines the na- 
 ture of his offense and the measure of his 
 responsibihty. And as these two theories 
 differ in their conception of sin, so also they 
 differ in their interpretation of the nature of 
 punishment. With one, it involves endless 
 suffering in an eternal hell, a punishment 
 which is purely vindictive in character; with 
 the other, it involves the cumulative effect of 
 the penalties which every breach of the moral 
 law brings in its wake, penalties which 
 [101] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 are wholly remedial. Endless punishment 
 would defeat its own purpose. It would 
 make forever impossible the reclamation of 
 the sinner. It would signify that finite hu- 
 man creatures could revolt against the in- 
 finite God and continue that revolt through- 
 out eternity in spite of the restraints of Al- 
 mighty Power and the constraints of Al- 
 mighty Love. Thus the traditional hell 
 would be a perpetual monument to a de- 
 feated God. It would be destructive of all 
 religious faith. As long as men remain im- 
 perfect, they will continue to sin, each sin 
 will bring its inevitable penalty, and these 
 penalties will increase in intensity until, 
 through their cumulative effect, every hu- 
 man soul is brought into right relations with 
 God. It may take a year or it may take a 
 millennium, but its goal is assured. A good 
 God cannot will that any of his children shall 
 perish. If he wills that all shall have ever- 
 lasting life, then he will find some way to 
 accomplish his purpose. Otherwise he is not 
 infinite. He is not God. To those who af- 
 firm that such a conception of sin and its 
 [102] 
 
SALVATION 
 
 punishment cuts the nerve of all moral en- 
 deavor, and that "if you destroy the fear of 
 hell in the minds of men you will create a 
 hell on earth,'" it can be rejoined that just 
 in proportion as the world has grown morally 
 better, belief in a literal hell has declined. 
 The finest types of human character are 
 found among those who have long since 
 abandoned this archaic belief. It is doubt- 
 ful if any human being has ever been kept 
 back from presumptuous sin by the picture 
 of a lurid hell at the end of every sinner's 
 life. Our prisons and reformatories are 
 filled with those who have had the advantage 
 of whatever deterrent effect the traditional 
 doctrine may have been able to exert. 
 
 It is against the background of human sin- 
 fulness that we must formulate our concep- 
 tion of salvation. Its fundamental meaning 
 may be determined by considering the deriv- 
 ation of the word. It comes from the Latin 
 "salvus," which means wholeness, or health. 
 The saved hfe is the whole life, the life that 
 is characterized by moral sanity and spirit- 
 ual health. Because of this, every saved 
 [103] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 man becomes a saviour, one who saves others. 
 If he does not become such a saviour, he 
 needs to beware lest he himself come short of 
 salvation. 
 
 "Heaven's gates are shut to him who comes alone; 
 Save thou a soul, and it shall save thine own." 
 
 Such a conception is the polar opposite of 
 the traditional interpretation. According 
 to that, there has never been but one saviour. 
 To Jesus, and to him alone, this title can 
 be applied. And the salvation which he 
 wrought was determined by the traditional 
 conception of human needs. The first man 
 was created not only innocent, but perfect. 
 He was placed in a beautiful garden and 
 provided with everything which he might 
 need for his enjoyment or his use. There 
 he might have remained had he not disobeyed 
 the divine command. Through that primal 
 act of disobedience he not only fell from 
 grace, and lost the consciousness of the di- 
 vine approval, but he made it possible for 
 sin and death to enter the world and become 
 a part of the inheritance of the race. The 
 [104] 
 
SALVATION 
 
 function of Jesus, according to the tradi- 
 tional scheme of salvation, is to save men 
 from this inherited guilt. The church has 
 sanctioned many different explanations of 
 how this salvation is to be accomplished, but 
 that Jesus' death upon the cross atoned for 
 human sinfulness and made possible the 
 forgiveness of God is fundamental to them 
 all. For more than twelve centuries the 
 great question among Christian people was 
 "What shall I do to be saved?" And the 
 answer was "Submit yourself to the author- 
 ity of the church. It alone possesses the 
 kingdom of Heaven and therefore it alone 
 can assure one of salvation." Thus the 
 world was regarded as a doomed vessel, the 
 church was a sort of life raft moored along- 
 side, and the cry that went up from Christian 
 leaders was ''Sauve qui pent/' The situa- 
 tion was not even relieved by the rule of 
 "Women and children first." Men forgot 
 their duty to their fellows in their mad desire 
 to achieve safety for themselves. 
 
 The Protestant reformation destroyed the 
 Roman monopoly of the straight gate and 
 [105] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 the narrow way by providing other gates 
 and other ways but they were equally 
 straight and equally narrow. In place of 
 the Roman Catholic submission to ecclesias- 
 tical authority as the sole condition of salva- 
 tion, it promulgated a variety of conditions. 
 With Luther it was justification by faith; 
 with Calvin, election and f oreordination ; 
 with Arminius, the abounding grace of God. 
 And all of these, CathoHcism, Lutheranism, 
 Calvinism and Arminianism, claimed to be 
 founded upon the teachings of one whose 
 constant solicitude was not how he might 
 save himself but how he might serve others, 
 not how he might get to heaven bye and bye, 
 but how he could hasten the coming of the 
 kingdom of Heaven here and now. Can we 
 wonder that men came to distrust this whole 
 scheme of salvation as an insult to God and 
 an outrage upon humanity? They asked, 
 
 "Is selfishness^ — for time a sin, — 
 
 Stretched out unto eternity, celestial prudence?'* 
 
 Only in a self-centred world, one in which 
 everything is ordered with special reference 
 [106] 
 
SALVATION 
 
 to human needs and desires, could the tradi- 
 tional view of salvation find a congenial at- 
 mosphere. In a world which is God-centred 
 it cannot long endure. Unitarians beheve 
 that instead of falling to our present state 
 from a higher level of innocence and perfec- 
 tion, humanity has been slowly rising 
 through countless ages of evolution and de- 
 velopment. The process is still far from 
 complete. With the advance in knowledge 
 and the consequent quickening of our ethical 
 perception, we can no longer regard personal 
 salvation as the ultimate goal of human en- 
 deavor. We are less concerned about our 
 destiny in another world than about our 
 duties in this. And there is a growing con- 
 viction among all thinking people that if we 
 will but attend to the duties, God will pro- 
 vide the destiny. If we can make our lives 
 of service to the world, he will arrange for 
 their ultimate preservation. For us the 
 question is not "How shall I be saved?" but 
 "How can I make myself worth saving?" 
 And the answer is, only by a life of love and 
 service. 
 
 [107] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 And what is the chief obstacle to this hfe 
 of service? It is our inherent selfishness. 
 This is the primal source of almost all of the 
 sins of humanity, the spirit which leads us 
 to magnify self and to seek our own rather 
 than our neighbor's good. It is a spirit 
 which is as old as humanity. It has given us 
 a self-centred universe, a self-centred the- 
 ology, and a self-centred interpretation of 
 life and duty. And it is from this that we 
 must seek salvation. Not from the penal- 
 ties for our sins, for these are remedial in 
 nature and salutary in effect, but from sin 
 itself and its root-source, selfishness. And 
 it is for this that we look to Jesus. He has 
 pointed out the way of escape. "''iVhosoever 
 would save his life, shall lose it; but whoso- 
 ever would lose his life for my sake, -shall 
 find it.'* The effort after personal salva- 
 tion defeats itself. It is inherently selfish 
 and selfishness can never be the centre of the 
 religious life. As 'Whittier has said : "Hope 
 not the cure of sin till self is dead." It is 
 only by renouncing the life of self that the 
 higher life is found. It is only by "forget- 
 [108] 
 
SALVATION 
 
 ting it in love's service." The great war 
 taught us that there are ideal values for 
 which men will sacrifice their comfort and 
 ease and even life itself. To save one's life 
 from all hardship and discomfort and priva- 
 tion is to lose everything that makes it worth 
 living; while to lose one's life in the service 
 of some great and worthy cause is to find it 
 again in ever greater abundance. 
 
 Thus we continue to look to Jesus as a 
 world-saviour. He saves men, not by his 
 death, but by his life. When asked that the 
 chief places in the kingdom might be re- 
 served for two of his disciples, he replied 
 that it was not in his power to gi^ant such a 
 request. These places were for those for 
 whom they had been prepared from the foun- 
 dation of the world, those who had demon- 
 strated their fitness for them by long and 
 faithful service. There was to be no spoils 
 system, no favoritism, in the kingdom of 
 God. This lesson was not lost upon the dis- 
 ciples. With them, also, service, good 
 works, brotherly love. Christian kindness, 
 became the characteristics of the followers 
 [109] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 of Jesus. The New Testament knows 
 nothing of any faith which is not born of 
 love and attested by good works. When 
 Paul's disciples sought to pervert his teach- 
 ings and asserted that one could be saved by 
 faith independent of good works, St. James 
 rebuked them with this challenge: "Show 
 me thy faith apart from thy works and I, by 
 my works, will show thee my faith." For 
 "faith without works is dead." A saving 
 faith is not the acceptance of a body of opin- 
 ions about God and Christ and their relations 
 to one another and to the world; it is an at- 
 titude of confidence and love and trust 
 toward God as the great all-father and 
 toward Jesus as the supreme revealer of that 
 God to men. To those who share this faith 
 religion is no longer a means of personal 
 salvation; it is a means of social service. 
 The church is no longer an ark of safety; 
 it is an institution through which we seek to 
 organize the life of God as it manifests it- 
 self in the souls of men and to enlist it in 
 the service of the world. Under such condi- 
 tions the desire for salvation becomes at once 
 [110] 
 
SALVATION 
 
 honest and honorable. The means may be 
 personal, but the motive and the end are 
 both alike social. It is deliverance from the 
 sin of selfishness and from all that would 
 deaden the conscience or pervert the will. 
 Such deliverance is not achieved through 
 faith but through character. It is not pur- 
 chased for us by another's death; it is some- 
 thing which we must work out for ourselves, 
 always with fear and trembling lest we prove 
 insufficient for the task, and yet always with 
 the assurance that in every effort to make 
 our lives of service to the world, it is God 
 who works in us both to will and to do his 
 good pleasure. 
 
 [Ill] 
 
Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have 
 entered into the heart of man the things which God 
 hath prepared for them that love him. 
 
 1 Corinthians II, 9. 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE 
 
 ONE of the most absorbing questions 
 which have baffled and perplexed the 
 human mind throughout the ages has been 
 as to the nature of that life eternal which 
 has been the substance of the hopes and 
 dreams of devout men and women. What 
 is the secret of the life immortal? How 
 shall we solve the mystery which awaits us 
 there beyond death? Unfortunately, some 
 of our most cherished beliefs are incapable 
 of either proof or disproof. We are obliged 
 to content ourselves with a reasonable prob- 
 ability. Such is our faith in a future life. 
 As Tennyson has said: 
 
 "Thou canst not prove that thou art immortal, no, 
 Nor yet that thou art mortal — 
 For nothing worth proving can be proven, 
 Nor yet disproven." 
 
 The Unitarian belief in immortality isi 
 
 simply the inevitable corollary of their con- 
 
 [115] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 ception of life itself. If life is eternally pro- 
 gressive, progress upwards and onwards 
 forever, then death must be but an incident 
 in that endlessly progressive life. 
 
 There are two things which are impressed 
 upon us whenever we attempt to solve the 
 mystery which lies beyond the grave. One 
 is the recognition of the insuperable obstacles 
 by which every such attempt is beset. For 
 centuries men have sought to peer within the 
 veil. And with what result? The scenes 
 and events of the life immortal remain 
 shrouded in impenetrable mystery. No-one 
 has yet returned from that mysterious realm 
 to gratify our curiosity. Communications 
 which purport to come from the friends that 
 have gone before, although vouched for by 
 Sir Oliver Lodge and others, are couched in 
 the language of today and tell us little that 
 is not already present in our own or another's 
 consciousness. It cannot be affirmed that 
 such communications are impossible. No 
 human being is sufficiently well informed to 
 make such an assertion. What we can say 
 is that thus far these alleged communications 
 [116] 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE 
 
 have been singularly disappointing. May it 
 not be that there is infinite wisdom underly- 
 ing this apparent inscrutabiUty of the be- 
 yond? May it not be a beneficent uncer- 
 tainty? If it were possible to make voyages 
 of discovery into that other world and to 
 chart its mysteries, could we bear to do any- 
 thing else? If we knew that we could enter 
 into communication with the friends who 
 have gone before, should we not be forever 
 besieging the portals of that other world for 
 such communications? And would this not 
 lead to the utter abandonment of the inter- 
 ests and activities of the life that now 
 is? One cannot escape the conviction that 
 if God had intended that we should know 
 the details of that hfe he would have made 
 it easier for them to be ascertained. If he 
 has not made it easier for us, may it not be 
 because he does not wish to have the inter- 
 ests of this life overshadowed by the dis- 
 tractions of the next? We must live our 
 lives "One world at a time." "Otherwise," 
 as Kant has said, "God and eternity, with 
 their infinite majesty, would stand cease- 
 [117] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 lessly before our eyes." We could think of 
 nothing else. It may be that the benefi- 
 cence of this present life is attested by what 
 is denied quite as much as by what is given. 
 A second impression made upon us by the 
 attempts to fathom the secrets of that other 
 life is that the reality must surpass anything 
 that the mind can formulate or the imagina- 
 tion conceive. In the words of Isaiah, which 
 have their echo in St. Paul, "Since the begin- 
 ning of the world, men have not heard, nor 
 perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye 
 seen, — what God hath prepared for him that 
 waiteth upon him." How pathetic have 
 been the attempts of devout men to behold 
 the invisible and to portray the indescribable. 
 The Indian with his happy hunting ground, 
 the Goth with his Valhalla of feasting and 
 fighting, the Oriental with his dream of an- 
 nihilation or absorption and the Christian 
 with his vision of a city with walls of jasper, 
 gates of pearl and streets of gold, all attest 
 the inabihty of the human imagination to 
 grasp the reality of that other life. We look 
 up from these various pictures, with their 
 [118] 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE 
 
 material crudity and spiritual poverty, with 
 the conviction that that life must be infinitely 
 grander than this or God's work has resulted 
 in an anti-climax. In the words of Sir 
 Oliver Lodge: "I will not believe that it is 
 given to man to have thoughts nobler or 
 loftier than the real truth of things." 
 
 Let us turn from the vision to the reality. 
 If, as we believe, all worlds are God's worlds 
 and all hfe is one, then we must be already 
 living the eternal life. As Dr. Fosdick has 
 said, "If man is immortal at all, he is immor- 
 tal now." Eternal life is not a possession 
 conferred at death; it is a present endow- 
 ment. This is the conviction which is grad- 
 ually taking possession of the minds of 
 thinking people. They are giving less 
 thought to what is to become of them after 
 death and more to what is happening to 
 them here and now. What kind of a life 
 are we actually living today? What sort of 
 characters are we forming in the midst of our 
 daily activities? Are we living so as to 
 make it worth while for God to permit us to 
 live forever? If so, can we doubt that he 
 [119] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 will make it possible for us to live forever? 
 These are the questions which men are pon- 
 dering even though they may shrink from 
 giving expression to their hopes and fears. 
 What they are not always conscious of is 
 that this comes nearer to the thought of Jesus 
 than much that has passed as the teaching of 
 the church. When the young man came to 
 him and asked, "What good thing shall I 
 do that I may have eternal life?" he was not 
 contemplating impending death. He was 
 never more alive. And when Jesus an- 
 swered, "If thou wouldst enter into life, keep 
 the commandments," he also was thinking 
 of life, not death. To him, entering upon 
 life was synonymous with life eternal. It 
 was something that could be experienced 
 here and now, not something for which we 
 must wait until we have shuffled off this mor- 
 tal coil. According to Jesus, until one be- 
 comes conscious of the eternal character of 
 this present life, he has not begun to live. 
 "He that heareth my word and believeth on 
 him that sent me hath (already) everlasting 
 life." Only through this faith in the end- 
 [120] 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE 
 
 less character of the life we are now living 
 can we claim the victory over death and the 
 grave. 
 
 Such a faith is a matter of conviction 
 rather than of proof. It is the result of ac- 
 tual experience rather than of logical deduc- 
 tion. One might prove that life survives 
 death without proving that it is eternal. It 
 might survive for a time and then fade away. 
 One might prove that the human soul is in- 
 destructible without proving that the con- 
 sciousness of personal identity will be pre- 
 served. The soul may be reabsorbed into 
 the source whence it came. One might 
 prove that Jesus arose from the dead and 
 ascended bodily into heaven without prov- 
 ing that a similar destiny awaits mankind. 
 Such an experience would mark him as a 
 unique personality, and as such he would 
 naturally experience a unique destiny. But 
 one cannot demonstrate the real quality of 
 the life that we are living without proving 
 its eternal character. The disciples be- 
 came conscious of the power of the endless 
 life in Jesus and they refused to believe that 
 [121] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 death could have dominion over him. It is 
 the consciousness of this same deathless 
 qualitjT- in the lives of those we know best and 
 love most which assures us that, for them 
 also, death cannot be the end. But if for 
 them, why not for all? For death 
 
 "Can only take away the mortal breath; 
 
 And life, commencing here, 
 
 Is but the prelude to its full career." 
 
 If we would assure ourselves of the power 
 of this faith, we must observe its effects upon 
 the lives of those who have cherished it. 
 Their name is legion, for it has been the in- 
 spiration of the saints and martj^rs of every 
 age and race. Nowhere do we find it more 
 clearly exhibited than in the life of the great 
 apostle. Although he was not one of the 
 original disciples and had been deprived of 
 the privilege of walking with Jesus and talk- 
 ing with him during his brief ministry, he 
 came nearer to his thought than any of 
 the chosen twelve. Furthermore his letters 
 were written prior to the earliest of the gos- 
 pel narratives and therefore before the myths 
 [122] 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE 
 
 and legends which came to be associated with 
 Jesus had gained wide acceptance. He 
 knew nothing of the virgin birth and the 
 bodily resurrection, and yet for him Jesus 
 was not dead, but alive forevermore. There 
 is no New Testament writer whose testimony 
 is given more emphatically or more consist- 
 ently in favor of this power of the endless 
 Hfe. 
 
 The first effect of this faith was to make 
 St. Paul utterly indifferent to all earthly 
 vicissitudes. As long as he could carry on 
 the work to which he had dedicated himself, 
 he cared nothing about the persecution and 
 suffering to which he was subjected. They 
 were evidence that he had been permitted 
 to share the tribulations of the Master and 
 might expect, therefore, to share his glory. 
 He might suffer, but he must not sin. He 
 might be beaten and imprisoned and endure 
 all manner of evil, but he must not renounce 
 the cause of Christ and so crucify him afresh. 
 For, as he wrote to the Roman church, "The 
 wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is 
 eternal life." 
 
 [123] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 A second effect of this same faith was 
 Paul's contempt for death and all its attend- 
 ant evils. Writing to his friends in the 
 Philippian church he states that it matters 
 not to him whether he live or die, if so be 
 Christ is magnified in his body, "for to live 
 is Christ, to die is gain." To the Corinthians 
 he writes: "For we are confident, willing 
 rather to be absent from the body and to be 
 present with the Lord." At times his atti- 
 tude is that of mingled challenge and exulta- 
 tion as in the familiar cry, "O death, where 
 is thy sting; O grave, where is thy victory?" 
 Everywhere there is the same sublime disre- 
 gard, fearing neither death nor life, nor 
 things present nor things to come, if only he 
 remained obedient to the heavenly vision. 
 
 This faith, while conspicuous in the great 
 apostle, was not peculiar to him. It has mani- 
 fested its power in all ages. We witness the 
 same heroic spirit asserting itself again and 
 again during those terrible days when the 
 church was prostrate under the heel of a 
 Domitian or a Nero. There is something to 
 be reckoned with in a faith which takes rich 
 [124] 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE 
 
 and poor, master and slave, patrician and 
 peasant, and transforms all alike into heroes 
 and martyrs. They might renounce their 
 property but they would not renounce their 
 religion. They might be deprived of their 
 liberty but they could not be deprived of 
 their faith. They v^ent into the arena with 
 hymns of praise upon their lips. They were 
 torn by wild beasts and mangled by scarcely 
 less brutal gladiators, and yet they retained 
 their faith that their affliction, which endured 
 but for a moment, would work for them a far 
 more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. 
 Persecution might destroy the body ; it could 
 not destroy the soul. And when, at last, 
 they should be absent from the body, they 
 would be at home with their Lord. 
 
 If, at times, this faith seems wholly absent 
 from the world of today, it is not because it 
 has lost its power but because men have lost 
 their grip upon it or abandoned it altogether. 
 Those who heed the apostolic injunction and 
 lay hold upon life eternal find that it has 
 lost none of its old-time efficacy. Make it 
 a this world reality, not a next world expec- 
 [125] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 tation, and all fear of death will be swallowed 
 up in the consciousness of life. Such a faith 
 does not bid us court death, but live each day 
 as though we knew that we were to live for- 
 ever. It does not bid us renounce our 
 worldly possessions, but use them as means 
 to the attainment of a higher life. It does 
 not bid us go into the arena and fight with 
 beasts in order to prove our faith, but it bids 
 us take our stand as immortal souls in the 
 midst of the arena of life and to wage an 
 eternal warfare against everything that 
 would drag us down to the brute level. 
 Without this faith, we might regard this 
 earthly life as a sort of pleasure trip, pro- 
 longed for twenty or forty or seventy years, 
 after which we go hence to be no more. 
 Under such conditions it would be the part of 
 wisdom to crowd it with creature comforts 
 and bodily satisfactions. We should eat, 
 drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. 
 But sustained and strengthened by this faith, 
 believing that we are not pilgrims or stran- 
 gers but children of the household of God, life 
 becomes real and earnest and the grave is no 
 [126] 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE 
 
 longer the goal. We experience a complete 
 trans valuation of values. We realize that 
 wealth and power are temporal; they will be 
 left behind. Character is eternal; it alone 
 endures. Creature comforts are fleeting 
 and transitory; they will pass away. The 
 things of the spirit are permanent ; they can 
 never fade. Even death itself is temporal. 
 It is simply a door, opening into another and 
 larger room in the father's house, and life 
 becomes richer and more beautiful as we 
 journey through the many mansions which 
 he hath prepared for those that love him. 
 This has been well called "practicing im- 
 mortalitj^" Those who have learned to live 
 their lives amid the seen and the temporal 
 in the spirit of one whose soul has been 
 touched by the unseen and the eternal, find 
 that this faith has lost none of its power. 
 It is capable of transforming the lives of 
 men today just as it transformed the hves 
 of Jesus and Paul and the holy men of old. 
 Working day by day in the light of an end- 
 less life, we become builders for eternity. 
 The apparent loss of spiritual energ\% the 
 [127] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 seeming discrepancy between the world's ef- 
 fort and its actual achievement, the manifest 
 disparity between virtue and happiness, or 
 wickedness and misery, the blasted hopes, 
 the disappointed ambitions, the shattered af- 
 fections, all of which are so apparent when- 
 ever we attempt to view this life as an end in 
 itself, disappear at once when we learn to 
 view it as part of a larger whole. In that 
 larger life the lost spiritual power is re- 
 gained, the world processes come to an ade- 
 quate fruition, the justice of the world is 
 vindicated and the broken arcs of our little 
 lives come to their perfect round. As 
 Browning says : 
 
 "All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good 
 
 shall existj 
 Not its semblance, but itself — 
 When eternity affirms the conception of an hour." 
 
 It requires no argument to prove that a 
 life lived in this way, "under the aspect of 
 eternity," cannot fail to give satisfaction. 
 In the words of Aristotle: "Live as nearly 
 as you can the immortal life and it will prove 
 [128] 
 
THE FUTURE LIFE 
 
 itself. Live the kind of life you ought to 
 live if you are to live forever and all your 
 doubts will disappear." Live it for a single 
 day and it will be abundantly worth while. 
 Live it for any number of days and it will 
 bring with it a strength of character, a moral 
 courage, a spiritual peace which the world 
 can neither give nor take away. 
 
 [129] 
 
CONCLUSION 
 ARE UNITARIANS EVANGELICAL? 
 
 THE question with which we began — 
 Who are the Unitarians? — is now an- 
 swered. We have considered their origin, 
 their history and their behefs. It has been 
 demonstrated that a creedless church is not 
 necessarily a faithless church. It could be 
 demonstrated just as easily that this free 
 faith has ever articulated itself in terms of 
 upright life and noble character. Call the 
 roll of the good and the great among the men 
 and women of America and one will be sur- 
 prised to find how many of them have be- 
 longed to the Unitarian church. A church 
 which has numbered among its adherents 
 William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edward Everett 
 Hale, and which still counts among its most 
 devoted members Charles W. Eliot and 
 William Howard Taft cannot be ignored. 
 Its constituency must be weighed rather than 
 counted. We can say without boasting, for 
 [130] 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 it is admitted by those who love us least, 
 that nowhere in any community can one find 
 a group of men and women more renowned 
 for breadth of mind, strength of will and in- 
 tegrity of character, than those who have as- 
 sociated themselves together for the purpose 
 of organizing a Unitarian church. 
 
 For more than a century it has been the 
 privilege of these churches to mediate be- 
 tween an unintelligent faith and an irrelig- 
 ious culture. They have demonstrated that 
 men can be religious without being supersti- 
 tious and hberal without being irreverent. 
 This has been a task for strong men, for 
 self-reliant men, for men who have dared to 
 do their own thinking and to abide by the 
 consequences of their own thought. This 
 may explain, even if it does not justify, what 
 is often an occasion for concern among lib- 
 eral Christians, — the relatively small number 
 of liberal churches. It is lamented that it is 
 not a popular faith, that it does not appeal 
 to the multitudes. Since when has truth 
 been determined by majorities or the right 
 b)^ popular vote? Ours is a pioneer move- 
 [131] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 ment. Our mission has been to blaze the 
 trail over which others now walk in perfect 
 security. When we become popular we 
 shall have ceased to be pioneers. 
 
 Scarcely less common among the miscon- 
 ceptions of Unitarianism is the statement 
 that it is an easy faith. On the contrary it 
 is the hardest of the hard. It dares to dis- 
 pense with the helps upon which other 
 churches place so much rehance. It is 
 harder to think for oneself than to have one's 
 thinking done by pope or presbyter or priest. 
 It is harder to formulate one's own belief 
 than to accept a creed formulated by synod 
 or council or church. It is harder to deter- 
 mine for oneself what is right and then to do 
 it at whatever cost than to conform to some 
 external standard of conduct. And it is a 
 thousandfold harder to face the inevitable 
 and unescapable penalties for wrong-doing 
 than to have those penalties remitted through 
 faith in the atoning death of an innocent man. 
 It is this reliance of the individual upon him- 
 self, upon his own reason and conscience and 
 will, that makes the Unitarian faith so diffi- 
 [132] 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 cult to accept and to live up to, and yet it is 
 this self-reliance which makes it abundantly 
 worth while. 
 
 But is such a faith evangelical? This is 
 the question asked by those who are respon- 
 sible for the policy of exclusion in religion 
 and answered in the negative. Our answer 
 will depend upon what we mean by evangel- 
 ical. It may mean a message which is Hter- 
 ally "good news," or one which is in accord 
 with the teachings of Jesus as contained in 
 the gospel narratives. 
 
 We know how the traditional scheme of 
 salvation, with its wretched story of sin and 
 failure and defeat, fares when subjected to 
 this twofold test. Is it good news? Can 
 one who hears the story for the first time ac- 
 cept it as glad tidings of great joy? Is it 
 not rather a gospel of despair? Again, is 
 it in accord with the teachings of Jesus? 
 On the contrary it is in direct opposition to 
 those teachings. If Jesus were here today 
 and were to be judged by his teachings as 
 recorded in the four gospels, he would not be 
 eligible to sit in the councils of the so-called 
 evangelical churches. 
 
 [133] 
 
WHO ARE THE UNITARIANS? 
 
 How is it with the Unitarian message as 
 outhned in these pages, — God our Father, 
 man our brother, Jesus our moral and spirit- 
 ual leader, human life a progress in that 
 Christlikeness of character which is salvation, 
 and human destiny that same progress con- 
 tinued upward and onward forever? If we 
 take the word literally, it is certainly evan- 
 gehcal, for it has brought glad tidings of 
 great joy to men in all ages and the world 
 over. If we take the derived meaning as 
 implying conformity to the teachings of 
 Jesus, it is also evangelical, for it is more 
 than conformity; it is practical identity. It 
 is a fair question whether the Unitarian 
 church, ( and its sister church, the Universal- 
 ist) is not the only church which has a right 
 to call itself evangelical; for it is the only 
 church which has dared to preserve in all its 
 simple beauty the evangel which Jesus pro- 
 claimed in far-off Galilee, — the good tidings 
 of the coming of the kingdom of God, and 
 of man's fitness for citizenship therein. We 
 are not ashamed of this gospel of Christ, and 
 by our fidelity to it we are willing to be 
 judged. 
 
 [134] 
 

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