YALE
DIVINITY SCHOOL
LIBRARY

Gift of
The Reverend Williston Walker

CONTENTS.

PAGS
I. Historical Introduction  i
II. The Doctrine of Man  35
III. Concerning God  58
IV. The Bible  84
V. Christianity  109
VI. Concerning Jesus  137
VII The Future Life  164
VIII. The Great Salvation  191
IX. Loss and Gain  217

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OLD AND NEW

UNITARIAN BELIEF

JOHN WHITE CHADWICK
..M. HARVARD UNIVERSITY J MINISTER OF THE SECOND UNITARIAN SOCIETY OF
BROOKLYN, N.Y. ; AUTHOR OF " THE BIBLE OF TO-DAY," " THE FAITH
OF REASON," "THE MAN JESUS," "a BOOK OF POEMS," ETC.

BOSTON
Geo. H. Ellis, 141 Franklin Street
1894

COPYRIGHT
By Geo. H. Ellis
1894

CEO. H. ELLIS, PRINTER, 141 FRANKLIN ST-, BOSTON.

^ngcrifcefc

The Unitarian Family on Earth and in Heaven, and
especially to those Men of Force and Genius who
have been my Teachers from my Youth up, and
to those Friends of my Society in Brooklyn
who for Thirty Years have given me
so freely of their Trust and Love.

PREFACE.

The chapters of this book, with the exception
of the first and last, were written for my Brooklyn
congregation as a series of monthly lecture sermons
during the season extending from November, 1893,
to May, 1894. The interest which they awakened
and the satisfaction which they gave have seemed
to justify their publication, and I have thought that
a book containing them might mark appropriately
the conclusion of my thirtieth year with a people
whose generous loyalty to me has been more beau
tiful than words can say. While none of the chap
ters is as good as I could wish, some of them, I
know, are not so good as others, because of slacker
health and spirits and more serious interruptions
than the common run. But I have gone over them
all with care, and tried to better what I could not
radically change. In matters of pure fact I have
sought to follow the most excellent authorities,
verifying every particular of which I had any doubt,
and yet, it may be, trusting too much a memory

VI PREFACE
that has generally served me well enough to deserve
a generous confidence. It was unavoidable, from
the nature of the subject, that the lines should
often cross each other, and that there should be
some repetition. But this defect has its advantages
in the better recollection of my matter to which it
may contribute in my readers' minds. One does
not learn by once reading anything, but by many
repetitions ; and I have written for learners, not for
those already well informed. Herein is my excuse
for the further repetitions of my first chapter and
my last. They are voluntary and deliberate, with
a view to making a more definite impression. I
must beg my readers not to be discouraged in the
porch of each chapter from the second to the eighth,
but to go on, hoping to find a better welcome
farther in ; for in each case I have written the con
cluding part, dealing with recent times, with much
more heart and hope than the preceding. I dare
not hope that my treatment of opinions more or
less different from my own will in all cases be
accepted by those holding such opinions as entirely
fair; but I have meant to write "with malice
towards none, with charity for all." It may be that

PREFACE Vll
some of my Unitarian brethren will demur at my
conception of Unitarian progress and my measure
of its rate. In such estimates we are all of us more
or less liable to what Emerson called "the subjec
tive twinkle " ; but I have never consciously allowed
my wish to be the father of my thought. If there
is one thing which I hope my book will do over and
above all others, it is that it may furnish some cor
rection of a very general impression in the Unita
rian mind that Unitarianism is "the same yester
day, to-day, and forever." We make much of the
changes which other creeds have undergone, and
sometimes think and speak as if we had ourselves
been mainly influential in bringing these changes
about. Something we have done, no doubt ; but in
the mean time the same Time Spirit which has been
at work on the other creeds has been at work upon
ours also, and the changes it has undergone have
not been less than theirs. But so much more unify
ing, in the long run, is intellectual liberty than
dogma, prescription, and authority, that it may well
be doubted whether any Protestant sect is so well
agreed at present on the main lines of its belief and
faith as " the unsectarian sect called Unitarians."

Vlll PREFACE
The first chapter was originally prepared as a
lecture in a course on the different Churches of
Christendom. It has been printed separately and
in a book by the British and Foreign Unitarian
Association ; but, as printed here, it has been con
siderably changed. The concluding chapter was
prepared as an address before the Middle States
Conference, and was read at Meadville, Pa., June 12,
1894, in connection with the fiftieth anniversary of
the Meadville Theological School. Its tone would
have been less critical, and more joyous and en
couraging, if I could then have foreseen how we
should be caught up at our Saratoga Conference
into a sweet heaven of agreement as to the things
commonly believed among us, and a common spirit
of inclusive liberality.
If the scope and purpose of the book, considered
as a whole, were those of Dr. J. H. Allen's ' Uni
tarian Movement since the Reformation' recently
published, it would be absurd for me to put it forth.
But they are very different; and I am glad that
I can refer my readers to a book so rich and full
and interesting in its presentation of the story of our
historical development. I was much indebted to his

PREFACE IX
earlier works in the preparation of my lectures, and
to his latest in their last revision. I must also ex
press my indebtedness to Dr. Alexander Gordon for
four admirable articles on Servetus and the Socini in
the Theological Review, and add that they should
be made more accessible than they are in the pages
of an extinct periodical. What shall I say more,
but, after the manner of many writers, in the words
of the Maccabean annalist, "If I have done well
and as is fitting the story, it is that which I de
sired; but if slenderly and meanly, it is that which
I could attain unto " ?

I.
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION.
Unitarianism, as a doctrine of the unity of God,
is much older than the Christian Church, not only
in the direct line of development from Judaism, but
on various subsidiary lines. This is true of the ex
plicit doctrine, and it is much more widely true
of that implied in many forms of primitive religion.
The heroic company of scholars which has argued
for a primitive Monotheism, from which the various
polytheisms of the world were a decadence, has not
been wholly given over to believe a lie. Their crude
result has been the clumsy symbol of a striving after
unity, or tendency to it, in the most primitive and
polytheistic forms of worship and belief. Thanks to
this tendency or striving, the Vedic Hymns elevate
Indra or Varuna into a prominence that sometimes
leaves the other deities of the pantheon with their
occupations gone. Behind the dualistic strife of
Ahrimanes and Ahura-Mazda a power is conceived
that reconciles their opposition, and in the Greek
mythology we have an ultimate fate to which the
Olympian gods must yield. Underlying and over
topping all the different theological schemes, with
their multiplicity of gods and goddesses, there was
the sense of the Divine, of that mysterious power

2 UNITARIAN BELIEF
which was at the heart of things, coming to clearer
consciousness in the thought of philosophic minds,
but seldom wholly absent from the most simple and
untaught. That the early Christian Church was Unitarian in
the sense of being Monotheistic is evident from the
fact that the early Christians were mainly Jews ; the
earliest, Jews without exception. Whatever Jesus
might have thought as to its being no robbery for
him to be equal with God, to say nothing of identity,
for him to have broached such an opinion would
have brought his ministry to such a sudden termina
tion that we should never have so much as heard his
name. The fishermen of Galilee, equally with the
scholars of Jerusalem, would have recoiled from such
presumption with immeasurable distrust; and there
would have been no need of any civil process to
punish it : an outburst of spontaneous rage would
have anticipated Pilate's acquiescence. The simple
fact that the first theoretic conception of Jesus was
that which regarded him as the Jewish Messiah
makes the idea of his original deity absurd, for the
idea of deity no more entered into the conception
of the Messiah than the idea of comfort entered
into the later doctrine of eternal hell.
The deification of Jesus was a very gradual proc
ess. To say that the beginnings can be found in
the New Testament is not to claim for them a very
primitive Christianity, for the New Testament books
took just about a century to come full circle, — from
50 to 150 a.d. Paul's Epistles represent a more de
veloped form of the doctrine of Christ's nature than

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 3
do the Synoptic Gospels ; but this is only what we
should expect from what we know of Paul and his
relation to the early Church, and of the character of
the Synoptics, as the last result of a long process of
traditional aggregation. The highest point in either
of the three is found in the idea of a dignity and
office to be bestowed on Jesus as a reward of his
faithfulness, and through the medium of his death
and resurrection. That all the Epistles of Paul were
written before the first of the Synoptics shows, when
we consider how little the Epistles colored them,
how tenaciously the human side of Jesus held its
ground. As the deification proceeded, the Jews
were alienated more and more. In the Epistles of
Paul the process of exaltation is much further ad
vanced than in the Synoptics ; but it stops short
of actual deification, as does the Fourth Gospel also,
though that goes a little beyond Paul. The nature
of Christ was a matter of free speculation for the
next two hundred years, and even further on. Mid
way of the third century Sabellius advocated the
doctrine that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were
all emanations of the Logos, which he identified
with the Supreme God. For a time this quaternity,
this fourfold mystery of the divine nature, threatened
to be the orthodox doctrine ; but it was finally con
demned as heretical, and in its place the doctrine of
the Nicene Creed was set up, — namely, that Christ
was of the same substance with the Father, and was
the product of his eternal generation. The great
advocate of this doctrine at Nicsea, in 325 a.d.,
was Athanasius ; and its great opponent was Arius.

4 UNITARIAN BELIEF
Time was when the majority of Unitarians cast in
their lot with Arius, and those who were inclined to
question his superiority to Athanasius were received
with much suspicion and alarm. But the preference
is now quite the other way, not as fully accepting
the thought of Athanasius, but as thinking that it
had probably more philosophic truth in it than the
Arian conception. This tendency has been inter
preted by some orthodox critics, whose wish is
father of their thought, as a retreat upon the or
thodox position. But, in truth, the late attraction of
Athanasius for Unitarians has been his teaching of
the humanity of Jesus. If he affirmed his deity, he
affirmed his humanity with equal energy ; while
Arius makes him a being sui generis, — not a non-
natural man, but a non-natural God ; not quite so
old as God, but so nearly that that Arius would not
say "there was a time when he was not," but
"there was when he was not." It is interesting and
significant that Dr. Hedge, sympathizing with the
Athanasian doctrine rather than with that of Arius,
would have had the Unitarians call themselves Hu
manitarians. The animating motive of both Arius
and Athanasius was much the same, — to steer clear
of Ditheism, — the affirmation of two gods, — while
still exalting Jesus to the highest possible degree.
But, dreading one and the same evil, the two parties
took different methods of avoiding it, and in their
hot insistence, each on its own way, made every
corner of the Roman Empire ring with angry alter
cation. When this at length had died away, there was

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 5
very little Unitarianism, as opposed to Trinitarian-
ism, for some dozen centuries, though there was
here and there a good deal of earnest criticism of
the creed of our traditional orthodoxy, some of
whose doctrines were slowly getting themselves es
tablished all along this weary time. The doctrine
of the Atonement had to wait till the eleventh cen
tury for anything approximating to its modern form.
Considered doctrinally, the Reformation was a
reactionary movement ; and its reaction was to those
opinions and beliefs which were most horrible in
the earlier centuries, which had most oppressed the
mind and heart of Catholic Christendom, and which
had been shorn of something of their hatefulness.
As for the doctrine of the Trinity, Luther accepted
it by sheer force of will ; Melanchthon would not
consider it too seriously ; Zwingli was sounder (less
tritheistic) upon this point than Calvin himself, while
he differed from him by the heavens' width in regard
to total depravity, finding in every child a new-born
Adam, thanks to the power of Jesus' death and res
urrection, and matched the Free Religionists of our
own time in his abundant sympathy with the relig
ions of the heathen world. Castellio, one of the
finest spirits of his age, at first befriended by Calvin,
afterwards became the victim of his implacable en
mity for his free handling of predestination, and was
so beset that in his lonely banishment he was liter
ally starved to death. The name of Servetus is
much better known. With all his brilliant qualities,
he was somewhat crotchety, or, in more precise lan
guage, " one of those bold spirits who sometimes

6 UNITARIAN BELIEF
seize hold at once, and, as by instinct, of high and
rich truths, but are wanting in the depth and sobri
ety of reasoning power necessary for the working
out of a great system." His system has been de
scribed by M. Reville, a competent critic, as a crude
mixture of rationalism, pantheism, materialism, and
theosophy. Generally hailed by Unitarians as "one
of themselves," if he had been, the shame of Calvin
would have been less in putting him to death. In
truth, he would have had him beheaded, and not
burned ; but, as he had done his best to hand him
over to the Roman Inquisition, which would have
tortured him first and burned him afterwards, he
should not be too much admired on this account.
So far as a matter somewhat obscure and difficult
can be made out, Servetus held an opinion which
was much the same as that of Sabeillus. A man is
never sure of orthodoxy who does a little thinking
for himself. This was Bishop Huntington's trouble
when he left the Unitarians : before he knew it, he
had a quaternity upon his hands, as Dr. Hedge
made clear enough. One thing is certain, — that
Servetus was no Arian. He said distinctly that
Arius was "not equal to the glory of Christ," —
"gloria? Christi incapacimus." And as little Arian
were the Socini, Laglius and Faustus, uncle and
nephew, whose name has nicknamed English Unita
rians to the present time, though long since it
ceased to indicate their opinions as obviously as the
name Calvinism has ceased to indicate the opinions
of the modern orthodox. But I do not know of
any name upon their calendar of which Unitarians

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 7
have more reason to be proud, not even Channing's,
than the name Socinus, such a leap the uncle and
nephew of this name made out of the darkness of
the ancient and the mediseval into the light and
beauty of the modern world. It was no petty or
equivocal arraignment that the younger brought
against the orthodox creed : it was a sweeping one,
without paltering or obscurantism ; and the scope of
it included the doctrines of the deity of Christ, the
Trinity, the personality of the devil, total depravity,
vicarious atonement, and eternal hell. Moreover, he
had the social temper of Priestley and Channing,
their hatred of oppression, their sacred passion for
a kingdom of heaven upon earth.
Poland and Transylvania had been troubled with
dissentients from the doctrine of the Trinity before
the burning of Servetus in 1553; and in 1558
Georgio Blandrata went to Poland, and heaped such
fuel on the fire that in a little while there was a gen
eral conflagration and a schism in the Church, the
year 1565 seeing the establishment of the first Uni
tarian church that Christendom had seen since Con-
stantine, throwing his sword into the Athanasian
scale, had made the other kick the beam. The his
tory of Polish Unitarianism is a history of an efficient
organization, and a success so positive that it drew
upon itself the arm of persecution with its utmost
strength, a decree of expulsion (1658) marking the
first centennial of Blandrata's arrival in Poland.
The exiles went in all directions, those that went
to Transylvania finding there a goodly fellowship
which had sprung into being almost simultaneously

8 UNITARIAN BELIEF
with the beginnings of the Polish Church. To-day
it nourishes a vigorous life, with more than a hun
dred congregations, and cherishes the name of Fran
cis David as did the Polish Church that of Faustus
Socinus above all names in its eventful history. It
was Socinus who took up the work of Blandrata in
Poland, and carried it along to larger issues ; while
Blandrata went to Transylvania, first to establish
the new faith, and afterwards to desert it in its day
of trial, even allowing himself to be made the instru
ment of David's imprisonment, which soon resulted
in his death.
By this time (1579) certain Anabaptists had al
ready borne their fagots to St. Paul's Cross, in Lon
don, and been burned there for the wrongfulness of
their opinions and the glory of God ; and among
their opinions thus cruelly opposed were some strik
ingly Unitarian. For like opinions Joan Boucher
perished at the stake in 1550; and because "the
new man always hates the newest, and the seceder
from the seceder is as damnable as the pope him
self," we have in the same reign (Tudor Mary's),
from one John Philpot, Archdeacon of Winchester,
an apology " written for Spittynge on an Arian, with
an invective against the Arians, the veri naturall
children of Antichrist." " Apology " must here be
understood as justification. The ecclesiastical spit-
ter and the Arian were both in the same prison for
heresy. It was a very characteristic piece of busi
ness. The progressive orthodox of our own time
are much given to spitting, in a figurative but not
agreeable manner, upon those who are so unfortu-

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 9
nate, or fortunate, as to be a little more progressive
than themselves. That good Queen Bess might not
be any whit behind her father and her sister in her
disrespect for Arians, she burned one in 1583 and
another in 1585 ; and in 1612 two others — Bartholo
mew Legate and Edward Wightman — had the dis
tinction of being the last two persons burned for
heresy on English soil.
As yet, apparently, the Socinian influence had not
been felt in England ; but signs of it began soon after
to appear. The Socinian books came in ; and the
Presbyterian Synods, which midway of the seven
teenth century constituted the established Church,
forbade their sale and importation. The exclusion
was imperfect, and many persons were infected with
the dreadful taint. One of these was John Biddle
(spelled Bidle at the time), who made a bad begin
ning at Oxford, in that, as we are told, he was " more
determined by reason than by authority." Frankly
anti-trinitarian, in 1654 all his books, and they were
many, were ordered to be burned by the common
hangman ; and but for the interposition of Cromwell
he might have shared their fate. As it was, when
Cromwell had concluded his great work, the doughty
man had no defender, and was thrown into a loath
some prison, which soon ended his career. In 1655,
the year following that in which Biddle's incendiary
books were subjected to a homoeopathic treatment,
Dr. Owen, the rigidest as Baxter was the most liberal
of dissenters, said there was "not a city, a town,
and scarce a village in England where some of this
poison was not poured forth." Among those who

IO UNITARIAN BELIEF
took kindly to this poison were John Milton, John
Locke, Sir Isaac Newton, and Dr. Samuel Clarke
easily first among the leading intellects of their
time, though their Unitarianism was more of the
Arian than the Socinian type. They were no more
Trinitarians than Dr. Lyman Abbott, and believed
in the deity of Christ no more than he ; but they
believed much less in his humanity. Another
sturdy Unitarian was William Penn, who stated his
objections to the doctrine of the Trinity very for
cibly in a tract entitled 'The Sandy Foundation
Shaken.' With the downfall of the Stuarts in 1688 the " era
of toleration" succeeded to the era of persecution
and disability. Baptists, Independents, and Presby
terians built their chapels east and west. But, while
the Baptists and the Independents seemed to have
learned no lesson of religious breadth and toleration
in the school of narrowness and persecution to
which they had been sent so long, it was different
with the Presbyterians. Their chapels generally
were established upon what are known as "open
trusts." That is, they were not tied down to any
creed or articles. Left free to read the Bible at first
hand, they very soon began to wander from the
strictness of the Westminster Confession. One
hundred and seventy years ago they had got along
as far as the Professor Briggs contingent of Ameri
can Presbyterians have got now (1894). They had
had enough of predestination, whether as election or
reprobation ; and the doctrine of the Trinity fell into
general neglect. The state of things was very simi-

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION I I
lar to that in America at the beginning of this cen
tury, when hundreds of Congregationalists and many
of their ministers had ceased to care for or to preach
the traditional dogmas, yet had not broken with
them openly, but with this difference: while in
America the signal for a manlier attitude came from
without, as we shall see, in England it came from
one of the progressive Presbyterians, Joseph Priest
ley, the first great English Unitarian, a scholar, a
scientist, a discoverer, a reformer, of whom English
Unitarians have as good reason to be proud as
American Unitarians of Channing; though Priest
ley was a man of as much less exalted spiritual
genius than Channing as he was a man of more
restless scientific curiosity and intellectual range.
His theological position was the direct result of his
philosophy, which was the materialistic, associational,
necessarian philosophy of Hartley. His belief in
supernatural revelation was intense. He had an ab
solute distrust of reason as qualified to furnish an
adequate knowledge of religious things, and at the
same time a perfect confidence in reason as qualified
to prove this negative and to determine the contents
of the revelation. The doctrines of traditional or
thodoxy he exhibited as "Corruptions of Christian
ity," not finding them in the New Testament. He
made nothing of the natural argument for immor
tality, basing his hope entirely on the resurrection
of Jesus, and arguing with perfect logical consist
ency that the general bodily resurrection of the dead
will be as miraculous in every case as the resurrec
tion of Jesus. The Unitarianism of Priestley was, in

12 UNITARIAN BELIEF
fact, largely a reaction against the natural theology
of the eighteenth-century Deists. It was less ra
tional and progressive than that. And it tended
much more to the dogmatic hardness of a creed than
the Presbyterianism of " the Bible only " from which
it was evolved. It made religion as much a matter
of belief as it has ever been made. The hand of
Priestley has been heavy upon English Unitarian
ism. But nothing shows more clearly and impres
sively what libels labels may become, and how wide
the range of thought included in the Unitarian
name, than a comparison of Priestley's Unitarianism
with that of recent date. And nowhere else does
this inclusion come out so strikingly as in a compari
son of his thought with that of James Martineau, at
whose birth in 1805 Priestley's death was so recent
as the previous year. Martineau himself began with
the materialistic philosophy and necessarian ethics
of Priestley, but for forty years they have had no
sterner opposition than from him. And, while Priest
ley contended that belief in the Messiahship of Jesus
was the only essential of the Christian religion,
Martineau contends that Jesus neither was the Mes
siah nor conceived himself to be so, that the doc
trine of his Messiahship was one of the " Corruptions
of Christianity" which Priestley omitted from his
catalogue. Three other names stand out with Priestley's as
pre-eminent among the Unitarian founders of the
eighteenth century. They are Price and Belsham
and Lindsey. Price was not a Socinian, like Priest
ley and Belsham, in his theology, but an Arian ; yet

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 1 3
he was in thorough sympathy with Priestley's politi
cal ideas. He was an intimate and valued friend of
Benjamin Franklin, to whom he introduced Priestley
at the beginning of that scientific career of which
the discovery of oxygen was the proudest incident.
He was equally the valued friend of American inde
pendence, and, with Priestley, of the French Revo
lution, in its earlier manifestations. His public ad
vocacy of the Revolution drew upon him Burke's
celebrated 'Reflections' ; while Priestley's drew upon
him the mob which sacked his house in Birming
ham, and scattered his papers, and destroyed his
philosophical instruments, where now his statue
looks serenely down, as if he had forgotten or for
given every wrong. But Unitarianism as a distinct
organization in England derives neither from Price
nor Priestley, nor from Belsham, who was a loud
echo of Priestley's materialistic, necessarian Chris
tianity, but from Theophilus Lindsey. He was the
solitary contribution of the Established Church to
the new faith. There were hundreds in that Church
who agreed with him ; and a number of them got
together, and petitioned Parliament for some altera
tion of the creeds and articles that would enable
them to use them without mental reservation. The
petition was not even received. Whereupon all ex
cept Lindsey fell back upon their livings, fat or lean,
resolved to wait for better times, meantime to go on
using the words which they did not believe. So
could not he. He gave up his Yorkshire vicarage,
and went up to London with .£20, the proceeds of
his furniture and books ; and in an auction-room in

14 UNITARIAN BELIEF
Essex Street, just off the Strand, he started the first
Unitarian Church. There, shortly after, was built
the Essex Street Chapel, which still remains, the
Unitarian headquarters of to-day; and, speaking
there one morning in June, 1887, I felt myself to be
on holy ground, not only because of the denomina
tional association, but because Theophilus Lindsey
was one of the holiest of men, one of the gentlest,
purest, truest, that the world has ever known. Bel
sham was his successor, and thereby hangs a tale.
Priestley, homeless in England, came to America in
1794, and was instrumental in the organization of a
church in Philadelphia, which had lay-preaching till
1825, when Dr. Furness was installed its minister;
and he is now, in 1894, its pastor emeritus, having
brought his active ministry to an end in 1875. But
this was not the first Unitarian Society in America.
The first, like the first in England, and solitary as
that in this respect, had an Episcopalian reformer
for its minister, James Freeman, of King's Chapel,
the grandfather, by marriage, of James Freeman
Clarke. An English nobleman, travelling in this
country, — Lord Stanley or Lord Amberley, I have
forgotten which, — speaking of the King's Chapel
Prayer Book, said to Dr. Bellows, "I understand it
is our liturgy watered." "No," said Dr. Bellows,
"washed." The washing, or watering, was done in
1785, by Dr., then young Mr. Freeman, who ac
knowledged his indebtedness to Theophilus Lindsey
in his preface. In 1787 Mr. Freeman was installed
by his vestrymen, — he had been a lay-reader before
that, — no bishop being willing to lay his apostolic

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION I 5
hands upon a head so full of heresy. There were
other Episcopal churches which the new wine made
for a while somewhat unsteady in their gait, but
they all settled down at length into a sober acquies
cence. It was very different in the Congregational
churches. These furnished the Unitarian body with
nearly all its early churches in America, as the
Presbyterians furnished them with nearly all their
churches in England.
Ecclesiastically speaking, the Unitarian Church in
America is " the liberal wing of the great Congrega
tional body which founded the first colonies of New
England and gave the law to Church and State for
more than two hundred years." Twelve years ago
120 or more of our 366 Unitarian churches of that
date were on an historical basis of Puritan Congre
gationalism. They had all descended from Puritan
parishes ; and thirty-eight of them antedated the
year 1700, including the first church in Plymouth,
that of the Pilgrim Fathers. For many years before
the beginning of the present century Calvinism had
been undergoing a process of softening and abridg
ment in the New England churches. Since the be
ginning of the century this process had become more
general, and more conspicuous in its manifestations.
It especially characterized some of the ablest minis
ters in and around Boston. A class was thus formed
to which the name " Liberal Christians " was applied.
The meaning of this term was simply that they were
disposed to put a liberal construction on the Calvin
istic creed. Among the members of this class there
was no organized sympathy. They were generally

1 6 UNITARIAN BELIEF
Arminians, but so predominantly intel'ectual rather
than emotional, and so conservative in taste, that
Arminian Methodism had for them no attractions.
A smaller majority were dissenters from the Trinita
rian dogma. In regard to the rank of Jesus and the
nature of the atonement there was much less una
nimity. Liberal Christian ministers exchanged pul
pits freely with the so-called orthodox, and united
with them in all the ecclesiastical relations of the
time. Presently some of the more rigid of the or
thodox party began to see that Liberal Christianity
was silently but surely eating out the heart of Cal
vinism. The catastrophe would probably have come
a few years sooner but for the War of 1812, which
was of such absorbing interest that for the time the
dangers to which Calvinism was subject were forgot
ten. But peace between America and England had
hardly been proclaimed when war between Ortho
doxy and Liberalism was declared. The declaration
came from the orthodox side, — an article written
in the Panoplist by Jeremiah Evarts, father of the
Hon. William M. Evarts, written at the instance of
Dr. Jedediah Morse, its editor, whose 'Geography'
was a famous book in the forepart of the century.
It was, perhaps, some sharp reviews of that, in
which he fancied odium theologicum was present,
that stirred him up to make reprisals in a book
called 'American Unitarianism,' which was based
on Belsham's Life of Lindsey. And now you have
the tale which I said hung thereby, in speaking of
Belsham's succession to Lindsey's place and work.
Belsham's book was made up mainly of letters to

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 17
Lindsey by Dr. Freeman, Buckminster, and other
Boston Liberals. Morse's book, and, still more vig
orously and violently, Evarts's article, was bent on
showing the sympathy and identity of the American
Liberal Christians with the English Unitarians, and
on convicting the former of dishonesty in covertly
teaching or hypocritically concealing their opinions.
Finally, the article was a call upon all orthodox
Christians to come out from the Liberals, and deny
to them the Christian name and Christian fellowship.
Dr. Channing, who in 1815 was thirty-five years
old and had been for twelve years the beloved min
ister of the Federal Street Church in Boston, wrote
an elaborate letter in answer to Morse's article, deny
ing the general sympathy of his party with Priestley
and Belsham (they were not Socinians, but Arians,
for the most part, in their theory of Christ), but
claiming for the Socinian humanitarians the Christian
name, and all the rights and courtesies of Christian
fellowship. But it was his reply to Evarts's charge
of dishonesty and hypocrisy that showed what a re
serve of moral indignation his quiet modesty had long
concealed. His disclaimer was entirely rational, but
the event proved the mistakenness of the policy
which the Liberals had pursued. In periods of
transition, negation and affirmation should go hand
in hand. The policy of the Boston minister, who
was " mighty careful to tell no lies," always fails in
the long run. It is not enough to preach that which
you believe, as Channing and his party did, with
passionate sincerity. The negations must come out.
They had to, then and there.

1 8 UNITARIAN BELIEF
In conclusion, Channing pleaded earnestly against
the exclusive spirit which would deny the Christian
name, and shut out from Christian fellowship all
those who could not take the Calvinistic shibboleth
upon their lips. His pleading was in vain. The
controversy which had been so vigorously begun
went on for several years, and drew into it, on either
side, men of great ability. Many things were said
that showed how independent of each other are
theological soundness and the Christian spirit. In
the asperities of debate, in the injustice of parochial
divisions, there was blame enough on either side.
Scores of congregations were divided ; and hundreds
of the clergy and laity who should have been lifelong
friends were ranged in hostile camps and met each
other with indifferent greetings or averted eyes.
Channing's contribution to the controversy was
equally remarkable for the smallness of its bulk and
the weight of each particular item of the count.
There was one mighty sermon in Baltimore (1819)
at Jared Sparks's ordination ; and not long ago I
stood in the very church and pulpit in which it was
preached, and felt myself again on holy ground.
The pulpit's shape is not unlike that of a mortar,
and the sermon that was shot from it exploded like
a bomb in the orthodox camp. There was another
mighty sermon that was preached at the dedication
of the Second Unitarian Church in New York, in
which the sacred eloquence of Dewey was afterward
a soaring flame. There were a few articles in the
Christian Examiner and a few public letters to the
same effect. But every sermon that he preached

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 19
was interpenetrated with his Unitarian gospel of
the dignity of human nature, the supremacy of rea
son, salvation by character, and the intellectual and
moral unity of God and man. He had no liking for
controversy, and the most of it fell into other hands,
some of them mighty for the pulling down of strong
holds of inveterate error, some of them plastic for
the shaping of new forms of church organization and
missionary work. Of the former, Andrews Norton,
of the latter, Ezra Stiles Gannett, was easily the
first. The elder Ware contended against Woods of
Andover for the new interpretations : whence an im
perfect pun — the " Wood'nd Ware Controversy " —
touched with a gleam of humor the too sombre
spirits of a strenuous and baleful time.
My friend, William C. Gannett, reckons that few
of the preachers who were over forty at the out
break were ever anything but Arians. The younger
men were more inclined to the Socinian interpreta
tion, which was not inconsistent with an intense
Biblicism and supernaturalism. Jesus might be a
man, and still invested with miraculous powers,
miraculously born and raised up from the dead ; and
the Bible might be the infallible record of his life
and teaching and of much besides. But hardly had
the Unitarian controversy, as between Liberals and
Calvinists, reached its term, which may be roughly
fixed at 1830, than the first signs began to appear of
a new controversy within the limits of the Unitarian
body, — a controversy in which Channing was dis
tinctly on the Liberal side, though others broke
much more effectually than he with the Arian and

20 UNITARIAN BELIEF
supernaturalist tradition. But we find him lamer
ing the development of "a Unitarian orthodoxy
and deprecating "a swollen way of talking aboi
Christ," and these signs are two of many that mal
clear in what direction he was going, and why tl
more conservative people viewed him with distrust
though it should not be forgotten that his anti-slavei
sympathies also were intolerable to many. But tr
Unitarianism of Channing, and those whose intellec
ual and spiritual temper was nearest akin to his, coi
tained from the outset of the denominational histor
a principle — the principle of reason in religion -
which soon or late was sure to carry those obedier
to it a great deal farther away from Arianism, whic
exalted Christ sometimes to a degree of inappreciab]
difference from God, than the Socinian doctrine of
miraculously gifted man and an infallible book, j
was inevitable, if reason was sufficient to determin
the grounds and limits of a revelation, and withi
those limits to interpret what was written, the
there should come the moment when it would dar
to judge the revelation, and by such judgment a:
sert its own superiority thereto. When Channin
said, " The truth is, and it ought not to be deniec
that our ultimate reliance is, and must be, on ot
own reason : I am surer that my rational nature i
from God than that any book is an expression of hi
will," he said that in which all our later development
were folded like the oak within the acorn's cup.
But the development would probably have bee
much slower if a new philosophy, quite different fror
that of Locke, — which was consciously the philo;

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 21
ophy of Channing, while unconsciously he antici
pated a more spiritual rendering of the world, — and
very different from that of Hartley, — which Priest
ley and Belsham had espoused, — had not sprung up
in Germany, and been illustrated by such names as
Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, and in England found
such advocates as Coleridge and Carlyle. These
last, it would appear, did much more than the Ger
mans directly to foster the Transcendental movement
in New England; and Carlyle's 'Sartor Resartus,'
with its one glorious chapter on " Natural Supernat-
uralism," the most of all. There were many touched
with the new thought, — pre-eminently Emerson and
Hedge, and Ripley and Clarke, and Bartol and
Parker; and to the first and last of these respec
tively it fell to give to it its loftiest expression, and
its most thorough-going application to the religious
questions of the hour. Emerson's withdrawal from
the Hanover Street pulpit in 1832, because of his
inability to use the forms of the Lord's Supper as
they were then generally understood, was followed
in 1836 by his little book called 'Nature,' and in
1838 by his 'Divinity School Address,' higher than
which the wings of his religious aspiration never
beat the upper heavens. Furness's ' Remarks on
the Four Gospels,' a book of startling radicalism in
its day, came out in 1836 ; and Strauss's Life of
Jesus, of the year before, had consequences not to
be measured by the degree to which his mythical
theory might commend itself to an intelligent and
earnest mind. It laid bare the countless inconsist
encies of the miraculous stories and the insufn-

22 UNITARIAN BELIEF
But it was a young man — who was one of the first
American readers of Strauss's book, and who re
viewed it for the Christian Examiner with more
satire than appreciation, who had just finished a
translation, printed later, of De Wette' s 'Introduc
tion to the Old Testament ' — -who was to con
centrate in himself to an unparalleled degree the
influence of the New Criticism and New Philosophy
on the Unitarian body. I speak of Theodore Par
ker, who was born Aug. 24, 18 10, was settled at
West Roxbury in 1837, and in Boston, where he
had been preaching for some time, in 1846, and died
in Italy, May 10, i860. What manner of preaching
he did in West Roxbury we have just now a better
opportunity for knowing than formerly, a volume of
his sermons there being still (1892) warm from the
press. They are much warmer from the impress of
his spirit. They have a wonderful simplicity. The
love of God, the love of man, the love of all things
beautiful and sweet and true, blossoms on every
page. I had hoped that his sermon on 'The Temp
tations of Milkmen' would be there, but it is not.
Reading everything, three hundred and twenty
volumes in fourteen months before he fairly got up
steam, Parker read deep in all the philosophical and
critical literature of the time, and skimmed from it
the cream of cream. He heard Emerson in Cam
bridge, and walked home to Roxbury with a stormy
pulse, thinking unutterable things. At least, so far
he had not uttered them ; but now he felt he must.
And soon he did, first to his own people, and then
one day — May 19, 1841 — in a South Boston ser-

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 23
mon at the ordination of a friend ; and now the ser
mon ranks with Channing's Baltimore sermon and
Emerson's at Cambridge as one of the great epoch-
making sermons of the Unitarian development. Its
subject was "The Transient and Permanent in
Christianity." The permanent was the spiritual
truth of Jesus and his personality exalted to a degree
which the most conservative Unitarian of the pres
ent time could not easily surpass. It was the
transient part that was most permanent in the
hearers' memories and the denominational conscious
ness. In this he included the New Testament mir
acles, — not as never having happened, but as being
now more an encumbrance than a help. He also in
cluded the supernatural character of the Bible and
Jesus, and the sacraments, — not as invalid and un
worthy, but as not essential to a Christian faith and
life. Parker had not yet thought out his system to
the end ; but he had gone too far already for the
brethren's peace, or for his own. For, like some
others, while he must speak frankly and strongly, he
had a woman's heart, hated to wound others, and was
easily wounded himself. The South Boston sermon
was followed up with a course of lectures, afterwards
published in a book called ' A Discourse on Matters
pertaining to Religion,' which are the best expres
sion of Parker's theological position. No more re
ligious book has ever welled from the deep heart of
man. His new philosophy united with the funda
mental religiousness of his nature to produce this re
sult. His interpretation of the philosophy was much
more positive than that of its great German ex-

24 UNITARIAN BELIEF
pounders. Compared with Schelling's or Fichte's
it was as a mountain to a cloud ; and, where Kant'
" God and Immortality " were merely posited as con
veniences for the working of his "Categorical Ira
perative " of the Moral Law, with Parker God, Im
mortality, the Moral Law, were intuitional certaintie
of irrefragable stability. It was as if he had se
aside a public supernatural revelation only to subst:
tute for it a private one in each several mind an
heart. At the same time it must be said that in th
general working of Parker's mind he was much mor
experiential than intuitional. His religious intu
tionalism was very much the splendid symbol of hi
personal genius for religion and his own abidim
faith. Channing, theoretically inductive, was prac
tically deductive ; while Parker, theoretically deduc
tive, had such a stomach for facts as few men eve
had, and his digestion of them gave the tone an
vigor of his intellectual life.
The controversy growing out of Parker's theolog
cal position was both long and hard ; and it wa
harder upon none than upon those who, honorin
and loving him for his great gifts and noble spirii
felt that they could not walk with him because the
were not agreed. He made no attempt to organiz
a party, and was left very much alone. To e:
change with him was dangerous ; and for daring s
much on one occasion James Freeman Clarke sa'
the secession of a large section of his congregatioi
and John T. Sargent lost his standing as a ministc
at large. The influence of the controversy on th
life of the denomination was simply paralyzing fc

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 2$
some twenty years. It alienated from its organized
activities, if not from its name and its communion,
many of the younger men, some of them, such as
Johnson and Longfellow and Higginson and Weiss
and Frothingham and Wasson, men of the rarest in
tellectual force and largest spiritual capacity, to lose
whose furtherance and sympathy was almost a fatal
blow. The bias of the anti-slavery conflict on the
situation was such as to prevent an organized schism
from the body. It was, moreover, of the essence of
Transcendentalism to be distrustful of organization,
and the anti-slavery movement drew off a world of
Parker's energy that might have made the theologi
cal controversy still more hot ; while the ethical
passion of the young Abolitionists who followed the
double lead of Parker and Garrison was for the time
being the "one world at a time" which they could
entertain, and furnished them with all the high and
genial fellowship that they could ask.
The war of words came to an end at last on the
political field, and the war of ships and armies fol
lowed; and in April, 1865, just as the tottering
strength of the great rebellion was rushing down to
final wreck, a Unitarian convention met in New
York to initiate the fourth period of our denomina
tional life, the period of organization. We will call
the other three the periods of controversy, internal
division, and stagnation — the last of these designa
tions relative to the unrealized possibilities of the
time. It was a good year for such a meeting, the
three hundredth anniversary of the first Unitarian
church established in the world, that of Georgio

26 UNITARIAN BELIEF
Blandrata, in Poland. The convention was the di
rect result of Dr. Bellows's personal application to
himself of that great word of the spirit,— " Thou
hast been faithful over a few things : I will make
thee ruler over many things." He had been faith
ful over the few things of the Sanitary Commis
sion, — few relatively to the boundless energy of his
organizing and inspiring genius. He had conceived
and managed and inspired its glorious work ; and all
that he had done instead of exhausting his energy
had stored up in him a fresh amount, which must
have some new outlet, or the man would spiritually
burst. In advance of the convention, in response to
his appeal, $100,000 was raised by subscription, and
turned over into the treasury of the Unitarian Asso
ciation, four-fifths as much as had been given for de
nominational work through that channel during the
preceding twenty-five years. A single year since
then has seen $250,000 pouring through that chan
nel ; and the regular annual expenditure is about
$100,000, which is very greatly increased by the
work of the Western Conference, that of the State
and the local conferences, and that of the Women's
National Alliance, while special objects sometimes
double the amount. From those whose wish is
father to the thought we sometimes hear that Uni
tarianism is dying out ; but in the light of these
figures, and with half a million of our publications
scattered every year where it was a few thousands
formerly, and with more churches west of the
Rockies than we had west of the Hudson twenty
years ago, scoring additions every year that will

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 27
soon outnumber all we reckoned then, — in the light
of all these facts, and many others of like character,
it surely may be said, " As dying, and behold we
live," and with such vigor and expansion as we
never had before.
But I must have no one suppose that this period
of organized activity has been troubled by no contro
versy whatever. Because we have freedom of in
quiry and religious liberty, and because some hasten
slowly and others a little faster in the revision of
their opinions, I am inclined to think that we shall
always have some differences of opinion and policy,
and that we shall wax warm about them, if we do
not get red-hot. But I doubt if we are any worse
on this account. Periods of difference in religious
bodies are quite as often periods of prosperity and
growth as periods of decadence. We have, in fact,
had three somewhat memorable controversies in
America during the last thirty years in our denomi
nation. The formation of our National Conference
in 1865 was the signal for the beginning of the first.
Some wanted a creed of several articles as a banner
for our organization. That had no chance. The
proposition was defeated by an overwhelming vote.
It would have been perfectly easy to frame a consti
tution that would have been true to all and agreeable
to both parties, under which we could have gone on
conquering and to conquer from that time till now.
But what some wanted was "a stone of stumbling
and a rock of offence " ; and they had their way, in
corporating in the preamble of the constitution a
phrase describing Jesus as our "Lord and Master

28 UNITARIAN BELIEF
Jesus Christ," which, for a good many, carried with
it a suggestion of authority inimical to spiritual free
dom and a suggestion of official dignity unwarranted
by the historic facts. There was a great debate,
and it was renewed at Syracuse at the second meet
ing of the Conference which was established in New
York. Indeed, what has been aptly called the " Bat
tle of Syracuse " was one of the greatest meetings
we ever had. I shall never forget the flaming elo
quence of the Abolitionist hero, Charles C. Burleigh,
as he appealed "from you to your Master," pointing
to the words of Jesus on the frescoed wall ; nor how
Dr. Bellows had to hold down the top of his dear
shining head after such an extemporaneous speech
as only he could make. The battle was a victory for
the conservative party ; and that night upon the
home-bound train the Free Religious Association
was conceived, and duly born in Boston the next
May. It detached many wholly from the Unitarian
body, and gave many others room for their wider
sympathies, while they still kept up their connection
with the parent body, and tried time and again to
bring the obnoxious preamble into better shape. As
it now stands, there is an article of the constitution
declaring that the preamble is only binding upon
those who can agree to it. This miserable arrange
ment is likely to be done away with before long, a
committee having been appointed at the last meet
ing of the Conference to this end, and their report
having been made advising certain changes that
would satisfy the scruples of the radical party and
may be satisfactory to all concerned. Meantime the

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 29
broadening temper of the Conference has drawn back
every year a greater number of those who were
alienated from it by its earlier course.
What is known in our annals as the " Year Book
Controversy" was a pendant of the controversy in
and about the National Conference. The question
mooted was whether the names of those who could
not conscientiously appropriate the Christian name
should appear in the Year Book of the Unitarian
Association. It may seem a petty question ; but
it involved the question, What is Christianity, and
What is Unitarianism ? and the further question
whether a man can be a Unitarian who is not a
Christian. The personal centre of the controversy
was the Rev. William J. Potter,* of New Bedford, after
the Rev. O. B. Frothingham the President of the
Free Religious Association, a preacher of the loftiest
moral temper and the rarest intellectual gifts, his
published sermons the best expression of our most
characteristic thought to which we have yet attained,
as calm as Channing's in their tone, but with an in
tellectual grasp which Channing never had, and a
sweep of vision which was impossible before the orb
of scientific truth had fairly risen and dispersed the
misty exhalations of the dawn. The final outcome
of the controversy was the admission to the Year
Book, and by that sign to the denomination, in good
standing, of all ministers who were in charge of Uni
tarian societies, and of all who had been so and had
not withdrawn from the ministry. And so again we
took the broader road which leads to the destruction
* AllVe V'k"" +kie w<ae w/ritton ht* AinA Tier o^ 1893.

30 UNITARIAN BELIEF
of all artificial barriers between men who, if not of
one mind, are of one heart and one soul.
And last we had our "Western Controversy." It
came about through the attempt of certain earnest
spirits to limit the fellowship of the Western Confer
ence by a " statement of purpose," committing the
Conference as such to a belief in Christian theism.
In the great debate which followed, at its annual meet
ing, the Conference, refusing to limit its fellowship
by any dogmatic test, welcomed all to come in and
help who would fain build up the kingdom of right
eousness and truth and love. This action, known as
" the Cincinnati Resolution," was the signal for the
withdrawal of many individuals and some churches
from the Western Conference, and for the extension
of the controversy in ever-widening circles, until the
East hardly less than the West was included in their
sweep. There was much more misunderstanding
than real difference. The principal contestants for
the broader way were men pre-eminent for their
theistic ardor and the tenderness of their devotion
to the memory and example of Jesus of Nazareth.
What they have contended for has been simply a
franker avowal of the National Conference position,
putting first, however, the principle of generous in
clusion, and then making a statement of "things
commonly believed among us " wonderfully rich and
strong, and expressly given as not covering all and
binding none. I have no doubt in my own mind
that we shall, as a denomination, ultimately come to
this position, and that the wandering sheep will all
come home at last, and that there will be one flock

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 3 1
and one fold, open on every side to pastures new.
Long since the spiritual genius of Dr. Martineau,
whom the Messianic phrase of the National Confer
ence preamble would logically exclude from our fel
lowship, if it were made a test, sounded the note of
highest courage when he said, "The true religious
life supplies grounds of sympathy and association
deeper and wiser than can be expressed in any doc
trinal names or formulas ; and free play can never be
given to these genuine spiritual affinities till all
stipulation, direct or implied, for specified agree
ment in theological belief is discarded from the
bases of church union." Into the largeness of this
liberty we are sure to come at length. Nor is it
now a distant city sparkling like a grain of salt, but
near at hand, and beautiful with unimagined light.
So it seemed to me in 1892 before the meeting of
the Western Conference for that year. At that
meeting a resolution was passed pledging the Con
ference to religious work in harmony with the Cin
cinnati Resolution and the " Statement of Things
commonly believed among us." To many this ap
peared to be unnecessary, because sufficiently im
plied before ; while some of the stanchest friends
of the Cincinnati Resolution feared a construction
prejudicial to that utterance. Further resolutions
were adopted in 1893 which were satisfactory to
both parties, and brought the painful controversy to
a tardy end.
The fifty years which have gone by since Chan
ning died in 1842 have seen great changes in the
several worlds of politics and science and philosophy

32 UNITARIAN BELIEF
and criticism and theology. They have seen the
anti-slavery conflict, in which Channing and Parker
took conspicuous and noble parts, culminating in
civil war and in the destruction of slavery. They
have seen science advancing, with a step ever more
confident, to discoveries ever more magnificent,
the doctrine of evolution central to them all, and
giving them organic unity and life. They have
seen philosophy driven back by science from the
transcendental ground, and compelled to base it
self upon experience. They have seen theology
powerfully affected both by philosophy and sci
ence, and criticism in its treatment of the Bible
making all things new with its discovery of the
modern date of great portions of the Pentateuch
and all the Psalms, if we take the Exile as the divid
ing line between ancient and modern in the Old
Testament history.
And all of these changes have powerfully affected
Unitarian thought and life. Nobody has been more
sensitive to them than we. No sect has been less
backward and more cordial in accepting the new
ideas. But so it has happened that, while the phi
losophy for which Emerson and Parker were made
anathema has passed into the keeping of the ortho
dox sects, the scientific philosophy which these have
made anathema in its turn has become very gener
ally the philosophy of Unitarian thought. So it hap
pens that the critical results which Parker reached,
and which his brother Unitarians could not endure,
are now the commonplaces of the progressive ortho
dox. So it happens that the doctrine of the divine

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION 33
unity now resumes a wealth of meaning in which, at
first, it had no part. Science is but another name
for the discovered unity of the world ; and the unity
of the world reflects as in a mirror the Unity of the
Universal Soul. If any doctrine was more central
to the Unitarianism of Channing than the unity of
God, it was the Dignity of Human Nature. But,
clearly, Channing's " one sublime idea," as he called
it, has been vigorously challenged by the doctrine
of heredity, and by the Darwinian theory of human
origins. In the first particular, the gain of pity and
compassion is much more than any loss entailed ;
while, as for the second, what seemed to wreck our
faith in human nature has been its grandest confir
mation. For nothing argues the essential dignity of
man more clearly than his triumph over the limita
tions of his brute inheritance, while the long way
that he has come is prophecy of the novel heights
undreamed of that await his tireless feet. As it is
here, so it is everywhere. If that which was done
away was glorious, much more that which remaineth
is glorious. It is through its inheritance from
Priestley, in the main, that Unitarianism has been
a movement of thought in sympathy with science.
It is through its inheritance from Socinus and Mil
ton and Locke and Price and Priestley and Channing
and Parker that it has been a movement of con
science in sympathy with reform. And, as the
former binds it to the religious interpretation of
science, so does the latter bind it to intelligent co
operation with every movement that makes for the
purification of our politics and the improvement of

34 UNITARIAN BELIEF
our social life. Common worship is beautiful, and
mutual incitement to the highest moral things is
more than beautiful ; but a church, or body of
churches, which is not persuaded that the field is the
world, and does not shape its life conformably to
that persuasion, is a thing that cumbereth the
ground.

II.
THE DOCTRINE OF MAN.
In this course of lecture-sermons I wish to bring
out as clearly as I can the distinctive doctrines of
our Unitarian faith. They have not always been
what they are now. In this respect they have not
been singular. A Christianity that is the same yes
terday, to-day, and forever is a theological fiction to
which nothing real corresponds, as Cardinal New
man finally discovered, and so wrote his 'Develop
ment of Christian Doctrine,' endeavoring therein to
establish a principle by which the extent of varia
tion, without a difference of species, could be deter
mined. But the Unitarian doctrine in regard to
human nature has had more consistency from first
to last than any other. The first Unitarians in the
line of our development were the Hebrews and the
Jews, — a distinction of historical succession merely,
— the survival of whose fittest literature we have
in the Old Testament. The general conception of
human nature in the books of that collection, cov
ering about eight centuries, is one of generous ap
preciation and noble self-respect. It is true that the
doctrine of total depravity has backed itself up with
as many texts from the Old Testament as from the
New; as many from the Psalms as from Paul's Epis-

36 UNITARIAN BELIEF
ties, if not more. But the individual self-abasement
of the psalmists cannot be taken in evidence of a
general estimate of human nature, and no more can
the denunciations of the prophets hurled at specific
criminals and crimes. Moreover, it is the opinion
of our most learned scholar that only in the fifty-first
Psalm do we find the depravity of human nature
clearly taught: "Behold I was shapen in iniquity,
and in sin did my mother conceive me." Much more
in consonance with the general view than this is the
verse in the eighth Psalm : " Thou hast made him
but little lower than God. Thou hast crowned him
with glory and honor." The Septuagint reading,
"but little lower than the angels," perpetuated by
the King James translation, is sufficiently at va
riance with the Calvinistic view. The characteris
tic note of the Old Testament, and of Jesus in the
New, is that, if a man will, he can obey the law of
righteousness, and that, too, without divine interpo
sition. He is the architect of his own fortunes.
" It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll ;
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul."
This language of the modern poet is nothing but
a free translation of the average tone of the Old
Testament and the earlier Gospels of the New. Jesus
was always drawing inferences from the goodness
of men to that of God : " Forgive us our debts as we
also have forgiven our debtors " ; " For what man is
there of you who, if his son ask him for a loaf, will

THE DOCTRINE OF MAN 37
give him a stone ; or, if he ask a fish, will give him a
serpent ? " Everywhere in the parables, and espe
cially in that of the Prodigal Son, a human good
ness furnishes an image and an argument for the
divine. If theologians had had only the words of Jesus,
the first Christian Unitarian, to build upon, .they
would not have built one stone of their doctrine of
man's total depravity upon another. But they have
had also the Epistles of Saint Paul ; and it must be
confessed that, to paint human nature blacker than
he sometimes painted it, or more incompetent, would
be difficult, if not impossible. Augustine, Calvin,
Edwards, have all dipped their brushes in his pot ;
and there has been enough in it for them and all
their kind. The Unitarianism of Arius in the fourth
century, so often treated as a novel heresy, was, in
fact, the swan-song of the Unitarian orthodoxy of
the earlier Church ; and swan-songs are not sweet.
His doctrine, while it saved the unity of God, saved
nothing of "the excellency of Christ" for human
nature. Indeed, the Athanasian doctrine, which tri
umphed over Arius, at Nicasa, in its identification
of Jesus with God, while still affirming his humanity,
was a doctrine much more honorable to human nat
ure than that of Arius, which made Jesus a being
sui generis, as far as possible removed from man, as
near as possible to God, short of identity. The at
tractiveness of Athanasius — whom you must not as
sociate with the seventh-century Athanasian Creed,
but with the fourth-century Nicene — for many Uni
tarians is in virtue of the fact that they find in him

38 UNITARIAN BELIEF
a blundering expression of " the divinity of man and
the humanity of God," and of the one substance of
all uncreated and created things.
For some centuries after the Council of Nicaea, in
325, the Unitarianism of Arius made a good fight for
its life, and had many able coadjutors. At Nicaea
the opposing doctrine conquered only because the
Emperor Constantine threw his sceptre into the
scale ; and for a long time after the question which
should finally prevail was simply a question which
could get the strongest battalions — those of the im
perial power — upon its side. Given a little more
assistance from the secular arm, and the Unitarian
ism of Arius might have been the orthodoxy of the
succeeding centuries for a thousand years. We, of
to-day, have little reason to regret the actual course
of history. It would seem that the doctrine of Arius
must have been much more fatal to the human as
pect of the life of Jesus, and the helpfulness implied
in that, than the doctrine of the victorious party.
Once the doctrine of the Trinity had got fairly es
tablished in the sixth century or thereabout, there
was very little Unitarianism in Christendom until
the Protestant Reformation ; that is, there was very
little denial of the identity of the Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit. But, though Augustine, looking " down
into the unsunned depths of his breast, — into hideous
gulfs of bottomless guile, into weltering abysses
of insatiate lust, — and seeing the hells open, —
hell underneath hell — in his darkling, selfish heart,"
inferred from this experience the total depravity of
human nature ; and, though his doctrine triumphed

THE DOCTRINE OF MAN 39
over the more genial doctrine of Pelagius, neverthe
less, as time went on, it was the doctrine of Pelagius,
rather than that of Augustine that became the rul
ing doctrine of the Church. In our own time we
have Roman Catholics assuring us that Romanism,
and not Protestantism, must be the religion for
America, because self-government and universal suf
frage presuppose that human nature is not, as Prot
estantism teaches, radically corrupt. They cer
tainly do ; but, if God has made man upright, the
political bosses have sought out many crooked in
ventions. The doctrine of Luther and Calvin on
the human side was a reactionary doctrine. It went
back to Augustine for the most horrible doctrines
which his perturbed imagination had conceived, —
the doctrines of total depravity and predestination.
It was these doctrines rather than the Trinity or the
Deity of Christ that made the first Protestant here
tics. Zwingli taught that every new-born child —
thanks to Christ's making alive of all those who had
died in Adam — was as free from any taint of sin as
Adam was before his fall.* Laelius and Faustus So
cinus were the first Unitarians of the Reformation
period out of whose thinking came a definite body
of Unitarian belief and a definite Unitarian organi
zation. These two were men whose reputation has
been much spattered and obscured by the incalcula
ble mud thrown at their followers by the more ortho
dox, but no sect in Christendom has representatives
of whom it is more justly proud. It was no slight
*This brave old Zwingli had such appreciation of the pagan scholars, saints,
and heroes that he anticipated the late Parliament of Religions by three centuries
and half another.

40 UNITARIAN BELIEF
departure which they made from the theology <
their contemporary, Calvin, and those who thougf
with him. They broke with these at almost ever
point ; and, while a great body of churches in Polan
and Transylvania sprang from their thought, it wa
a long time before the Unitarianism of Great Britai
and America reached the mark of their high calling
The earlier Unitarians in England and America fo
the most part took the Arian line ; and, except fo
their anti-trinitarian ideas, they were in general agree
ment with the opinions of the majority. But ther
was no fixed rule. Richard Price, of London, wa
a belated Arian among Socinians, — Priestley, am
Lindsey, and their kind ; but it was his preaching
in favor of the French Revolution that drew Burke';
'Reflections on the French Revolution' on hi:
venerable head, and we may be sure that no mai
preached that way in 1789 who did not believe ii
human nature as something radically sound anc
good. And here in America it was not one of th(
radical Socinians, of whom there were a few, but on<
of the conservative Arians, of whom there wen
many, who made the doctrine of the dignity o:
human nature his "one sublime idea," set it in th<
forefront of his preaching, and rallied to its illustra
tion and defence all that was best in his own nature
and in the fellowship of which he, William Ellerj
Channing, was the leading spirit. It was that illus
tration and defence that made the Transcendental
ism of Emerson and Parker possible a few yean
further on. What was their doctrine but a corol
lary of Channing's dignity of human nature ? Manj

THE DOCTRINE OF MAN 41
before Channing had asserted the dignity of human
nature, notably one William Shakspere, in a passage
which I need not quote, beginning, " What a piece
of work is man ! " But it was reserved for Channing
to assert this dignity with such amplitude and con
sistency as had not been known before, and in his
personal character to furnish the doctrine with such
an argument and illustration as he could not send
abroad upon his winged words.
The dignity of human nature ! No other doctrine
has been so central to our faith and work as this.
It enters into all our other doctrines, leavening the
lumpishness of what was dullest once, raising the
meanest to some better height, compelling new in
terpretations, broader and truer than the old. Not
all there was in it was seen by Channing when he
first published it with glowing heart, nor even when
he finished his course amidst the beauties of an
outward nature as calm and peaceful as his own.
All the denials and affirmations of Theodore Parker
were contained in Channing's " one sublime idea,"
as the days are in the year and the stars are in the
sky. Logically carried out, it meant the complete
humanity of Jesus. Given such faith as Channing's
in the possibilities of human excellence, and what
need to claim for Jesus any superhuman quality ?
Within the wide space of humanity his greatness
swings as freely as the earth amidst the various
stars. Given such faith, and the Bible in its marvel
lous richness and its wonderful complexity seems an
easy thing for human genius to create, no prophecy
or psalm or gospel or epistle too ethically stern or

42 UNITARIAN BELIEF
too spiritually exalting for man's normal delight in
the infinite God and the law of the Eternal. Given
such faith, and man's reason, conscience, and im
agination furnish him with all needful revelation.
Given such a faith, and not to hope for immortality
— nay, not to heartily believe in it — would be quite
the impossible thing. The dignity of human nature
is not an inference from that, as many have imag
ined, inverting the true order of relations, but the
immortality of the soul is a just inference from its
present dignity and worth. So with the doctrine of
the atonement. No magical appropriation of the
merits of the blood of Jesus, nothing less than
character, obedience, righteousness, could save the
soul from the only real hell, — that of the great re
fusal to be what we may and can be, working out
our own salvation, and God working evermore in us.
And so on, through the whole range. There was
not a doctrine held by the earlier Unitarians that
Channing's "one sublime idea" did not make fluid
and recast in some diviner mould.
But its practical implications were of more im
portance than those merely doctrinal. Certainly,
they were so for Channing himself. Here was the
root and ground, the motive, inspiration, spur, of
all his philanthropic zeal. " What ! strike a man ! "
was his sufficient argument against flogging in the
navy. And for himself he asked no better argu
ment against slavery, against intemperance, against
debasing punishments, against the oppression of one
class by any other, against the niggardly support of
education by the town or state. In every man or

THE DOCTRINE OF MAN 43
woman, white or black, educated or ignorant, good
or bad, elevated or degraded, he saw the glory of
the human, — if not a realized, then a potential fact.
And it is so with every one who has entered faith
fully into his spirit, whose appropriation of his " one
sublime idea " is not merely nominal, but vital. If
in the anti-slavery conflict, for all the thin-voiced
and weak-kneed apologists for slavery that stood
in Unitarian pulpits, there was a larger company
who witnessed a good confession at whatever cost,
it was because they had not sat at Channing's feet
in vain. There are aspects of society in our own
time which in Channing's time were not conspicu
ous. They have come from the development of our
industrial organization, from the widening gulf which
has been fixed between the employer and the em
ployed by the stupendous changes that have taken
place in methods of industrial production. But for
these novel aspects the doctrine of Channing has as
clear a word as if he had anticipated their utmost
stress ; and how often do I wish that he were here
to make the application ! For I hold that nothing
is more sure than this : that underlying and over
topping every other necessity of our industrial or
ganization is the necessity, on the part of the em
ployer, of seeing in every workman at his forges or
his looms, in his quarries or his mines, not merely
so much "labor," and not merely an industrial
machine, but a fellow-creature, a human being, a
conscious soul, a brother man whom he must not
treat with any least indignity or disrespect. With
out this vision and this sympathy no legislative

44

UNITARIAN BELIEF

ordering of our political economy will bring us much
nearer than we are now to the mark of our high
calling. The changes in industrial organization are not the
only changes that have taken place during the four
score years that have elapsed since Channing's "one
sublime idea " touched his thought with beauty and
his lips with flame. And during these years it
must be confessed that our theories of human nat
ure have been subjected to a good deal of stress
and strain by the changes which have overtaken our
conceptions of man's physical and intellectual and
moral history, — changes coming from the side of that
great doctrine of evolution into which each several
science is now pouring itself in an abounding stream.
It must be confessed that the problems of human
character are far less simple as they present them
selves to us than as they presented themselves to
Channing and his contemporaries. For one thing
our studies in heredity have made it plain that every
new-born soul is not that tabula rasa, that clean
white sheet of paper, just like every other, which
in the popular presentations of Unitarianism in its
earlier course it often was. The parable of the
talents is a parable of human inequality : only this
ranges from one talent to five hundred instead of
from one to five. Some men are born with aptitudes
for virtue, some with aptitudes for vice. The will,
however free, is in one case drawn by a stupendous
energy in the direction of the good, and in another
case by an equally stupendous energy in the direc
tion of the bad. There have been many fluctuations

THE DOCTRINE OF MAN 45
in the battle which has raged upon this ground.
Buckle was a man after the early Unitarians' own
heart so far as he did not believe in heredity at all.
But, then, he did believe in the incalculable and
enormous influence of the environment. Spencer,
on the other hand, has made heredity the central
principle of his philosophy, the inheritance of ac
quired variations being essential to his doctrine that
the gain of evolution is transmitted, in the accumu
lations of experience, from one generation to another,
not as a social tradition only, but registered in nerve
and sinew, blood and bone. The most lively battle
now proceeding in the scientific world is on this
very ground. Spencer has encountered a most vig
orous and confident antagonist in the German natu
ralist, Professor Weismann, whose doctrine of hered
ity does not admit of any transmission of acquired
peculiarities. No use and no abuse of their original
outfit, on the part of parents, has the least congeni
tal effect upon their offspring according to the teach
ings of this new philosophy.
Here is a doctrine which has important bear
ings on our individual and social life. For all the
learning with which it has been defended, it has
not yet been established ; not by a good deal : and
Weismann has made more notches in his sword
by his own grinding than have his enemies by their
sturdy blows. He has abated so much from the
first form of his doctrine that it is now, though dif
ferent from Darwin's, and more different from
Spencer's, very near akin to that of Galton, whose
' Hereditary Genius ' is one of the most interesting

46 UNITARIAN BELIEF
books the general controversy has brought forth.
We have in Galton's a doctrine of heredity which
denies much less confidently than Weismann the
transmission of individually acquired traits, and
which narrows much less than he the path of pre
natal influences, especially of the mother on the
child. But all prenatal influences he insists are not
hereditary, — a distinction which will not impress
the average mind as practically a difference.
Be these things as they may, the doctrine of he
redity rather gains than loses in significance, if it
prevails after this manner rather than after that of
Spencer. Only, if this happens, the doctrine be
comes much less appealing to parental virtue ; there
is no longer occasion to say of the unborn children,
"For their sakes we sanctify ourselves." The
working of heredity is much more than before that
of a blind and helpless fate for good or ill, though
certain of its larger implications still remain. And
in the mean time the fact remains, however caused,
that human nature presents no such equality and
lucidity to our recent science as it did generally
to the Unitarians of Channing's generation. But
the inequality does not impeach the dignity. The
range is wide, but its inclusions on the higher side
are so magnificent that it can well afford the lower
and the lowest in the scale. Then, too, the lowest
natures frequently manifest traits that ally them
with the highest, and put to shame the conventional
moralities of the professionally pious. Consider,
too, how much of grievous fault is but the exaggera
tion and the overplus of appetites and passions of

THE DOCTRINE OF MAN 47
which we need not be ashamed. Consider yet again
how marvellously responsive many of the lowest
are to the touch of sympathy and love. Suppose the
upshot of the battle, now raging so fiercely between
Spencer and Weismann, should be the complete dis
comfiture of the former, — an event which I do not
anticipate, — we should gain more upon the side of
the environment as determinative of the good or evil
of the individual life than we should lose upon the
side of inherited acquisitions. Indeed, upon this
side, the gains are clear and steady independently of
the immediate question in dispute. How often do
the children that are born of ignorance and lawless
passion, of intemperance and crime, where they have
been sequestered from the influences of their con
genital environment, develop in due time the no
blest manly strength, the rarest womanly perfec
tion ! The dignity of human nature stands approved
in the ability of the most basely born to reach the
heights of intellect and will ; in the nobility that is
bound by its advantages to service of the miserable
and perishing. In seven generations there accumu
late more than two thousand possibilities of hered
ity for each new adventurer. More than a match
for these, in the majority of cases, is the environ
ment of thoughtful love which can be built around
the growing child to shield him from all harm.
Nay, but we should not know how great our human
nature really is, were it not for these contrasting
depths and heights. We would have none continue
in sin that grace may abound in others ; but we can
not but be glad that a Leo X. compels a Luther to

48 UNITARIAN BELIEF
stand forth, a Philip II. and an Alva bring a Will
iam the Silent safe to his political birth, a pig
headed George of England means Sam Adams and
John Adams and George Washington in America,
the slavocracy of the South means Garrison and
Lincoln and a mighty company who were fellow-
laborers with these. From the abstractions of phi
losophy and the ballooning of speculative science,
they that are wise will often turn to the pages of
history, to the records of personal greatness, to their
own knowledge and recollection of the most exalted
character and worth.
It will be impossible for them to contemplate the
spectacle of so many men and women of great name
and high example, or of private goodness and fidel
ity, without assurance that the dignity of human
nature is not at the mercy of any doctrine of hered
ity, no matter whose or what. " Beloved, now are
we the sons of God ; and it doth not yet appear what
we shall be." So said the writer of old time. And
what say we ? " Beloved, still are we the sons of
God, whatever we have been in those from whom we
draw the bane or blessing of the life we call our
own." Whereupon suddenly and sharply we are told that
the dignity of human nature must not only reckon
with the inequalities of human life and the mys
teries of hereditary taint, but also with the descent
of man from lower animal forms. Here is some
thing which did not enter into the most prophetic
calculations of the earlier Unitarians, and it must be
confessed that to many of the later ones it has been

THE DOCTRINE OF MAN 49
an unwelcome and annoying guest. How would the
Calvinists rage, and the orthodox imagine a vain
thing ! And yet, strange as it may appear, it was
not the Calvinists to whose aid Darwin had seemed
to come after a fashion, but the Unitarians whose
exalted estimate of human nature he had seemed to
seriously impeach, who were among the first to ac
cord to him a patient hearing, and afterward a gen
eral acquiescence. And with what loss, if any, of
their confidence in the dignity of human nature ?
With none whatever, albeit with some better under
standing of the stress of certain motions in our
blood, some happier confidence that what the theo
logians have called original sin is some inheritance
from far-off ancestors of whom we have no call to
be ashamed. We are too prone to think that all
that we inherit from the lower animals is a deduc
tion from our proper nature. But the distinction of
lower and higher has in it a good deal of human
vanity. We should be no lower than we are if we
could swim like the fish, see like the hawk and float
as he does in the upper deeps, run like the deer, and
wrestle like the pard. Are not the most of us such
miserable weaklings that we might well desire that
we had inherited more of the primitive ancestral
brawn, had more of the original Bersark marrow in
our bones ? Plotinus was ashamed of his body, —
with good reason probably, — like many of the Chris
tian saints. Here and there we have seen a rever
sion to that sentiment, coming from two quarters,
contempt for the ladder by which we have reached
the top of animal life, and insistence on "spirit"

50 UNITARIAN BELIEF
as the only real thing by our friends, the Christian
Scientists, and such as they. But who more spiritual
than Novalis ? and he said, " I touch heaven when I
touch a human body." " Every muscle," said Theo
dore Parker, "is a good muscle, every bone is a good
bone." And Browning sang : —
" Then let us no more say,
' Spite of this flesh, to-day
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole.'
As the bird wings and sings,
Let us cry, ' All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more now than flesh helps soul.' "
You that despise the body, buy a first-rate 'Anat
omy and Physiology': read and study that. Look
at the Venus of Milo and Michel Angelo's Dying
Captive, and remember it was Michel Angelo who
said, — " Nor hath God deigned to show himself elsewhere
More clearly than in human forms sublime."
You that despise your animal birthright, learn from
the biologist that every substance, every cell, and
every tissue of your body is the same as in the mam
mals next to man, and farther back, and that they
are as beautiful and good as God can make. Tenny
son is always flouting at the tiger and the ape in us,
as if they were all of our inheritance. But the world
is big enough for apes and tigers, too ; and I am glad
of that. " The young lions roar, and seek their meat
from God ! " Good for the young lions ! May they
never suffer lack ! Be far from us that conceit which
regards the steps of animal creation, from the proto-

THE DOCTRINE OF MAN 5 1
zoon up to man, only as so many steps toward man,
and not each good in itself, even as each successive
stage in a delightful journey which brings us to some
happy goal. " It is not the goal, but the course, that
makes us happy," said Jean Paul. Nay, but in this
matter it is both the course and goal.
The dignity of human nature is not in the least
impeached by these considerations of the connec
tions and resemblances of animal and human life.
Man is a cup which the Eternal Power has had for
many million years upon his wheel and 'neath his
moulding hand. Therein I read, in part, the worth
and dignity of what has taken shape and beauty
from his plastic stress. Whatever the Eternal might
have done, what he has done is plain enough. He
has taken millions and billions of years to bring
forth man from the ascidian, — about half a million
from the time when first he -fairly got him on his
feet to bring him to his present amplitude of life.
And have we not a perfect -right in the long way
that we have come to find a hint and prophecy of
the long way we are to go ? As yet we have not
reached the half-way house upon the mountain of
our great endeavor. The highest summits that now
beckon us are only foot-hills to that top and crown
on which humanity shall be transfigured into the
image of that glory which it had in the beginning
before the world was with God. Nay, but we can
not think of any possible achievement that shall end
the endless quest. " The sun is but a morning star."
Now, there are those who find no deduction from

5 2 UNITARIAN BELIEF
the dignity of human nature in the past history of
the race who confess themselves staggered by the
prospect which speculative astronomy opens to their
view ; that is, the prospect of an ultimate collapse
of our whole mundane order, the degeneration of
the earth to the condition of the moon,
" A gray, wide, lampless, dim, unpeopled world,"
throwing itself at length in sheer despair upon the
fiery bosom of the sun. This prospect, it must be
confessed, does not agree with the idea that in a
perfected humanity upon the earth we have a suf
ficient substitute for personal immortality. This
prospect resolves the spectacle of universal life into
the play of children on a sandy beach, who comfort
one another by singing as they work, —
" Perhaps, if we hurry very much,
And don't lose a minute of the day,
There'll be time for the last lovely touch
Before the sea sweeps it all away."
In the phrase of Omar Khayyam, the caravan would
reach "the nothing it set out from." But, if that
were so, we should not cry with Omar Khayyam,
" Oh, make haste ! " No, as the disciples said to
Jesus, " It is good for us to be here." Such a pros
pect does not impeach the dignity of human nature,
but it does impeach the husbandry of heaven. The
Scotch woman, asked what she would say to God's
damning her forever, answered, "An' if he does,
he'll lose mair than I do." If the prophecy of the
speculative astronomers is made good, and there be

THE DOCTRINE OF MAN 53
no personal immortality, God will lose more than we
shall by the transaction. We shall have had our day,
— our love and laughter, our sunshine and sweet
rain, our work and rest ; and " we know that what
has been was good." But can God afford such prod
igal destruction of his work ? Why not ? there are
so many stars in heaven. But without personal im
mortality, unless our speculative astronomers are
"all wranglers and all wrong," there will come a
time when the whole process of terrestrial develop
ment will be as if it had never been. So help me
God, I can no otherwise than think some better
thing of him than that. And, if the speculative
astronomers are right, then we have one great, sad
reason more for an unconquerable hope and stout as
surance of a spiritual immortality that shall justify
the ruin of the physical environment in which the
soul has nourished for a time its half-unconscious
life. Another challenge to the dignity of human nature
has come from those for whom the greatening uni
verse and the greater God which it implies have
dwarfed mankind into a hopeless relative insignifi
cance. What said the Psalmist? "When I consider
the heavens the work of thy fingers, the moon and
the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man ? "
And if the Psalmist was so impressed, how much
more must be the modern man, for whom the
heavens are so much more vast and wonderful than
they could be for him ? But pari passu with the
enlargement of the sidereal universe there has been
an enlargement of humanity. It is man who has

54 UNITARIAN BELIEF
read the secrets of the heavens. He has weighed
the stars as in his hand. He has measured them as
with a surveyor's chain. And hence he is more
wonderful than they.
" Thou gazest on the stars, my soul : *
Oh, would that I might be
Yon starry skies, with thousand eyes,
That I might gaze on thee ! "
Moreover, it is evident from our latest studies that
we are as far from fathoming the mysteries of the
human brain and mind as we are from fathoming the
mysteries of the heavens. And when to the myste
rious greatness of the mind we add on the one hand
the wonder and beauty of the physical organism,
and on the other the tragedies of misplaced and
disappointed and the exaltations of triumphant love,
the heroisms and devotions of the moral life, the
splendors of the imagination, the trust of broken
hearts which cry, "Though the Lord slay me, yet
will I trust in -him!" — if we cannot "still suspect
and still revere ourselves," still front with unabashed
demeanor the greater universe and the greater God
which science has revealed, it is because we have
not individually the mind to enter into and appropri
ate the most obvious meaning of the things that
press upon us day and night.
The apostle promised those to whom he wrote
that they should be like God, for they should " see
him as he is." "We are like him," rejoins our mod-
*"My love" in the original. I am indebted for the variant to Dr. Horatio
Stebbins, and think it a stroke of genius.

THE DOCTRINE OF MAN 55
ern thought, "because we do see him as he is." All
genuine appreciation means a common mind. It is
so between man and man. No Shakspere or Rem
brandt or Beethoven in you, and no appreciation of
their glorious art. It is so between man and God.
An intelligible universe must be intelligent. The
converse of the proposition is as true. The order
of our notions and ideas means the order of the uni
verse ; and our apprehension of that order means,
as Channing said, that "all minds are of one fam
ily," that we have the mind of God, and by that sign
are now the sons of God, and not merely in some
future tense. " Were not the eye itself a sun,
No light for it could ever shine :
By nothing Godlike could the soul be won,
Were not the soul itself divine."
The power in us to read the laws, to hear the har
monies, to appreciate the beauty of the world, is
proof of our celestial mind as absolute and glorious
as we can ask or dream.
So, then, having attended to each separate chal
lenge that our doctrine of the dignity of human
nature has received from modern thought, we may,
I think, conclude that the doctrine of the dignity of
human nature has suffered no detriment, nq diminu
tion, from the changes that have taken place in
men's conceptions of the universe and human ori
gins during the last half-century. The more we
know of geology and biology and anthropology and
archaeology, the more significant and grand must

56 UNITARIAN BELIEF
seem the human nature for which there was such
costly preparation, whose physical constitution is
such a marvel of infinitely delicate and beautiful co
ordinated powers, whose prehistoric training brought
about a change only less signal than the whole ex
tent between the animal and man, whose historic
manifestation has been a splendid and victorious
march, illuminated by the heroisms of men and
women of whom we may not say, " The world was
not worthy," but who were worthy of the world and
of an immortal destiny.
And even if it were not so, if the teachings of sci
ence were apparently conclusive of an origin and an
inheritance fatal to all worth and dignity in man,
and if the examples of history and experience only
tended to confirm this verdict by their apparent bal
ance on the side of weakness and injustice, extrava
gance of passion and infirmity of will, the dignity
of human nature might still hope to come off con
queror, and more than conqueror, if only those in
doubt would turn from every outward evidence, and
look in upon the mystery and wonder of their own
throbbing hearts. What passions surging there,
what infinite desires, what unconquerable love ! and,
calm and strong amid the turmoil and the conflict,
the moral will, the conscience pronouncing its inex
orable laws, issuing its imperial mandates, proclaim
ing its imperishable satisfactions and rewards. I
hold with one in whom the dignity of human nature
found a splendid illustration, Orville Dewey, that
there is no greatness of fame, no splendor of repu
tation, that is worth a millionth part of what we all

THE DOCTRINE OF MAN 57
possess in our own powers of thought and love and
consecrated will. The humblest man has that
within him greater than the greatest name. " Fear
not : thy vessel carries Caesar," said the conqueror to
his captain, when the winds were loosed and fearful
was the sea. And whatever storms of science and
philosophy, and whatever black experience of others'
wickedness, may smite our sense of human dignity
and worth, we need not fear if with us sails that
greatest conqueror, that righteous will, in whose
captive train rebellious passions walk with downcast
eyes, and in the grandeur of whose triumphs em
perors and kings have been abased below the level
of the poorest creatures subject to their sway.

III.
CONCERNING GOD.
Unitarianism is named after its doctrine of the
Unity of God, at least in popular apprehension.
This apprehension would not be correct, were it quite
certain that the name was originally applied to cer
tain " Uniti " in Transylvania, a league of sectaries
in support of mutual toleration among Roman Cath
olics and Calvinists and Arians and Socinians, and
that the name stuck to those affirming the Divine
Unity because they were the most active members of
the league.* Such an origin is a happy one for our
associations with the word ; but, after all, what gives
words their meaning is not their origin, but their his
toric use. And to make the word " Unitarianism "
to-day with all its splendid connotations mean what
it originally meant in Transylvania, if it originated
there in the manner indicated, would be like thrust
ing an oak or eagle back into the germ from which it
came. Even the doctrine of the Unity of God's
personality ceased long ago to exhaust the meaning
of Unitarianism. Even as accepted by Channing
and his generation, the word meant a great deal
more than that. To read Channing carefully, or
even casually, is to see that the doctrine of the Trin-
* A matter about which our most learned doctors, J. H. Allen and Alexander
Gordon, are not well agreed.

CONCERNING GOD 59
ity was the least part of his objection to the orthodox
system. The greatest part of it was the moral, the
immoral, character of God as represented by that
system and its contemptuous estimate of human
nature. Moreover, or rather as a part of his "one
sublime idea" of the dignity of human nature, the
Unitarianism of Channing meant the right and duty
of individual judgment in matters of belief, and that
character is more than creed.
Unitarianism as a doctrine of the Unity of God
is much older and much wider than the Christian
Church. Judaism was not Unitarian (monotheis
tic) from the earliest times, but it was for about
eight centuries before the birth of Jesus. And
there was a good deal of Unitarianism outside
of Judaism, the most .of it implicit. For underly
ing and overtopping all the different polytheistic
schemes, with their multiplicity of gods and god
desses, there was the sense of the divine, coming to
clearer consciousness in philosophic minds, but sel
dom wholly absent from the most simple and un
taught. That the early Christian Church was Uni
tarian in the sense of being monotheistic is evident
from the fact that the early Christians were mainly
Jews, the earliest Jews without exception. And the
Jews were nothing if not Unitarian. If Jesus had
presumed to claim for himself identity with God, he
would not have been taken before Pontius Pilate.
He would have been summarily despatched. The
fact that the first theoretic conception of Jesus was
as the Jewish Messiah makes the idea of his original
deity absurd, for the idea of deity no more entered

60 UNITARIAN BELIEF
into the conception of the Messiah than it enters
into our idea of the President of the United States.
The doctrine of the Trinity * only very gradually
succeeded to the Unitarianism of the early Chris
tians. This doctrine did not reach its term, as
many think, at the Council of Nicaea in 325 a.d.
What then reached its term was the deification of
Jesus. Then the unscriptural doctrine of Athanasius
triumphed over the scriptural doctrine of Arius. I
do not mean that the doctrine of Arius is taught
consistently in the New Testament, but that it finds
plenty of proof-texts in the Pauline Epistles and the
Fourth Gospel. But, if the process of development
had ended at Nicaea, the orthodox doctrine of the
centuries would not have been a doctrine of the
Trinity, but a doctrine of the duality of the divine
nature. It took two or three centuries more to de
velop the personality of the Holy Spirit and its co-
equality with the Father and the Son. We have
lately been through a series of centennial celebra
tions, and a century seems to us a long time. It
took six centuries to establish the doctrine of the
Trinity. Still more recently we have had our Co
lumbian celebration. That has carried us back
four centuries. You must have two more to carry
you forward from Jesus to the Athanasian Creed
which marks the absolute triumph of the doctrine
of the Trinity. It was no mushroom growth. Six
centuries back from now would take us back to the
* Strictly speaking, this doctrine is not opposed to monotheism, which affirms the
unity of God's being. The doctrine of the Trinity also does this ; but it affirms his
triple personality, which the Unitarian denies. That God is unipersonal is the char
acteristic Unitarian affirmation.

CONCERNING GOD 6l
crusades. The doctrine of the Trinity was a long
time coming, and it came to stay for a long time.
Nearly a thousand years went by before there was
any serious doubt ; though here and there a School
man — Abelard, for example, in his avoidance of a
Trinity which insisted so much on the threeness
that there was no oneness left — swung over into a
practical Unitarianism, making the Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit manifestations of an Eternal Unity.
And this was the heresy of Servetus when, as a
young man of twenty or twenty-two summers, he
wrote his De Trinitatis Erroribus, — ' False Views of
the Trinity.' Fifteen years later he more fully de
veloped his heresy, the Sabellianism of the early
Church, and sent the manuscript of his new book,
' Christianity Restored,' to Calvin, not knowing ap
parently the manner of his spirit, soliciting his criti
cal comment on the argument. The manuscript was
not returned. It was kept against a rainy day, a day
when the wrath of Calvin rained fire upon Servetus.
So simple-minded was Servetus that he would have
visited Calvin, that they might hold sweet counsel
together. Calvin did not encourage him, but wrote
to Farel, his fierce coadjutor, " If he should come,
only let my authority prevail, I will never let him go
away alive." He came in 1553, and the authority of
Calvin prevailed. He was burned to death October
2"j in " a fire of green oak fagots with the leaves still
on," which prolonged his sufferings two hours. He
was a man of great but irregular genius, of bound
less industry, of insatiable curiosity, of kindly dispo
sition. The progressive orthodox of our own time

62 UNITARIAN BELIEF
have the best claim upon his thought, and they
should build his monument. Apparently, he was
even further from Calvin's doctrine of total deprav
ity than from his doctrine of the Trinity ; and Jona
than Edwards's idea that little children are " vipers,
and infinitely worse than vipers," had for him no
attraction. Witness this prayer of his which has
been saved for us, as by fire : " Most merciful Jesus,
Son of God, who with such token of thy love didst
take little children in thine arms and bless them,
bless now and by the hand of thy power guide these
little ones, that by faith in thee they may be sharers
of thy heavenly kingdom. O most gentle Jesus,
Son of God, who from thy birth wast wholly free
from guilt, grant that we may abide without guile in
the simplicity of these infants, that the kingdom of
heaven which thou hast declared to belong to such
may so by thy favor be kept for us, and by thy
boundless mercy may they, made humble in spirit,
be gathered into it."
In the same century with Calvin and Servetus
came a brace of real Unitarians, the uncle and
nephew, Laelius and Faustus Socinus, for whom the
Unitarians of England are called Socinians to this
day. Strangely enough, the elder of these men
was -on friendly terms with Calvin at a time when it
would seem that his heretical opinions must have
been definitely formed. Calvin was a genuine
scholar ; and it was, no doubt, the profound scholar
ship of the uncle that attracted him. The break
which these men, uncle and nephew, made with the
current orthodoxy was as radical as any ever made

CONCERNING GOD 63
by a theological reformer. It swept the whole
gamut of doctrine, — Trinity, Deity of Christ, total
depravity, personality of the devil, vicarious atone
ment, and eternal hell. The doctrine of Arius did
not satisfy the Socini any more than Servetus, but
for a different reason ; for Servetus insisted on the
identity of Christ and God, even as the sun's light is
identical with the sun. But the Socini were human
itarians. Christ for them was a man endowed with
miraculous powers. Nevertheless, Faustus declared
him to be an object of worship and petition ; and it
was the refusal of the brave Hungarian Francis Da
vid to accede to this position that made his life and
death a tragic martyrdom. Servetus died, and left
no sign of a religious body organized about his name.
Laelius Socinus followed his example. But Faustus
Socinus organized in Poland a Unitarian church
which had great numerical and moral strength, and
flourished for well nigh a hundred years. In 1 660
it was destroyed by the strong arm of persecution ;
but its Hungarian offshoot still nourishes a vigorous
life, and has more than one hundred congregations
cherishing its best traditions and a lofty hope.
To trace the growth of Unitarian doctrine in Eng
land is less a matter for a lecture on the Unitarian
doctrine of God than for a general lecture on the
Unitarian development, or for one on the Unitarian
doctrine concerning Jesus. Suffice it now to say
that the first English Unitarians sometimes inclined
to the Arian deviation from the Nicene doctrine,
and sometimes to the Socinian deviation. John
Locke, John Milton, and Sir Isaac Newton were all

64 UNITARIAN BELIEF
Unitarians in the Arian manner, which made Jesus
only a little less than God, but an entirely distinct
person. During the eighteenth century the Arian
type still lingered here and there, but it was much
less prominent than the Socinian. Price, Belsham,
Lindsey, and Priestley were all Unitarians ; but
Price, the friend of Franklin and the antagonist of
Burke, was of the Arian color, the others of the So
cinian. At the outbreak of the Unitarian contro
versy in this country in 1815 it was three to one,
or ten to one, the other way. Thirty years before
this King's Chapel was our first Unitarian church ;
and it was that presumably with the Socinian bias,
Dr. Freeman having been in sympathetic corre
spondence with Lindsey and Priestley and Belsham.
The correspondence came out in Belsham's Life of
Lindsey ; and Dr. Morse, who made Morse's geog
raphy for our parents and grandparents, pounced
upon it like an ant upon an aphis, and made a book
to show up the Unitarianism of others besides Dr.
Freeman. And then Jeremiah Evarts, the father of
our William M., made an article on the book, to rub
in the injurious accusation. And so the Unitarian
controversy was begun. The book and pamphlet
were both bent on convicting the American Unita
rians of the opinions of the English humanitarian
Socinians. But Channing and the most of his coad
jutors repudiated those opinions. They were not
less Unitarian than their English brethren, but
they wore the doctrine with a difference. They
were Arians. Their Jesus was a being unlike any
other in degree or kind, pre-existent, superangelic ;

CONCERNING GOD 65
as Dr. Parkman, father of the historian, put it, "but
one iota less than God." As time went on, the
number of the Arians grew less and less, that of
the Socinians more and more. And from the first
the American Unitarians were stoutly opposed to
making Jesus an object of worship on account of
his post-mortem heavenly exaltation after the man
ner of Faustus Socinus.
Indeed, the worship of Jesus equally with God was
one of the implications of the doctrine of the Trin
ity that was most repellent to the mind of Chan
ning and his spiritual friends. The "arithmetic of
heaven," as Daniel Webster called it, was never
prominent in their argument and thought. It was
the moral implications of the doctrine, not its nu
merical excess and contradiction and absurdity, that
made their revolt from it so sharp and stern. ' Uni
tarian Christianity most Favorable to Piety' was the
subject of Channing's mighty sermon at the dedica
tion of the Second Unitarian Church in New York.
It was, in truth, always his subject, but then and al
ways a part of it, and not the whole. The other part
then and always was 'Unitarian Christianity most
Favorable to Morality.' It was most favorable to
piety because it concentrated the energy of devotion
on one infinite object instead of distracting it by the
rivalry, however generous, of three ; because it left
the spirituality of God unspoiled, unharmed, by the
concreteness of a human image ; because of the sim
plicity of one God, the Father of all, as compared
with the complexity of a being three in one and one
in three, so baffling to the imagination ; because it

66 UNITARIAN BELIEF
thought it robbery to take from God the Father
every more winning attribute and loving attitude,
and assign such to the Son or Holy Spirit, leaving
to God little or nothing attractive to the affections of
the heart. What wonder that Henry Ward Beecher,
expressing the inevitable outcome of this method,
said: "Jesus Christ is my God. All that there is to
me of God is bound up in that name." All that he
cared to cherish. But that in the traditional system
which offended Channing most was the part which
it assigned to God the Father in the division of
labor between the different members of the Trinity.
He never dipped his pen in blacker ink than when
he wrote of this, declaring that, in the Trinitarian
system, God " had erected a gallows in the centre of
the universe, and had publicly executed upon it, in
room of the offenders, an Infinite Being, the par
taker of his own Supreme Divinity," wholly inno
cent of blame. What wonder, he demanded, that
men's thoughts and men's affections turned from the
God of such transactions to the victim of his stern
decrees ! But this was not the worst. The imitable-
ness of Christ's character and the imitableness of
God's character were the double prop of Channing's
moral lever with which he fain would move the
world. The latter was the subject of his discourse
at Dr. Farley's ordination ; and that discourse soars,
to my thinking, far above the epoch-making ones at
Baltimore and New York. But what was there imi-
table in the character of God as displayed by the
Trinitarian system? What was there worthy of
imitation in a being the following of whose example

CONCERNING GOD 6y~
would make monsters of us all ? " It is plain," he
said, " that were a human parent to form himself on
the universal Father, as described by Calvinism, —
that is, were he to bring his children into life totally
depraved, and then pursue them with endless punish
ment, — we should charge him with a cruelty not
surpassed in the annals of the world; or were a
sovereign to incapacitate his subjects in any way
whatever for obeying his laws, and then torture them
in dungeons of perpetual woe, we should say that
history records no darker crime." We must remem
ber here that Channing was speaking of the Calvin
ism of his own time, and not of that of ours, as
different from the other as a painted from a real
flame. We must remember that the least part of
the effect of the Unitarian controversy was the sepa
rate Unitarian body : a much greater part was the
adumbration of Calvinism in the orthodox churches
till it no longer made the impression of horror and
revulsion which was its natural operation.
Here, then, was the gravamen of Channing's
charge against the Calvinism of his time. It was
what he called " the moral argument against Calvin
ism." It was his great argument. It was bad
enough that the traditional system was unfavorable
to piety. That it was at the same time unfavorable
to morality in that it made the Almighty not a being
to imitate, but one whose example was pernicious
and abominable, — this was the most unkindest cut
of all. For Channing was nothing, if not ethical ;
and it was the ethical inadequacy of the Calvinistic
God that set his face against the Calvinistic system

68 UNITARIAN BELIEF
with a severity that the general sweetness of hi
temper brought out in sharp relief. We read in th
New Testament of " the wrath of the Lamb " ; an
there is no better commentary on that phrase tha:
the wrath of Channing's gentle heart poured ou
upon the system of theology which solicited men'
reverence and worship for a being infinitely desen
ing of their horror and their scorn.
In a former lecture we saw that the doctrine o
man as promulgated by the Unitarians of Chan
ning's generation had been variously challenged b;
the subsequent developments of scientific thought
It has not been otherwise with the doctrine of God
But, if there has been challenge, there has also beei
abundant confirmation. What was the special cor
tribution of Theodore Parker to our Unitariai
thinking but his clear insistence that the true am
perfect unity of God was no more consistent with :
duality of operation, natural and supernatural, — nat
ural and revealed religion, — law and miracle, — thai
with a trinity of persons ? There were those whi
would have cast him out from the Unitarian body
but they never did ; and in all sincerity he was th
noblest Unitarian of them all. " One God, one law
one element." The Unitarians before Parker had ai
firmed the one God, but with a double operation
Parker affirmed "one law," and so made the divin
unity more perfect and complete. He found in al
religions different aspects and degrees of the on
seeking of mankind for God. In all ancient scripl
ures, Hebrew, Indian, Iranian, Egyptian, Greek, th
records of that seeking were inspired just in propoi

CONCERNING GOD 69
tion as they were inspiring, and no more. He found
in Jesus the bright flowering and the wholesome
fruit of powers that are not wholly strange to any
man of woman born. And so it happened that he
enriched the Unitarian name with a wealth of mean
ing it had never had before. For not only to the
numerical and moral unity of God which Channing
had affirmed did he add the unity of the divine op
eration in all matter and all spirit, but also the unity
of all religions in their common root in human
nature, and the unity of Jesus with all men in a
common spiritual life; while he made the spiritual
unity of God and man, which Channing also had
affirmed, far more consistent than it could be while
the miraculous sonship of Jesus orphaned all his
brethren. It was right, then, for Parker to insist
upon his right to keep the Unitarian name and con
tinue in its fellowship. It was right for him, when
the conservatives wanted him to withdraw, to tell
them that really he couldn't do it conscientiously,
and to ask them, "Couldn't they withdraw?" Why
not ? He was more Unitarian than they.
It was Parker's sympathy with science, in reality
though unconsciously stronger than his sympathy
with philosophy, that made him a prophet of the
Divine Unity declaring itself in the uniformities of
natural law. But among Unitarians generally sym
pathy with science was not remarkably characteris
tic of the period — say from 1835 to 1855 — during
which Transcendentalism was in the ascendant.
Then it began to grow, and soon it mightily increased.
This meant that the Unitarian doctrine of God must

70 UNITARIAN BELIEF
be profoundly affected by the development of science.
Now, this development meant for one thing, or,
rather, for two things, a tremendous enlargement of
the universe in terms of time and space; and the
vaster universe implied the vaster God. To call God
infinite was one thing : to realize his infinitude was
quite another. To realize his absolute infinitude
was, of course, impossible. But the extension of the
universe in terms of time and space created for the
imagination a practical infinitude which could prac
tically be realized. When the six thousand years of
Genesis were made six million years, and the width
of the heavens and the multitude and vastness of the
stars were correspondingly increased, the later Uni
tarian could say with the Psalmist, " O God, thou
art very great," with a meaning in the words of
which the Psalmist never dreamed. But the new
awe which fell upon our minds from the immensi
ties of science was matched with a new wonder from
the microcosmic side, from the infinitesimal niceties
and adaptations of the organic world.
" So great is littleness, the mind at fault
Between the peopled speck and starry vault
Doubts which is grander, and with tender awe
Adores their equal God whose perfect law
Sustains them in eternity or time :
Greatest or least ineffably sublime."
But there is a word of science that has had a
much more special interest for Unitarians than the
words of power and vastness which that benignant
presence has sounded from the heavens, or the

CONCERNING GOD 7 1
words of mystery and wonder she has breathed
from microscopic things. There should be nothing
here which does not equally appeal to Trinitarians
and Unitarians, save as the former may have staked
their all upon the Biblical chronology. But the last
word of science, its last and greatest word, is Unity ;
and how can the Unitarian heart but swell with joy
at this tremendous confirmation of his thought, this
great " Amen ! " to his doctrine of the Divine Unity,
echoing and re-echoing from all the heights, from all
the depths, from all the vastness, all the infinitesi
mal smallness of the manifold and glorious world?
Unity ! This is the revelation of the spectroscope,
showing with cumulative evidence that the chemi
cal constituents of the sun and stars are the same
as those of our own planet. Unity ! This is the
revelation of the correlation and conservation of
forces, the most majestic generalization science has
yet made, whereby we know that light, heat, magnet
ism, electricity, are all but variants of each other and
manifestations of one central force which is in and
through and over all of them. Unity ! That is the
meaning of the transmutation of species, a unity that
binds all animal races and all animals and men to
gether in one great family of the earth above and
the deep that lieth under. Unity ! This is the
simple truth, — that everywhere the differences of
the material world have yielded to the patient obser
vation and experiment of science the proofs of an
essential likeness and identity. Deep calleth unto
deep. Fraternal salutations sound across from peak
to peak, from star to star. What George Herbert

72 UNITARIAN BELIEF
wrote of man is true of universal nature, — " Each
part may call the farthest brother." It takes a poet
to make some of the best discoveries. It was
Goethe who discovered that every part of the plant
is a modification of the leaf. What a unifying dis
covery here ! How it takes the sting out of the
familiar plaint, " Nothing but leaves " ! The thou
sands of bushels of apples that have blushed to think
of it, the millions of bushels of wheat and corn that
feed the people of a continent, the tons of cotton
that they wear, the wood that builds their habita
tions, — nothing but leaves! Ay, and the coal with
which we warm ourselves and keep up our steam
and make our infant industries to flourish, — nothing
but leaves, all that ! — leaves of the gigantic ferns of
yesterday, — these, in their turn, but sunlight organ
ized in root and stalk, so that, whether we warm our
selves at the grate or in the sunshine out of doors, it
is the same sun that warms us everywhere. Goethe
also suggested that the brain is but the topmost of
the human vertebrae. Nature is not more prodigal
than economical, If she wants an apple, she de
velops a leaf. If she wants a brain, she develops a
vertebra. We always thought well of backbone ;
and, if Goethe's was a sound suggestion, we think
better of it now.
Turn any way you will, you are confronted by this
all-pervading unity. A resolution of apparent differ
ence into essential likeness is the outcome of all
science. The proofs of this are written everywhere
in earth and sea and sky. They bloom in every
flower, they glow in every star, they shine in every

CONCERNING GOD

73

face, they beat in every heart. Day uttereth speech
of them unto day, and night showeth knowledge of
them unto night. There is no speech nor language
where their voice is not heard. And all this unity of
man and nature, of each in itself and of both in their
connection and relation, is at the same time the
unity of God, seeing that we can have no knowl
edge of the Unseen and Eternal save as we take
counsel with the temporal and seen, and that only
as we acquaint ourselves with man and nature can
we acquaint ourselves with God. Whatever else the
effect of science on our theology, it has incalculably
enhanced the force and value and significance of our
doctrine of the unity of God. There is no such
Unitarian as Science. There is no better Unitarian
literature than Tyndall's ' Heat considered as a
Mode of Motion,' and Darwin's ' Origin of Species,'
and Stewart's 'Conservation of Energy,' and the
scores of similar books which in one way or another
have exemplified the all-pervading unity of universal
life. It is not to be pretended that the advance of
science has been in all particulars as favorable to
our Unitarian doctrine as in the particular that is
most characteristic, — that of the divine unity. The
devotees of science have built many altars of late
years to the unknown God, and invited us to come
and worship him with them. The Unknowable, too,
has altars of his own and those who serve thereat.
Now, if by the unknown God is meant a God we can
not comprehend, — cannot, that is, know all about, —
we have not much objection to the term. When we

74 UNITARIAN BELIEF
have thought over all the things we know, we are
compelled to say, " Lo ! these are parts of His ways ;
but how little is yet known of him!" How little,
yet how much ! and, if we worship we know not
what, it is only because we rationally and logically
inform the vast of the unknown with an imagined
power and wisdom, order, beauty, and beneficence,
like to such as flood our spirits from the wide range
of what we actually know. And this means that
what we really worship is not the unknown, but the
known, — that and the shadow of that projected on
the void, — nay, the light of it which streams into the
deepest depth of the abyss. What we know is such
a little piece compared with the unknown that any
inference from the former to the latter may appear
unwarrantable. But what would you have ? To
argue from the known to the unknown is a law of
our being. We can no more help it than we can
help being hungry and thirsty and sleepy, no more
than we can help thinking and loving. The name of
this law is experience, and there is no other name
given under heaven by which men can be saved.
But an unknown God is one thing, and an unknow
able God is quite another. Were God unknown, we
still might hope to know him soon or late. But
the Unknowable! That means paralysis of effort
from the start. Thank Heaven, it also means an
abuse of terms, so reprehensible that the philoso
pher who is most responsible for it, now that he has
exhausted his "unknowable" of all its terror and of
all its meaning, ought frankly to confess his misera
ble mistake, and, if he can, before it is too late, ex-

CONCERNING GOD 75
punge the misleading term from every place where
it appears throughout his works. It is too fre
quently forgotten that the same process of reason
ing in the 'First Principles' of Spencer which
makes God unknowable leaves the universe in the
same limbo of inapprehension. Here is a fact which
relieves the unknowableness of God from all those
dreadful associations which it has connoted for the
popular mind. For, however unknowable the ulti
mate concepts of science, we have evidently no spe
cial lack of scientific knowledge. If so much scien
tific knowledge in spite of fundamental ignorance,
why not as much religious knowledge ? There is
nothing in the conditions of the problem which pre
vents this happy consummation. No one need be
troubled that an unmanifested Infinite could never
be found out, seeing that the universe is "full of
visions and of voices." No one need be troubled
that we know only the manifestations of "the infi
nite and eternal energy from which all things pro
ceed." To know that energy as infinite and eternal,
to know that all things proceed from it, to know
their quality, and in their light to read the character
of the Eternal, — to know all this is to make that
beggar phrase, the Unknowable, as rich as Croesus
with all saving knowledge. Do we know matter in
its inmost essence ? Do we know our neighbors or
ourselves in that ultimate, absolute fashion ? Cer
tainly not, and yet we know them pretty well ; and
that which we call matter we know not in itself, but
in ten thousand bright and beautiful and blessed
ways, which we would not exchange for any knowl-

•J6 UNITARIAN BELIEF
edge of its inmost essence. We know what we wor
ship, and we worship what we know, — the manifested
matter, the manifested friend, the manifested God.
Now, here, if anywhere, is where the development
of our later thought means difference from the
earlier, not in degree only, but in kind. Channing,
so passionately enamoured of the spirituality of God,
insisted that his incarnation in Jesus would be a
deduction from that spirituality. In the inmost
sanctuary of his mind, as in that of the temple of
Jerusalem when Pompey drew aside the veil, there
was no image of a God. And was he wrong in this ?
Shall we not say, Better none than one, one only ?
But shall we not further say, as Tennyson has said
for us? —
"The sun, the moon the stars, the seas, the hills, and the
plains, —
Are not these, O soul, the vision of Him who reigns ?
Is not the vision He ? "
Yes, only it is more than all the outward things. It
is man as well as these. In him the vision shines
as not in them. Not in Jesus only, but in all men
and women, in all truth and goodness. The incarna
tion is a fact ; but it is a fact not exhausted by Jesus,
nor even by humanity, — by nothing less than the
complete and perfect world.
" God dwells in all, and moves the world and moulds,
Himself and nature in one form enfolds."
And, unless the nature here includes human nature,
the half has not been told. But it does include
human nature. It did in Goethe's spheric mind.

CONCERNING GOD yj
The philosophers are welcome to their Absolute, a
being without attributes, without predicates, without
everything. Be ours the manifested God, — all nat
ure and all men and women, more than the garment
that we see him by, even the breathing substance of
the universal Soul. As we commune with him at
the unending feast of life, he gives us suns and
moons and stars and galaxies, and says, " These are
my body." He gives us the wine of health and
heroism and devotion and self-sacrifice, and says,
"This is my blood." He gives us the laws of
science, and says, "These are my thoughts, which
the Keplers and Darwins have thought after me."
He gives us " the Lord Christ's heart and Shak-
spere's strain," and says to us, "These are my
poems " ; " This is my loving heart." How much
better such a feast as this than the Barmecide feast
of the abstract philosopher, with his Absolute empty
of all attributes ! How much better even than that
feast which Channing spread ! For all his spiritual
deity is also here ; but with how much besides !
But is He also here ? That is a question which
presses heavily on many hearts. They recognize
that the revelation of science has been the revelation
of a grander God. They recognize that his unity has
been affirmed by myriads of voices from the depth
and height. They recognize that all the sciences
join in a great choral affirmation of the truth of
those large words of the apostle, — " One Gc4. who is
above all and through all and in you all." But that
is not exactly what he said ; and what they question
is whether we can say exactly what the apostle said, —

78 UNITARIAN BELIEF
" One God and Father of all, who is above all and
through all and in you all." If we cannot, they tell
us that they do not care so much about the vastness
of the greater God, and the wonder of his infinitesi
mal things, and the all-pervading unity which binds
all things in one. " Show us the Father ! " is their
eager, passionate cry. Can Science answer them as
Jesus answered Philip ? " Have I been so long with
you, and yet thou hast not known me ? " Surely, it
can. For, if there is one idea which, more than any
other, science in all its branches has introduced into
our conception of the world and God's relation to the
world, it is the idea of organic development, — the
idea that nothing is manufactured, nothing is made,
by the Eternal Power, but all things are grown,
evolved, unfolded, out of other things that have been
before them. Now, the fatherhood of God is a sub
lime and daring symbol of this idea of organic devel
opment, and of the paternal and reproductive relation
of every past to every present, and every present to
every future, time without end. Many of our symbols
of the infinite Being have fared ill enough through
the developments of science, — Maker, for example,
Creator, Governor, Ruler, King. These symbols
are imbedded in the current language of religion,
but they have been discredited by the advance of
scientific truth, which has destroyed the mechanical
conception of the world and equally the govern
mental conception of the Almighty. But, because
the word "Father" expresses the idea of organic
development, vital reproduction, and genetic relation
as well as any word not purely scientific can express

CONCERNING GOD 79
it, it has been legitimated as a symbol of this truth ;
and we can say, with something more than meta
phorical aptness, " One God and Father of all."
Everything is symbolic here ; and the most that we
can demand of ourselves and one another is that our
symbols shadow forth reality, and do not contradict
it or manifestly oppose it.
But to save the name of Father as the symbol of
a scientific order of ideas is not enough for the relig
ious heart. What this desires with strong desire is
to save all that was best in that name as it trembled
upon Channing's lips, as it has trembled on the lips
of millions since the disciples came to Jesus asking
him to teach them how to pray, and he began, " Our
Father, who art in heaven." And its desire is not
in vain. For, where there is the childlike depend
ence, confidence, and trust, there is the Father's
face, deep-mirrored in his children's eyes ; and the
whole course of science has tended to the strength
ening of these sentiments. The invariableness of
natural law implies our confidence in it as in a
father's guiding hand, our rest in it as in a mother's
fond embrace. Moreover, if the tendency of science
has been to the disparagement of personality as an
adequate symbol of the divine perfection, it has only
been because the symbol falls so far below the in
finite reality, not because God is less than personal.
Let the materialists believe that ! But materialism
has no better standing with our latest science and
philosophy than the chronology of Genesis or the
idea, once seriously expounded, that the Pyramids
are geological formations. And what better symbol

80 UNITARIAN BELIEF
can we have than personality for the divine perfec
tion, seeing that there is nothing higher that we
know ? The elements of personality are thought and
will. Now it was no extravagance of rhetoric when
Kepler said, " I think thy thoughts after thee, O
God." The intelligible universe must mean the in
telligent God. That which thought interprets must
itself be thought. That which the mind interprets
must itself be mind. Conversely, our ability to read
the lessons of the intelligible world means that Chan
ning did not err when he said, "All minds are of
one family." And what more natural and inevitable
than to translate the force of science into the will of
personality ? It is safe to affirm those things which
our denials cannot but imply. When the would-be
atheist sings after this fashion, —
" Beneath this starry arch
Naught resteth or is still ;
And all things have their march
As if by one great will" —
Saul, also, is among the prophets. " As if by one
great will ! " Religion asks no more for the legiti
mation of her symbol of the second element of per
sonality. But thought and will are not enough. They do
not show us the Father. We must have benefi
cence, affection, heart, before he is revealed.
" By one great heart the universe is stirred,
By its strong pulse stars climb the darkening blue ;
It throbs in each fresh sunset's changing hue,
And thrills through every song of every bird.

CONCERNING GOD 8 1
" 'Tis felt in sunshine greening the soft sod,
In children's smiling as in mother's tears ;
And, for strange comfort, through the aching years
Men's hungry souls have named that great heart God."
Strange comfort, indeed, unless, however named, the
great Heart is a heart of tenderness, a heart of love !
For it is true, as Browning sang, —
" A loving worm within his clod
Were better than a loveless God."
But, if the great Heart of the universe be not a lov
ing Heart, whence came the love, the tenderness,
the pity, the compassion, that have made wonderful
and beautiful the lives of countless men and women
in all ages and all lands ? The stream cannot rise
higher than its source. Even if God were the cre
ator, the artificer, it would be inconceivable that he
should make a creature better than himself. But,
when once he is apprehended as the organic source
of universal life, it is still more inconceivable that a
being better than himself should come forth out of
him. Nothing is evolved that is not first involved.
If that be not axiomatic truth, then are not things
that are equal to the same thing equal to each other.
Then are there no axiomatic truths. But, if this be
an axiom, then is that Heart which we call God
rightly so called, if God is good, if God is love.
Then is all human love forevermore identical and
consubstantial with his own. Does any say : " Why,
then, you only have the human love ; and it is no
special help to know that that is also God's. There
is no more love for us than there was before " ? Nay,

82 UNITARIAN BELIEF
but here also God is not only in and through, but he
is over all, blessed forever. The human love we
know which came forth from his heart is hint and
prophecy and surety that in that heart there is a
boundless deep of love which must express itself in
myriad ways to us unknown, so that even in those
things which are most terrible to think of and most
hard to bear there well may be the touch of his pity,
the sweetness of his affection, the swell and the sub
mergence of his divine compassion ; and, though
many waters have gone over us, we can still hold our
course, and cry, —
" Though my bark sink, 'tis to another sea."
And, seeing that these things are so, let us be
confident that at no time before, in all its varied his
tory, has our Unitarian doctrine of one God the
Father taken up into itself such a wealth of meaning
as it does in these last days. We do not pretend
that the doctrine is for us exactly what it was for
the fathers by whom we were begotten to a lively
hope for man here and hereafter, and to a mighty
faith in God. We do not pretend that all the
change has been in the direction of a brighter and
more joyous faith. Doubtless there has been loss
as well as gain. Certainly, if we take up all the
meaning of science into our theology, our God is
made of somewhat sterner stuff than he to whom
the fathers lifted up their grateful hearts. Our the
ology cannot be at once spiritual and cosmic, and not
recognize that God is in the earthquake and the
wind and fire as well as in the still, small voice of

CONCERNING GOD 83
conscience and the breathings of all pure affection
and all perfect trust. However great the change, it
leaves impregnable the oneness of the Almighty ; it
has brought to that oneness incalculable confirma
tion, furnishing it with a thousand splendid illustra
tions; it has, by its extension of the universe in
time and space, assured to us a practical infinitude
where we had but an empty name ; by the revelation
of invariable law it has given to us a fresh impulse
of unconquerable trust ; it has made God manifest
to us in every aspect of the fair and teeming world,
incarnate in all men and women; unknown in his
most secret essence, as we are ourselves ; well
known in the order and the beauty of the world ; a
Father still in his organic evolution of the world; a
Father still in that our thoughts are his thoughts,
our ways his ways, our love forever his, all that our
hearts contain a drop of his immeasurable sea.
Even so, Father ; for so it has seemed good in thy
sight !

IV.
THE BIBLE.
The subject, What Unitarians have thought and
now think about the Bible, is one very closely bound
up with their history. The first Christian Unita
rians were Jews, and their Bible was a very different
one from ours. For one thing, it had no New Testa
ment. Much of this was still unwritten at the end
of the first century of our era. The second century
was advanced to its third quarter before the last
book was written, the ' Second Epistle of Peter.'
That, however, did not mean that our New Testa
ment was at once recognized as such. Two cen
turies more went by before a canonical list was
made out and accepted as a new collection of
Scriptures, deserving of equal reverence with the
Old Testament. Before that, as Jacob and Esau
wrestled in their mother's womb, there were many
gospels and epistles and apocalypses contending for
the mastery in the womb of the young Church. In
a rough way, no doubt, we have the preservation of
the fittest, though some better things were thrust
aside, some poorer things retained. For a long
time after the present list was made up some of the
churches went on reading the excluded books. Evi
dently, in the earlier stages of this process the oral

THE BIBLE 85
transmission of the words of Jesus and his apostles
was more highly valued than new writings, and dis
couraged the production of these. The New Testa
ment writers had no idea that they were adding to
the sum of Scripture. Paul's letters were as occa
sional as the exigencies of his apostolate, and not all
of them have been preserved. The first collection of
these was probably the first attempt at a new canon,
— namely, a new authorized list ; and that came from
Marcion, who was accounted a heretic in his day.
He, like the other Christian Gnostics, valued the Old
Testament little, attributing it to some power inimi
cal to God. But the Old Testament was the Bible,
and the only Bible, of the earliest Christians. In the
time of Jesus a third enlargement of it was well
under way. There was much opposition to several
of the books, that to ' Ecclesiastes ' and ' The Song of
Songs ' being the last to give way, after the former
had got an orthodox postscript, and the latter had
received an allegorical interpretation. This conclu
sion was reached about a century after the death of
Jesus. Still other books were not admitted for one
reason and another. But the Christians were more
generous, and made up a list of these at the same
time that they made up the New Testament list as
we have it. They are the books of the Apocrypha,
to which Roman Catholics have accorded an equal
honor with the rest of the Bible. So have the later
Unitarians, but so have not the evangelical Protes
tants. The Episcopalian position with regard to
them has, in accordance with its usual temper, been
somewhere "betwixt and between." It should also

86 UNITARIAN BELIEF
be remembered that the Old Testament of the early
Christians was not a Hebrew book. It was the
Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew which
was completed about 100 b.c The New Testament
quotations from the Old Testament are habitually
from this. It was not till the sixteenth century that
Christian scholars began to show an interest in the
Hebrew text, — the Masoretic, established soon after
the dispersion of the Jews. Whether this is any
nearer the original Hebrew than the Septuagint, it
is difficult, if not impossible, to decide. Meantime
the countless and important differences of the Septu
agint and the Masoretic text is dynamite to any
theory of verbal inspiration except that of Dr.
Briggs's critics, which is that the original autographs
were verbally infallible. To prove that they were
not is as impossible as to prove that the inhabitants
of Jupiter's moons do not enjoy a republican form
of government, if anybody says they do.
Dogmas grow more defined and rigid with the
lapse of time, and we have reason to believe that
the doctrine of Biblical inspiration was never held
so rigidly by the early Christians as it came to be
when its rigidity became a logical necessity for the
Protestant apologist. From Arius to Socinus, about
1 200 years, there was very little Christian Unita
rianism in the world. But as it disappeared in the
fourth century, making its appeal to Biblical author
ity, so it reappeared in the sixteenth. And, as the
Bible responded much more cordially to the appeal
of Arius than to that of his opponents, so, differ
ent was the Unitarianism of Socinus from that of

THE BIBLE 87
Arius, the Bible responded much more cordially to
his appeal than to that of the Trinitarian party. All
is flux in the New Testament doctrine of Christ's
nature ; but, while there is not one good Trinitarian
text in any of its books, there are hundreds repre
senting different Unitarian conceptions of Jesus,
from the purely humanitarian up or down to the
doctrine of Arius, — that he was a pre-existent, su
per-angelic being, only a little less than God. The
doctrine of Socinus was an ingenious amalgam of
the different and contradictory texts, — an amalgam
upon which Trinitarian orthodoxy has broken its
teeth from the sixteenth century until now.
John Calvin had in him the making of an able
critic ; and, where his dogmatic predilections did not
have full play, he frequently attained to sound re
sults. For example, he was the first to advance the
opinion that some of the Psalms belong to the pe
riod of the Maccabees, the second century before
Christ. But he was so much enamoured of his doc
trinal system as a whole that he could not help find
ing that in the Bible, whether it was there or not.
Servetus and the Socini, Laelius and Faustus, really
seem to have gone to the Bible to find out what it
taught ; and, if he and they did not find exactly the
same things, it was because, in the balancing of rival
texts, the same texts did not at first lay hold of him
and them, and that, too, with such violence as made
the others subject to its stress. But this is the one
thing in the history of Unitarian thinking about the
Bible that I would have you make a note of and re
member, — that it began its modern course, as it con-

88 UNITARIAN BELIEF
eluded its early course, with a distinctly generous
and ardent loyalty to the Bible. And the modern
course it thus began it held to steadily as time went
on. There were no Christian people who appealed
to the Bible more confidently than the English Uni
tarians of the eighteenth century and the English
and American Unitarians of the earlier part of this.
It was because this Unitarianism was so Scriptural
that it was Unitarianism of one form and another;
for, studying the New Testament with minute and
conscientious care, they found exactly that, and
not anywhere the full-fledged Trinitarian doctrine.
Their wisdom has been justified, not only of their
children, but of the most orthodox, among whom
to-day there is not a scholar who pretends that the
full-fledged doctrine of the Trinity makes its nest
in any part of the New Testament. The most that
is contended for is that there are logical beginnings
of opinion which, if carried out to their conclu
sion, would give a Trinitarian doctrine. So taught
Cardinal Newman in his famous 'Development of
Christian Doctrine.' So taught Neander, the great
German orthodox scholar of the century. So teach
all orthodox scholars, deserving to be called so, at
the present time. The first great English Unita
rians—John Locke, John Milton, and Sir Isaac
Newton — were all men who had the Bible at their
fingers' ends, and held to it as unreservedly as any
of their orthodox contemporaries. That made them
Unitarians. It was not otherwise with Priestley
and Belsham and the great English Unitarians of
the eighteenth century; and, if you would know

THE BIBLE 89
how sincerely and how strongly Scriptural was our
own early Unitarian position, you must go to An
drews Norton's ' Statement of Reasons ' or Noah
Worcester's 'Bible Views of Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost.' This Noah Worcester was the mildest-man
nered man that ever cut a figure in religious con
troversy, not even Channing excepted.
Intensely Scriptural and therefore Unitarian, —
that was the early Unitarian position. Intensely
Scriptural, and therefore opposed to all " man-made
creeds," so called, and statements of belief. We
must beware of carrying back our present views and
doctrines and opinions, and attributing them to our
fathers in the Unitarian faith. We must beware of
thinking that all early Unitarians were of Dr. Chan
ning's breadth and liberality. He might be "surer
that his rational nature was from God than that any
book was the expression of his will." So were not
the majority of his fellow-ministers. His objection
to creeds was that in them the human spirit was
cribbed, cabined, and confined ; and that is also ours.
But the general objection to them in his time was
that none but Bible words were good enough to ex
press Bible truths. The Westminster Confession
might fortify itself with texts in triple row. No
matter. The wording of the Confession itself was
not Scriptural, but scholastic ; and hence they would
have none of it. You cannot make too careful note
of this, — that it was the Scriptural enthusiasm of
the early Unitarians which made their dislike of
creeds so vivid and intense. " Man-made creeds " :
the amiable iteration of that pungent phrase is as ex-

90 UNITARIAN BELIEF
pressive as anything could be of the Scriptural tem
per of our Unitarian progenitors.
But with the Scriptural temper a rational temper
went along. You see that from the start. You see
it not only in John Locke's ' Reasonableness of
Christianity,' but also in the manner of his criticism
of the Epistles of Saint Paul, always proceeding from
the more to the less obvious meaning, making the
former, not the latter, the standard of appeal. You
see it in the continual insistence of the English Uni
tarians against the Deists that Christianity was a
reasonable religion, and going far to make it so by
their elimination of irrational elements. You will
notice that in the Deistic controversy the divine au
thority of the Bible had no doughtier defenders than
the Unitarians, and they defended it as a rational au
thority. One consequence of this temper was a pro
found distaste for all allegorical and mystical inter
pretations of the Bible ; a stout insistence that its
words had but one meaning, and that this was to be
discovered by the grammatical construction, by the
connection, by the habit of the writer's thought, and
— I beg that you will notice this — by the average
testimony of the Scriptures. These canons of criti
cism rained destruction on the orthodox camp. I
suppose that from first to last thousands of people
have wondered how it was that there could be so
much difference of opinion as to the meaning of the
Scriptures between the Unitarians and their oppo
nents. There was abundant scholarship on either
side. Yes, but there were two methods of interpre
tation, — the literal and the allegorical. If there had

THE BIBLE

91

been only one, and that the former, there would still
have been some difference; but there would have
been a great deal less. " Reverence for the Script
ures," says Professor Toy, "emphasizes its letter,
but also, when a desired truth does not offer itself
from the letter, seeks to discover a hidden meaning."
The Old Testament was not Messianic enough for
the early Christians, and so they allegorized it to
their hearts' content. Not what it meant, but what
it could be made to mean, was the important matter.
It was precisely so with the Christians of the post-
apostolic age. The New Testament was not Trini
tarian enough for them ; and so they allegorized it
to their hearts' content. Cardinal Newman thinks
they did right in this respect. He thinks that with
out allegorizing they would have gone under in the
Arian controversy ; and he says, " It may almost be
laid down as an historical fact that the allegorical in
terpretation and orthodoxy will stand or fall to
gether." So said the Unitarians of fifty, seventy-five, one
hundred years ago. Take the Bible words at their
face value, and orthodoxy has no Scripture warrant.
They took them so, and therefore they discarded or
thodoxy. Were they right or wrong in so taking
them ? That is the previous question. Is there
any reason for an allegorical interpretation of the
Bible but that without one it does not satisfy the
theological hunger of the critic ? And is that any
reason for it at all? No more than the physical
hunger of a tramp is a reason for his allegorizing the
eighth commandment so as to make it mean "Thou

92 UNITARIAN BELIEF
shalt steal " when it is plainly written " Thou shalt
not." Such an allegorical interpretation would
hardly be more forced than many of those which
Cardinal Newman thinks were justified by the neces
sities of the orthodoxy of the Christian Church.
You will remember, then, that the temper of our
early Unitarianism was intensely Scriptural and at
the same time intensely literal in its Biblical inter
pretation. But hence another struggle of conflicting
elements, this time within the bosom of the Unita
rian Church. For the distaste for allegorical and
the inclination to literal interpretation came not
only from a loyal devotion to the Scriptures, but also
from a certain rational temper to which the allegori
cal method was naturally repulsive. But, as this
rational temper increased with the advance of time,
Unitarians found the same difficulty with the Bible
that many of the early Christians found with it.
They found things in it that did not seem reason
able, especially the various accounts of miracles in
both the Old Testament and New. The growth of
the scientific spirit, with its unbroken sequences of
natural law, had much to do with this. And what
was to be done? For one thing, perhaps, that set
forth by Dr. Furness in his ' Remarks on the Four
Gospels,' nearly sixty years ago. This was to nat
uralize, to rationalize, as much as possible of the mi
raculous in the Bible (more particularly in the New
Testament), and for the rest to call it natural, — not
contrary to law, but the expression of some higher
law than that commonly at work. We know how
good men were troubled by that book, and good

THE BIBLE 93
women so much that they wept for grief and shame
that a young Unitarian minister should be such a
heretic. But, if I am not much mistaken, a good
deal of the opposition had a rational basis. Was not
this method of Dr. Furness a new kind of allegorical
interpretation ? Was it not a declaration that the
words there in the Bible did not mean what they ap
peared to mean ? But the literal interpretation of
Scripture had been the ladder by which Unitarianism
had reached its outlook, and had seen the Sonship of
Jesus and the Unity of God. Should it now kick
the ladder which had done it such good service
down behind it, as if it were of no account ? Literal
interpretation had been the heavy ordnance with
which Unitarianism had raked Orthodoxy fore and
aft. Should it now be spiked or thrown overboard
into the deep sea? Many there were who said, "A
foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of weak minds,"
and resolved to give a cordial welcome to the new
interpretation. But all could not do this ; and, while
some of those who could not clove to the ancient
tale, others, finding that they must choose between
the Scriptural and the rational, chose the latter, al
beit sometimes with a grieved and anxious heart.
Channing, hardly imagining that such a conflict
ever would arise, had said that, if it should, it should
be decided in this wise ; and now his prophecy was
a great encouragement to many to do the difficult
and painful thing.
Back there a little way, when I spoke of the aver
age testimony of the Scriptures as one canon of in
terpretation, I said, " I beg that you will notice this."

94 UNITARIAN BELIEF
And why? Because it was an irrational and mis
taken canon of interpretation. It assumed the unity
of the Scriptures, and this assumption has no ra
tional ground. The Bible is an aggregation of
different books. It is not one book. It is a little
library of Hebrew and early Christian books bound
up together in one volume. Hence to interpret the
lowest things in one book by the highest in another,
the most doubtful things in one book by the clearest
in another, was an irrational proceeding. It was
perfectly legitimate ad hominem, so long as orthodox
and Unitarians alike proceeded on the assumption
that the Bible was one book and had a moral and
religious unity. It helped the Unitarians to tide
over many a difficult place. It saved them a hun
dred times from the disturbing force of something
intellectually repellent or painful to their moral
sense. In sober truth, it amounted to a kind of
allegorizing for those who had no faith in allegorical
interpretation. It gradually became discredited, and
with certain resulting consequences of first-rate im
portance. Consider how it was discredited. It was
by the operation of the two characteristic Unitarian
tendencies, the Scriptural and the rational. This is
one of the most interesting things in the history of
our Unitarian development. Just see if it is not.
Unitarians have latterly been in the forefront of
radical opinion concerning the Bible. And why ?
Because their devotion to the Bible, their allegiance
to it, their reliance on its authority, made them its
students to a remarkable degree ; and, searching it to
find out what it taught, they found out what it was.

THE BIBLE 95
Using their rational faculties to discover its mean
ings, they discovered the diversity of its parts, the
anonymous character of many, the pseudonymous
character of many more, the fragmentary character
of many books, the discrepancies of parts and
wholes, the inferior quality of certain histories to
certain others, the composite character of the Penta
teuch, the late origin of the 'Psalms,' in the New
Testament the late origin of the Fourth Gospel and
many of the Epistles. Strange it may be, and pass
ing strange, but it is the plainest truth of history
that Unitarian radicalism in the treatment and con
ception of the Bible is the direct result of Unitarian
devotion to the Bible as " the only rule of faith and
practice." The Unitarian searched the Scriptures,
for he thought he had in them eternal life. The
rationality he brought to their interpretation could
not stop with this. It must go on to " the higher
criticism," the study of dates and authorship, and
the relation of separate books to certain histori
cal sequences and certain tendencies of thought.
Hence came the modern view. The devout search
ing would not alone have produced it. The rational
temper would not alone have produced it. But,
when these twain became one flesh, there was born
to them at length the Higher Criticism, the scien
tific understanding of the Bible, as to Faust and
Helen, in Goethe's splendid allegory, was born the
child Euphorion.
The history of Biblical criticism discloses at every
stage of its advance the bias of inherited belief.
The devout Christian scholar almost invariably ap-

g6 UNITARIAN BELIEF
proaches the New Testament more timidly and
reservedly than the Old. The devout Hebrew
scholar approaches the Old Testament more timidly
and reservedly than the New. My friend Rabbi
Gottheil cordially accepts the most fearless and
least compromising criticism of the Old Testament ;
but, when he comes to the New, not even the radi
calism of F. C. Baur is radical enough for him. That
leaves to Paul four genuine Epistles ; but Rabbi
Gottheil would deny him even these, while rever
ently according to the praise of charity in i Cor.
xv. the highest place of honor in the religious
literature of mankind. Mr. Gore, the writer on
inspiration in the book called ' Lux Mundi,' — a
light under a bushel, — goes quite as far as any of
our modern critics in his uncompromising criticism
of the Old Testament ; but, coming to the New, he
says, " The reason is of course obvious enough why
what can be admitted [of mistake and contradiction]
in the Old Testament could not without results dis
astrous to the Christian creed be admitted in the
New." It is not often that the case is put so
frankly and so baldly as it is here. It is not often
that the fortunes of the Christian creed are made
so consciously and openly a check upon the scholar's
critical results, but all the way along they have
been an unconscious check and bias upon these
results. Even among Unitarians the truth of this
statement is made evident by the way in which New
Testament criticism has always lagged behind that
of the Old. There never was a more honest critic
than my Cambridge teacher, Dr. George R. Noyes ;

THE BIBLE

97

never one less capable of consciously accepting such
a limitation as that frankly accepted by Principal
Gore. And yet, as I remember him, his criticism of
the New Testament as compared with his criticism
of the Old was more or less compromising and apol
ogetic, though it was always going on to braver and
to better things. He could not approach the au
thenticity of the Fourth Gospel as courageously as
he approached the authenticity of 'Daniel.' The
same amount of evidence that convinced him of the
falsification of history in the Old Testament ' Chroni
cles ' could not convince him of this in the New Tes
tament 'Acts.' What we shall expect therefore in
our Unitarian history, as elsewhere, is that Old Tes
tament and New Testament criticism will not ad
vance with equal steps. That of the New will
always lag behind. It has done so, in fact.
In July, 1834, Dr. Noyes, then a parish minister
in the lovely town of Petersham, Mass., printed an
article on the prophets and prophecies of the Old
Testament which was a radical departure from the
traditional opinion in regard to them. This found
in the fulfilment of prophecy an evidence of the
super-natural character of Jesus and his mission
second only to the evidence of the New Testament
miracles, if to that. Dr. Noyes announced, "It is
difficult to point out any predictions which have
been fulfilled in Jesus." Here was an indirect im
peachment of the New Testament also ; for over and
over again in that, dozens of times, this or that Old
Testament passage is set forth as a prophecy of
some circumstance of the life of Jesus. Prophecy

98 UNITARIAN BELIEF
there is none, but only some word or phrase caught
up by the New Testament writer, and applied, often
inaptly, to this or that event, just as we more or less
aptly apply the language of Shakspere to circum
stances of the current time, except that we do not
imagine that we are dealing with a prophecy on the
one hand and with its fulfilment on the other. The
Hon. James T. Austin, attorney-general of the State
of Massachusetts, made a furious attack on Dr.
Noyes, and demanded his public prosecution for
blasphemy, instituting proceedings to that end,
which were untimely nipped. There were Unita
rians who were greatly shocked by Dr. Noyes's arti
cle, but not long afterwards he was made Professor
of Old Testament Criticism in the Harvard Divinity
School ; and the sobriety of his judgment, together
with his undoubted learning, did much to recom
mend his teachings even to those who were not
naturally inclined to them.
These teachings were confirmed and carried
further by De Wette's ' Introduction to the Old Tes
tament,' to the translation of which Theodore Parker
gave the strength of his young manhood while he
was preaching at West Roxbury. They were no
weak beginnings of the things since come to life.
With many lesser things they involved the documen
tary character of the Pentateuch ; the late origin of
'Deuteronomy' — about 620 B.C.; the late origin of
'Daniel ' — about 160 b.c instead of 538, as the book
itself gives out ; the division of Isaiah into two great
fragments, two hundred years apart ; the substitution
of moral warning and rebuke for supernatural predic-

THE BIBLE

99

tion as the real function of the prophets ; the deduc
tion of many Psalms from the seventy-three ascribed
to David in the traditional titles ; and from Solomon
of the most of what has been ascribed to him, all
of ' Ecclesiastes ' and 'The Song of Songs' ; the late
origin of ' Chronicles ' and their deliberate falsifica
tion of the history contained in ' Samuel ' and ' Kings '
in the interest of the priestly party and the priestly
legislation. The name of German Old Testament critics has
been legion ; but between De Wette and Wellhausen
the most celebrated and most influential was cer
tainly Ewald. More speculative than De Wette, and
of temper far less conciliatory, his learning was im
mense ; and he did much to confirm De Wette's re
sults, much also to modify them or carry them further.
Our Unitarian scholar, Dr. Joseph Henry Allen, was
as complete a master of his voluminous productivity
in this country as Dean Stanley was abroad, and fa
miliarized his results among us in his ' Hebrew Men
and Times,' which, if it is a less brilliant book than
Stanley's 'Jewish Church,' is less vitiated by a pas
sion for the picturesque, — in Stanley's book so often
fatal to historic truth. We had come so far a little
less than twenty years ago, when the criticism of
Dr. Abraham Kuenen, of Leiden, which has since
been confirmed by that of Wellhausen and Reuss
and Robertson Smith and Toy and Cheyne and
Driver, and the great body of qualified authorities,
without regard to their sectarian connection, first
found its way to this country. The Rev. Samuel R.
Calthrop at once became its eloquent champion.

IOO UNITARIAN BELIEF
My own lectures,* embodying Kuenen's generaliza
tion, were delivered in the winter of 1877-78; and I
have always allowed myself to glory just a little that
I consulted with none of the apostles at Jerusalem
or elsewhere before abandoning myself with enthu
siasm and delight to the stress of his great argu
ment. I must confess, however, that it won an easy
victory. There was some doughty opposition, but it
could not withstand the rising flood of frank assent
and cordial sympathy. The shepherds hailed the
happy birth before the wise men hereabout; but
these soon arrived to add their acclamation, — not
ably one from the South, where he had been a pro
fessor in some Baptist Theological School, Professor
Crawford H. Toy, now of the Cambridge Theolog
ical School, a scholar equal to the best in our own
country or in any other. After a few years the Rev.
Edward H. Hall, of Cambridge, one of our strongest
men upon the critical side as upon every other, read
a paper at our national Conference, embodying the
new criticism ; and some one said the only trouble
about it was that everybody believed it, so quickly
had the reasonableness and efficacy of the new criti
cism prevailed.
And now, very briefly, as to what this criticism of
Kuenen actually was and is. It was that, beginning
our studies with those parts of the Old Testament
of whose origin we are most certain, — the prophetic
writings, — and working our way out from these, we
find that for the present order of the Old Testament
— Law, Psalms, Prophets — we must have Prophets,
*'The Bible of To-day.'

THE BIBLE IOI
Psalms, Law, and then more Psalms up almost to the
threshold of the Christian era. It was a very radical
departure when De Wette assigned ' Deuteronomy'
to 620 B.C., seven hundred years after the time of
Moses. For a long time after that ' Deuteronomy '
was supposed to be the latest portion of the Penta
teuch, and the rest much older. But, according to
Kuenen, — and the whole world of scholarship is
with him now, — the priestly, the Levitical portions
of the Pentateuch are much later than 'Deuteron
omy.' They were projected in the sixth and pub
lished in the fifth century b.c. And the best thing
about this criticism is that it has immense con
structive energy. Up to this point disintegration
had been steadily going on, and confusion was get
ting worse confounded all the time. The Old Tes
tament was getting to be more and more like a
dear old misshapen building, with some hacking
away at it to build their petty theories, and some
trying to restore it, with much the same result as
where they tried to restore Chichester cathedral,
and the whole spire and tower came down upon the
run. The criticism of Kuenen left hardly one stone
upon another ; but for the ancient ruin it gave us a
logical construction, for a heap of stones a building
splendid and symmetrical in every part. For a unity
merely arbitrary and mechanical it gave us a unity
that was vital and organic. It related every part of
the Hexateuch, the Six Books, — for 'Joshua' is one
of the same company with the other five, the Penta
teuch, — to some stage of Israel's growth in spiritual
things. Everything falls into line, — the Ten Com-

102 UNITARIAN BELIEF
mandments, the Book of Covenants (Ex. xxi., xxiii.,
19), then the Prophetic narratives, which are the
story-book which has " kept children from their play
and old men from tha chimney-corner," from that to
the Elohistic document, to the fusion of this with
the former, to 'Deuteronomy' and a Deuteronomic
revision, and finally to the Priest's Code, and the
grand fusion of this with the rest, and the revision
of the whole that brought the Six Books into their
present shape from three to four hundred years B.C.,
about one thousand years after the time of Moses,
who is still celebrated in the International Sunday
School Papers and some other pious frauds as the
author of the Pentateuch.
And, mind you, the constructive achievements of
the Kuenen criticism do not end with the rearrange
ment of the Six Books in the manner indicated.
The order thus discovered is an order like that of a
great army which, as it goes marching on, sweeps
up into its files the wavering swarms of national
allies and border states, and makes them energetic
and consenting parts of its own conquering might.
The rearrangement of the Hexateuch furnishes a
unifying principle of Old Testament relations.
Each other part, in turn, the Histories, the Prophe
cies, the Psalms, allies itself with one part or another
of the Hexateuch's composite unity, and gives it
ampler illustration. Immeasurable the gain of every
part in interest, in vitality, in historical and spiritual
significance, because of this living spirit of evolution
in the midst of the revolving wheels of various mo
tive, passion, ardor, exaltation. Nor less the gain

THE BIBLE IO3
to Hebrew literature than to the Hebrew history and
Hebrew life, of which the literature is our report.
Henceforth we have a history of religious growth
where before we had one of decadence. And, seeing
that the ' Psalms ' were few, if any of them, written
until after the exile, five hundred years after the time
of David, they were evidently the product of the
priestly mind and heart ; and we cannot hereafter
admire the prophets so exclusively and depreciate
the priests so sternly as we have done hereto
fore. However disastrous such a principle to the Chris
tian creed, the Higher Criticism has but one method
for the Old Testament and New. If this has not
yet been worked so thoroughly with the latter as
with the former, it will be at no distant day. It is
an interesting fact that Andrews Norton who, in
1839, attacked Emerson's Divinity School address as
"the latest form of infidelity," was one of the first
to make a serious breach in the New Testament
wall : this by his insistence on the legendary charac
ter of the opening chapters of 'Matthew' and ' Luke.'
German criticism helped us with the New Testament
as it had done with the Old. If Strauss's ' Life of
Jesus,' which appeared in 1835, and which George
Eliot's translation domesticated in England and
America in 1846, did not persuade many to adopt
" the mythical theory " in all its rigor, it did much
to pulverize not only the supernaturalist, but also
the rationalistic interpretation of the miracles. (By
the rationalistic interpretation I mean that of Paulus,
which endeavored to show that every miraculous

IO4 UNITARIAN BELIEF
narration was the distortion of some actual occur
rence.) Then came the criticism of Ferdinand Chris
tian Baur, which the Rev. O. B. Frothingham com
mended to the young men of thirty years ago with a
pen touched with persuasion. This was the tendency
criticism, so called because it made the tendency of
the different books of the New Testament with ref
erence to Pauline breadth and Petrine narrowness a
test of literary motive, of date, of authenticity, and
so forth. It seems almost impossible that Kuenen,
in pushing out from the terra firma of the prophets
into the unknown sea, had not in mind the method
of Baur in pushing out from the four undoubted
Epistles of Saint Paul into the darkness round about.
He held them as a lamp close to his breast, confi
dent that their splendor soon or late would dissipate
the gloom. He may have overworked his theory,
but it was fruitful of magnificent results. It has
marshalled the New Testament books " the way that
they should go " almost as effectively as Kuenen's
principle has marshalled those of the Old Testament.
Meantime, as there the authorship and date of the
Pentateuch have been central to the interest of the
whole study, so here have been the authorship and
date of the Fourth Gospel. The conclusion which
is now generally agreed upon is that the Gospel was
written in the second quarter of the second century ;
that its long discourses are furthest removed from
the historic truth ; that, nevertheless, there are ele
ments of a genuine tradition both of phrase and fact
which may have derived its original impulse from
the apostle John. As for the other Gospels, it is

THE BIBLE

105

now generally agreed that ' Mark ' is the earliest, that
' Matthew ' came next, and then ' Luke ' ; that they
all abound in legendary and contradictory elements,
and are the outcome of a time long subsequent to
the death of Jesus, at the shortest about fifty years.
To Baur's list of Paul's genuine Epistles, — 'Ro
mans,' '1 and 2 Corinthians,' and 'Galatians,' — two
or three others have been added with some confi
dence. None of the other Epistles* are now cred
ited to the writers whose names they bear in the
New Testament. ' The Revelation of Saint John the
Divine,' as it is called, appears to be a Jewish Apoc
alypse made over by some Christian editor to suit
his taste and purpose. Hence the curses he de
nounces on those who take anything from the book
or add anything to it. To have another steal our
stolen goods from us is always a peculiarly distressful
circumstance. But the writer need not have been so
sensitive. He had only done what had been done a
hundred times by others from ' Genesis ' to ' Revela
tion.' His method was simply that in obedience to
which the whole structure of the Bible " rose like
Ilion in a mist of towers."
Have you kept the thread throughout this laby.
rinth, or has it broken in your hands ? Have you
thought out for yourselves as I have gone along the
general conclusion so that there is no need for me to
put it into words ? It is that Unitarianism, begin
ning with an intense loyalty and devotion to the
letter of the Scriptures, and making that, not the
Roman Catholic's tradition, nor the Evangelical
* Except possibly ' James.' But which James ?

106 UNITARIAN BELIEF
Protestant's creed, his standard of belief, yet seeking
by a rational process to discover what meaning and
what help the letter actually held, has come at
length to hold a doctrine of the Bible radically differ
ent from its original doctrine, which was that it was
a supernatural and infallible revelation. This was
inevitable ; for the textual criticism could not but
widen out into questions of date and authorship and
the purpose of the various books. Astronomy and
geology and anthropology could not withhold their
comments on the cosmology of ' Genesis ' and related
things. The studies of Niebuhr and other critical
historians could not be kept out of the equation,
with their general distrust of the validity of ancient
histories. The study of comparative religion pressed
its question why the opinion of Jews and Christians
should be considered as an argument for the inspira
tion of their sacred books more than the opinion of
Mohammedans and Brahmans and Buddhists in re
gard to theirs. Moreover, it appears that the writers
of the Bible did not suspect that they were writing
inspired documents. Could the various editors who
added here, subtracted there, who cast and recast
their material, have imagined that they were hand
ling the word of God ? " It is not possible," says
Renan, " to hack about so freely a text admitted to
be inspired." The theories of inspiration and infalli
bility are found to have grown up in obedience to
theological necessities, to have come from men
whose ipse dixit counts for less than that of any
modern scholar. All these things have had weight,
enough to make the theory of Biblical infallibility or

THE BIBLE IO7
supernatural inspiration kick the beam. Hundreds
of mistakes and contradictions have been brought to
light. Hardly a book in the Bible now retains its
former temporal relation to the general history or to
other books. Some are pseudonymous. Many others
are anonymous, by far the greater number of them
all. It is worse than a blunder, it is a crime for any
person decently intelligent and tolerably informed to
claim for a collection of books having these charac
teristics and this history a general or particular in
fallibility, a supernatural character, or an authority
in any part over and above the natural appeal it
makes to conscience, mind, and heart.
And still, "though much is taken, much abides,"
for those who are capable of serious study : a splen
did process of religious evolution sweeping through
a thousand years of busy, checkered time. Never at
any time before was the study of the Bible so rich
and so rewarding as it is now, and never before was
it pursued among us with such enthusiasm and such
large results. There is more fun in it, if our young
people did but know it, than in their social gayety
or scientific whist. Those are mistaken who imagine
that this study is for scholars only. The scholars
have made the way so plain that he who runs may
read, and a wayfaring man, though not a scholar,
may not err therein.
There is much no doubt in the combined result
of modern scholarship which cannot be readily taken
up into the consciousness of the average man of
business, the average woman cumbered with much
domestic serving and with many social cares. The

108 UNITARIAN BELIEF
Bible as it is generally printed, so miserably dis
located and deranged, is almost fatal to a vivid reali
zation of the positive results of critical investigation.
And what remains for those for whom such vivid
realization is difficult or impossible ? Surely much,
which, however it may be enhanced by a liberal ap
preciation of the critical results, does not depend on
these so absolutely that without them it cannot
enter with a wonderful delight and satisfaction into
the Bible's treasury of precious things; into its
thoughts that breathe and words that burn ; into the
quaint and beautiful old stories of the morning
world ; into the splendid indignation of the prophe
cies and the gladness or humiliation of the Psalms ;
into the moral and spiritual glory of the Epistles
which breaks through the dark and tortuous theol
ogy of Paul like sunshine through the clouds ; into
the parables and beatitudes of Jesus ; and, best of
all, into the vision of his personality, so radiant that
it cannot be obscured entirely by any conscious or
unconscious artifice of an inapprehensive, supersti
tious time, past, present, or to come. If here is less
than the old doctrine seemed to give, it is no meagre
benefaction. It can be indefinitely extended by ah
indefinite appropriation of the results of critical in
quiry, which, fatal to the imagination of a super
natural revelation, and to each and every dogma
which has this for its foundation, leaves every true
word as true as ever, every good thing as good, and
opens wide the doors for inspirations and for revela
tions broad as humanity, nor than the universe and
God less deep and high.

V.
CHRISTIANITY.
" Wide is the range of words," sang Homer long
ago ; and it is wider now than it was then, for words
are always taking on new meanings with the lapse
of time. And so it happens that Christianity is a
word of many meanings ; and it is necessary before
I set out to say what Unitarianism, old and new, has
thought of Christianity that I should indicate which
of its many meanings I have specially in mind : the
religion of Christendom, the most general meaning;
or the Roman Catholic religion, to which Roman
Catholics confine it ; or the evangelical theology of
the Protestant orthodox sects ; or the religious sys
tem whose initial stages, as reported in the New
Testament, were bound up with the life and teach
ings of Jesus of Nazareth, who, ultimately, if not
originally, was called "the Christ." Here are four
different meanings, — others might easily be named,
— and the last of these is the one which I have
specially in mind to-day. But even here we are not
dealing with a fixed quantity, with a Christianity " the
same yesterday, to-day, and forever." Even within
the limits of the New Testament we have a develop
ment. Even there Christianity is one thing in the
Synoptic Gospels, and another thing in Paul's Epis-

IIO UNITARIAN BELIEF
ties, and still another thing in the Fourth Gospel,
which is a splendid intimation of the course it was
to take for the two following centuries, from the
time of Hadrian to that of Constantine and the Ni-
cene Creed. During these centuries the Jewish
stock was planted in Greek soil, nourished by Greek
hands, subjected to Greek influences, grafted with
Greek ideas ; and it became far more a Greek than
Jewish thing, and bore Greek fruit abundantly, and
Jewish very sparingly. But the end was not yet.
Christianity as a development of religious thought
and life came in contact, not only with Greek philos
ophy which transformed it from an ethical into a
theological system, without a syllable of ethics in its
creed; it also came in contact with the Roman
Empire, with its religious customs, government, and
laws ; and all these made their mark upon the plastic
substance of the new religion. The emperor became
the pope, keeping the imperial title, pontifex maxi-
mus, the chief bridge-builder, which the emperor
had inherited from a time when the principal func
tion of the early king or consul had been the super
intendence of the bridges under which the Tiber
tossed its tawny mane. The transformation of
Christianity by Roman custom, government, and
law was not less important than its transformation
by the Greek rhetoric and mysteries and philosophy.
It was a transformation without end. In the eighth
century it made transubstantiation, the notion that
the eucharistic bread and wine are actually the flesh
and blood of Christ, a dogma of the Church. In the
eleventh century it radically transformed the doctrine

CHRISTIANITY III
of the atonement. In our own time, full as this is of
the pride of science, it has brought to birth two of the
most misshapen dogmas that it ever has conceived :
in 1854, the immaculate conception of the Virgin
Mary, which means that she was herself conceived
without original sin; and, in 1870, the infallibility of
the pope.
Thus you will see that, whatever origin and char
acter we may assign to Christianity as it appears in
the New Testament, we do not necessarily assign
the same origin and character to the Christianity
of the Nicene Creed or the much later Athanasian,
or to the Christianity of the Roman Catholic Church
in the eighth century or the eleventh or the nine
teenth, or to the Christianity of Calvin and the
Westminster divines. But here are distinctions
which are continually forgotten. Men argue this
way and that for the Christianity of the New Testa
ment, as if they were arguing for the doctrine and
observance of their particular church. It is like
arguing for a tariff bill as finally voted on, torn and
rent and patched and plastered by a pack of local
interests and political rivalries and hatreds and am
bitions, as if it were the bill originally conceived.*
Every scholar, every casual student of theology and
ecclesiastical history, knows that this is so ; but the
Protestant who is still orthodox is much slower to
admit the fact than the Roman Catholic. Why ?
Because the Protestant's standard of authority is the
Bible ; and the Roman Catholic has a double stand
ard, — the Bible and tradition. Time was when the
* February, 1894.

112 UNITARIAN BELIEF
Roman Catholics limited the extent of tradition to
the Patristic age, the time before "the Fathers fell
asleep." To Newman and his set while they were
still Anglicans the fourth century was their main
haunt, more sacred in their eyes than the century of
Jesus and the apostles. But to stop there would
leave many a Roman doctrine out in a most freezing
cold. So Newman for a bridge by which to pass
from the church of Henry VIII. to that of Alexan
der VI. — Arcades ambo — constructed his 'Develop
ment of Christian Doctrine,' allowing to that devel
opment indefinite continuance, but at the same
time devising a system of tests by which genuine
development could be distinguished from corruption
of the faith delivered to the saints. I need hardly
add that these tests were so devised as to establish
the validity of the Roman doctrine and observance
as, beyond peradventure, sound and good. And I
need not say that for logical coherency the Roman
Catholic system is infinitely superior to the Calvin
istic. The development of Christian doctrine is as
obvious as the decay of feudalism and the growth of
nationality from that decay. But, while the Roman
has his popes and councils to declare the quality of
this development and separate the true and false,
the Protestant has only his " unassisted reason," in
practice just as good as popes and councils, the same
thing in fact, but theoretically, for those who want
a supernatural and authoritative system of religion,
a very different and far less imposing matter.
In considering the Bible, in my last lecture, you
will remember that we found that the first Christian

CHRISTIANITY

H3

Unitarians — that is to say, Jesus and his earlier dis
ciples — had no such Bible as we have to think about
one way or the other. It was smaller than our Bible
by the New Testament, to say nothing of the Apoc
rypha. It was the Old Testament with two or three
books, now well inside, awaiting the decision of their
claims. And, in like manner, the first Unitarian
Christians, Jesus and his disciples, had no such
Christianity as we have to think about one way or
the other. For all that the Greek mysteries and
rhetoric and philosophy, and all that the Roman cus
tom, government, and law, contributed, was far be
low the horizon of an earthly future of which the
earliest Christians had no expectation whatsoever.
For what they thought of Christianity, as yet not
named, we must go to the first three Gospels, tak
ing care to set aside what was evidently the after
thought of a later time. We cannot go to Paul's
Epistles, the most authentic documents of the New
Testament and those nearest to the time of Jesus, be
cause they were a speculative transformation of the
life and death of Jesus, and were rejected as heret
ical by James, the brother of Jesus, and the whole
apostolic party. But, for the tenderness of a second-
century heretic for those Epistles, they might never
have come down to us at all. We cannot go to
the Fourth Gospel ; for that would have no general
recognition for a long time yet, no existence until
Jesus had been well-nigh or quite a century dead.
But the first three Gospels were written between
70 and 115 a.d., and the substance of them had been
treasured in men's memories and on scraps of parch-

114 UNITARIAN BELIEF
ment for some time before the former of these dates.
In this pre-existent stage they lacked some impor
tant features of their presentment as we have it now.
They lacked the miraculous birth of Jesus, and they
lacked his resurrection from the dead. ' Mark,' the
earliest of the three, never received the former of
these significant additions, and the latter only at a
wide remove from the original form.
Bearing in mind these things, let us inquire what
was the doctrine of the early Unitarians concerning
Christianity. What answer do we get ? This, and
this only : that they had no doctrine about it ; that
they had never heard the name, and had no idea of
the thing, — that is, a new religion separating itself
from Judaism. The religion of Jesus was to them,
as to Jesus himself, the culmination of Judaism, its
natural flower and fruit. Jesus was to them, as to
himself, the Jewish Messiah, who had been prophe-
cied for generations and expected long, the concep
tion varying with times and individuals, in the mind
and heart of Jesus taking on a lofty ideality to
which his disciples could not attain. He died a
cruel death, and straightway they began ¦ to look for
his return. It was very hard for them to give up the
hope of this. In the ' Second Epistle of Peter,' a
late document of the second century, we have a wail
of disappointment that, " since the fathers fell asleep,
all things remain as they were from the beginning."
Gradually they settled down to the millennial doc
trine, that he would come again after a thousand
years. Jesus and his earliest disciples were Jews, and

CHRISTIANITY 1 1 5
limited to Judaism the horizon of their hopes. But
Paul was an apostle to the Gentiles; and his doc
trine was that the life and death of Jesus meant a
new religion. In cursing Jesus, — " Cursed be he
that hangs on a tree," — the law had cursed itself.
In destroying him, it had destroyed itself; for his
resurrection had established his Messianic right and
title. By his death and resurrection the law had been
abolished; and the Christians — for they had now
begun to be so called — need not observe its provi
sions, in order to be as good as Jews in the new
order. To this rendering there was great opposi
tion, of which the traces in the New Testament are
not few. ' Luke ' and the ' Acts of the Apostles ' are
books which try to reconcile the difference. They
Paulinize Peter, and Petrinize Paul. They rob
Paul of his glory as the first apostle to the Gentiles,
and set it upon Peter's head. It was a daring com
promise, but it met with a remarkable success. The
genial falsification was accepted as the truth of his
tory from the second century till the nineteenth.
But the Jewish Christians were not taken in its
snare. After a little while their numbers steadily
decreased ; and in a few centuries Christianity lost
all attraction for the people in whose womb it had
been fashioned, and to which it has always been in
debted for its most precious things.
So long as there were any Unitarians in the early
church, — and this was for some centuries after the
adoption of the Nicene Creed, — their general view
of Christianity was substantially the same as that of
the Trinitarians. (Let me say here that these desig-

Il6 UNITARIAN BELIEF
nations were not in use, nor any Greek or Latin
designations corresponding to them, in the early
church. Servetus was the first to speak of Trinita
rians, Calvin resenting nothing else more fiercely;
and we do not encounter the word "Unitarian" until
after the death of Servetus.) But the general view
was undergoing constant change. There was a per
fect Babel of beliefs in the second and third cen
turies, and it is only the conceit of modern dogma
tism that can distinguish the channel of an orthodox
opinion in the wild waste of controversy that was
raging far and wide. There were those — the Gnos
tics — who opposed Christianity to Judaism outright,
and there were those who regarded it as the exten
sion of Judaism to meet the requirements of a uni
versal faith. The latter view prevailed, even as it
did so taking up into itself much from the conflict
ing tendencies. The Catholic Church emerged
from out the chaos, an amalgamation of the most
diverse elements. Jesus, the Messiah of the Jewish
nation, became the pre-existent Son of God, and, at
last, God himself, not merely as a manifestation (the
Sabellian view), but as a being equally eternal with
the Father, and of one substance with him. For
a long time we see two conceptions of Christianity
contending with each other, — one that it was a sys
tem of revelation, the other that it was a system of
redemption. Often the two changed swords; but
the latter won the final victory, and then went on to
make the redemptive sacrifice of Christ an ever-
present fact in the mystery of the eucharistic bread
and wine, — the Roman Catholic mass.

CHRISTIANITY

"7

It would be interesting,— to me, at any rate,— if I
had the time, to trace the re-emergence of the Unita
rian doctrine of the uni-personality of God, and dis
cover, if I could, what views of Christianity were as
sociated with it from one stage to another. (Here
let me again remind you that no Trinitarians mean to
be tri-theistic, though practically they have been so
oftener than not. They do not mean to deny the
unity of God's being, but only the unity of his per
sonality. They would all say that he is One, but
One in three persons.) The Reformation meant
much more than Luther's thought and action, even
when these had drawn in the thought and action of
John Calvin to enlarge their scope. There was a
ferment of ideas, and in this ferment there were
many tendencies to a Unitarian point of view. Pop
ular history and tradition are always unjust. They
select a few distinguished names, and banish to
oblivion many not less deserving of our reverence.
For the beginnings of modern Unitarianism they
have selected the names of Servetus and the Socini,
and these could not be more honorable; but there
were others who should not be forgotten, least of all
Bernardino Ochino, to whom the Socini and early
English Unitarianism owed a mighty debt. At
some important points these men were quite as defi
nitely opposed to Calvin as to the Church of Rome,
and these were points touching the general view of
Christianity. Servetus and the Socini were not of
one mind in their Christology. No one of them was
an Arian ; but, while Servetus was a Sabellian, or the
next of kin, holding that the Son and Holy Spirit

Il8 UNITARIAN BELIEF
were manifestations of the Father, the Socini were
humanitarians, Jesus was for them "a pure man," on
whom the Father conferred an official dignity equal
to his own. But, however they might differ in their
difference from Arius or the Trinitarian dogma, they
were agreed in their conception of Christianity as
God's purpose and endeavor, through Christ, to
reconcile mankind to himself. And, however it may
have been with Servetus, this was the doctrine of
Faustus Socinus, the nephew of Laelius, on which he
laid the greatest stress and by which he set the
greatest store. It was in direct opposition to the
teaching of Calvin, — that the object of Christ's
mission was to reconcile an offended God to men.
So it was that Socinus reverted to the conception
of Christianity as a system of revelation rather than
a system of redemption. The reconciliation of man
to God was to be effected by the teaching and exam
ple of Jesus, infallibly reported in the New Testa
ment, a book depending for its authority on its ra
tional consistency and its appeal to men's rationality.
There was no religion without revelation. The
New Testament was the standard, approved by
signs and wonders, fortified by its realization of the
predictions of Old Testament prophecy. The death
of Jesus ceased to be the centre of theology. His
life was the important matter; that and his resur
rection as a proof of immortality, of which there was
no other evidence.
Here was a system very simple and coherent, if
not too closely questioned, which commended itself
to many noble spirits, and which in Poland and Tran-

CHRISTIANITY 1 1 9
sylvania became the constructive principle of a
church that had no meagre history, with its own cal
endar of saints and its own martyr-roll.
The conception of Christianity adopted by the
early English Unitarians was generally Socinian.
It was not essential to this conception that the So
cinian conception of Jesus as "a pure man," miracu
lously born, endowed, and raised up from the dead,
should be adopted. There were Arians not a few
holding that Jesus was a super-angelic being, among
these Milton and Locke and Newton ; but Arians
and humanitarian Socinians held to much the same
conception of Christianity as a system of faith and
piety established as supernatural by miracles and
the fulfilment of prophecy, the Bible being a miracu
lously inspired account of the life and death of Jesus
and the preparation for his coming from the begin
ning of the world. The variations from this doc
trine in the direction of a greater liberalism were
much more common in England than in America,
where generally the tone was more conservative, the
Christology Arian rather than Socinian. But this
did not prevent the common representation of Jesus
from being that of a great teacher, furnishing a
great example. "Respect the gods," Confucius
said, "and keep them at a distance"; and the Unita
rians of Channing's time and school acted upon this
hint with their Arian conception of Jesus. "The
Imitableness of Christ's Character" was one of
Channing's most prolific and inspiring themes. As
time went on, the Arian view held the allegiance of
an ever smaller company ; but simultaneously with its

120 UNITARIAN BELIEF
decline there grew up a new humanitarian doctrine,
much more thoroughgoing and consistent than the
Socinian, and Theodore Parker was its prophet.
The Unitarian controversy, as we call it, — the
controversy, or rather separation, of anti-Trinitarians
and Trinitarians, which began in the New England
Congregational churches in 1815 after half a cen
tury, or more, of quiet preparation, — ended in 1830.
In one sense, it has not ended yet ; but by 1830 the
Unitarians had separated themselves or been sepa
rated from their brethren, and set up a denomination
of their own. Up to this time they had been as firm
as the most orthodox in their conviction that Chris
tianity is a supernatural religion. They had been
thus minded from the start. Luther and Calvin
did not accept more unequivocally the Reformation
principle of the supreme authority of the Bible. But
from the start the Unitarians had a principle of in
terpretation which, if faithfully adhered to, was cer
tain, soon or late, to entail important consequences,
and to bring the supernatural character of the Bible
and of Christianity level with the ground. For it
was a principle of rational investigation. The Roman
Catholics said that the Church was the interpreter
of Scripture ; Luther and Calvin, that it was to be
interpreted by the concurrent testimony of the Holy
Spirit and the believer's mind, whatever that might
mean. In practice it soon meant the Institutes
of Calvin and the Augsburg Confession overriding
private judgment. But the Socinian principle of
rational investigation declared upon the house-tops
what Luther had but whispered in the ear. " Prot-

CHRISTIANITY 121
estantism," says Dr. Holmes, "means 'Mind your
own business,' but it is afraid of its own logic." So
cinus was not. And that he was not bespeaks a
noble confidence in the Unitarian teaching of the
New Testament. But what a difference, immeas
urable, unspeakable, between the New Testament as
it was in his naive conception and the New Testa
ment of our modern critics ! For him its twenty-
seven books were all the writings of the men to
whom they were assigned. Six or seven only have
that character for us. For him none of them had
been corrupted. For us the most of them have
been — well, not perhaps corrupted, but written pseu-
donymously or made over for dogmatic ends. For
him the apostles were men who had abundant oppor
tunity to become acquainted with the facts of Jesus'
life. Yes ; but the original apostles wrote no book
that has come down to us. He found them in every
thing essential agreeing with each other. We find
a radical discrepancy between the Fourth Gospel and
the other three, between the ' Acts of the Apostles '
and the genuine Epistles of Saint Paul. We cannot
doubt the absolute sincerity of Socinus ; but we
stand amazed at his opinion that, if the whole New
Testament had been written by one man, it could
not have been more self-consistent and coherent
than it actually is.
But that gulf which now divides his happy con
fidence from the results of modern scholarship was
mercifully hidden from his view. Like a great
chasm in the earth, it has been made and widened
little by little by the action of forces quiet as the

122 UNITARIAN BELIEF
frost and rain. All through the sixteenth and sev
enteenth centuries we find Unitarian scholars repeat
ing the arguments of Socinus, and many of their or
thodox neighbors borrowing them to use against the
Deist and the infidel. And, since Unitarians have
had no further use for them, they — the orthodox —
have often used them against these, as if they — the
Unitarians — did not know exactly how much they
are worth. There is no better statement of the
argument for Christianity as a supernatural revela
tion than Dr. Channing's 'Evidences of Christi
anity,' and it agrees substantially with the argu
ment of Socinus. He is " not ashamed of the gospel
of Christ," because it makes a reasonable appeal to
his intelligence. It is reasonable to expect a revela
tion, and Christianity comes to us accredited as one
by unmistakable signs and wonders. "We have,"
he says, "abundant means of access to its earlier
stages." "No age of antiquity is so thoroughly
understood " as that in which Christianity arose. It
is true that for Socinus there was not a doubt that
'Matthew,' 'Mark,' 'Luke,' and 'John' were written
by the men whose names they bear, not a doubt to
meet and throw. For Channing there were many
doubts to meet, but none that left a shade of doubt
on his own mind. He found no traces in them of a
later time than that of the apostles. But the Gospels,
thus timely and authentic, attest a revelation miracu
lous through all its course, the miraculous birth of
Jesus and his resurrection significantly beginning
and concluding the impressive history. The mira,
cles of the New Testament were distinguished from

CHRISTIANITY 123
other miracles by certain tests which did no dis
credit to Channing's intellectual ability, and still less
to his moral sense. He found a presumption in
their favor as the sanctions of a needed revelation.
He found them associated with a doctrine so noble
and engaging that they could not be confounded
with the pretended miracles that had no moral pur
pose and no lofty doctrinal associations. Here he
was getting dangerously near the saying of John
Locke, that we accept the miracles on account of
the doctrine, and not the doctrine on account of
the miracles. Moreover, he was arguing in a circle,
first using the doctrine to accredit the miracles, and
then the miracles to accredit the doctrine as a thing
of God. It is a delightful thing to read the argu
ment of Channing, to put yourself in his place, or the
place of a sympathetic hearer, and let yourself be
carried along on the swift gliding stream of his dis
course. But at the end you waken with a start to
find how pitilessly his dome of many-colored glass
has been shattered to fragments by the scientific
criticism of a later and the present time.
Cardinal Manning said that to seek reasons for
our faith is to take the high road to infidelity. There
never was a truer word, if by " infidelity " we under
stand the rejection of Christianity as a supernatural
revelation. Reason as the interpreter of revelation
and the ground of revelation, as it was from
Socinus to Channing, tended with an irresistible
momentum to become reason as the judge of revela
tion, its general character and its particular contents.
In some of Channing's writings we find this process

124

UNITARIAN BELIEF

well advanced. We find him insisting that " nothing
but the approving sentence of reason binds us to
receive and to obey" the supernatural revelation.
We find him saying that "he is surer that his
rational nature is from God than that any book is
the expression of his will," and that, in case of any
conflict between his reason and the word of revela
tion, he must take reason for his guide. But there
was a certain operation of the rational temper of the
Unitarians that for a long time broke the force of
their rational principle, and delayed the advent of
its consistent application. It was that rationalism
which consists in rationalizing those elements in the
Bible which appear to be irrational, in explaining
away their irrational appearance. The ingenuity
exhibited in doing this was often marvellous. When
there was talk of Garibaldi's marrying an English
wife, and it was asked, "How about the one in
Italy?" it was said, " Gladstone can explain her
away." There were many Gladstones of this sort
among the Unitarians before the time of Parker,
— men able to explain away texts and obvious
meanings as truly inexpugnable as an Italian
wife. The more miracles, the better, ought to have
been the supernaturalist's rule. But we find the
English Unitarians before Channing and the Amer
ican Unitarians before Parker minimizing the mira
cles, getting rid of as many as possible in a quiet,
unobtrusive way, reminding us of the lover who
wrote upon the window-pane, —
" My wound is great because it is so small,"

CHRISTIANITY 1 25
to which another added logically, —
" Then it were greater, were there none at all."
The rational temper had another operation that
delayed the inevitable day of reckoning. I can best
indicate it in the words of Channing : " Let me go
to the Bible," he said, " dismissing my reason and
taking the first impression which the words convey,
and there is no absurdity, however gross, into which
I shall not fall. . . . Nothing is plainer than that I
must compare passage with passage, and limit one by
another, and especially limit all by those plain and
universal principles of reason which are called com
mon sense." Here in the last clause we have the
rationalizing method justified, the explaining away.
Common sense is to be expected and demanded of
everybody speaking and writing in the Bible. But
the limitation of one passage by another, of the
doubtful by the clear, of the part by the whole, was
not less unscientific. It assumed the unity of the
Bible, arguing from part to part, as if it were all the
work of one man, the expression of one mind. But
you can see plainly how, by the diligent working of
this method, one generation succeeded another, and
still there was no adequate appreciation of the di
verse and contradictory elements in the Old Testa
ment or New, and hence no adequate appreciation
of the weakness of the general argument for Chris
tianity as a supernatural religion.
You will think I am repeating my last lecture;
but the course of Biblical studies has furnished all
along the grounds of a right understanding of the

126 UNITARIAN BELIEF
character of Christianity. As time went on, with
all the ingenuity that was secretly pledged in ad
vance to the maintenance of a foregone conclusion,
there was a good deal of straightforward dealing
with the Bible. The fulfilment of prophecy equally
with miracles had been vaunted as a proof of the
supernatural character of Christianity ; but in 1834
Dr. Noyes came boldly to the front with a review of
HeUgstenberg, a famous German critic of the time,
in which he showed conclusively that the Old Testa
ment passages quoted as prophecies in the New
Testament had no relation to the events by which
they were supposed to be fulfilled. They were
merely ingenious adaptations, as of the phrase in
' Hamlet,' " A tanner will last you eight years," to
the second presidential term of General Grant, and
few of them so apt as this. The lack of correspond
ence was not now noted for the first time. Will
iam Whiston (died 1752) had noticed it, and had
concluded that the wicked Jews had altered the Old
Testament, so that the New Testament fulfilments
might be made absurd. In sorry truth, the wicked
Christians did sometimes interpolate prophecies in
the Old Testament, a fact to which the ' Epistle of
Barnabas ' bears unmistakable witness.
The argument from prophecy had few to do it
reverence after Dr. Noyes's article had been duly
read and inwardly digested. Andrews Norton said
in 1839, "By a belief in Christianity we mean that
Christianity is a revelation by God of the truths of
religion, and that the divine authority of him
whom God commissioned to speak in his name was

CHRISTIANITY 127
attested, in the only way it could be, by miraculous
displays of his power." " In the only way it could
be " : this seems to waive the prophecies aside. But
now the miracles must have their turn. When he
was a young man, Dr. Noyes taught a winter school
in Lexington, Mass. ; and I have in my possession a
manuscript letter to him by one of his pupils who
lived to carry on his work. It is signed Theodore
Parker. We date the Parker controversy, the sub
ject of which was the supernatural character of
Christianity, from Parker's South Boston sermon,
May 19, 1841. But that sermon did not deny the
supernatural origin of Christianity. It did not deny
that miracles are possible, nor that they were neces
sary to start Christianity on its career ; but it denied
that they were necessary to establish, prove, or
sanction Christianity for the modern mind. Chan
ning had said as much, but he had said it incident
ally and quietly. With Parker it was the business
of the hour. He made his statement sharp and
antithetic. Miracles were "the transient," the
morality and personality of Jesus were " the perma
nent in Christianity." But, if he had said that
miracles were impossible and had never happened,
he would have fared no worse. Jesus must be
believed, his character must be admired, his good
ness must be loved and followed, because of his
miraculous birth and resurrection, and the miracles
he wrought in the brief period of his ministry. The
difference between this manner of belief and Parker's
was declared by Dr. Gannett, the kindest and most
just of his opponents, to be "a difference between

128 UNITARIAN BELIEF
Christianity and no Christianity." Nearly all the
Unitarians thought after this fashion fifty years ago.
None of them think so now; and the American
Unitarian Association publishes a book in which this
is not merely conceded, but published joyfully.
From denying the present usefulness of miracles
Parker went on to deny their actual occurrence ; and
many followed him, some explaining them away into
natural or possible occurrences, and some regarding
them as altogether imaginary and fictitious. There
was much shuffling and misunderstanding, some
meaning by miracles violations of natural law, and
others the special wonders of the New Testament.
One thing is certain : that only miracles which are
violations of natural law can establish a supernatural
revelation. Miracles like Dr. Furness's, — I do not
mean the wonders of his beautiful old age, but those
which he has been writing about for some sixty years,
— these, which are the perfection of nature, cannot
establish the supernatural. Miracles, which are ex
hibitions of higher laws than those which we have
formulated, cannot do this. For a long time a good
many Unitarians did not seem to see this ; and they
went on imagining themselves supernaturalists when
they were not. But gradually they attained to
clearer vision ; and, when the scientific thinking of
the last thirty years succeeded to the vaguer think
ing of the Transcendental period, it became evident
that the laws of nature, as we call them, are only
so many subjective classifications of the observed
facts of nature. And the moment we come upon a
fact not included in our classifications we are simply

CHRISTIANITY 1 29
obliged to modify our hitherto unduly narrow classi
fications, so that they will include the latest fact.
There is more wisdom in Professor Huxley's day-fly
upon this head than in all the Christian evidences
that are mouldering upon dusty shelves. A " day-
fly," says the professor, — that is, a fly that lives but
for a day, — " has better grounds for calling a thun
der-storm supernatural than has man to say that the
most astonishing event he can conceive is beyond
the scope of natural causes." The presumption,
then, is in affirming supernatural interposition. As
for the New Testament miracles, so called, as nat
ural occurrences, the present Unitarian position is
that they are to be accepted or rejected according as
there is or is not sufficient evidence to support them.
Where there is so much smoke, we incline to think
there must have been some fire. Where most is
vaunted, there we find the least of fact ; and else
where we can often trace the growth of the legend
from some natural occurrence, some parable, or
phrase. Certain of no'particular event, we may enter
tain a general belief that on certain nervous diseases,
which Jesus and his contemporaries attributed to
demoniacal possession, he exercised a salutary influ
ence as normal as the reassurance which our good
physicians bring to us when we are sick. To under
stand the conditions of belief in Jesus' time is to
wonder that, from such a germ, in such a soil and
air, there did not grow a more luxurious tangle of
miraculous stories than we have in the New Testa
ment, which is the product of a century of mytho
logical exaggeration and dogmatic reinterpretation.

I30 UNITARIAN BELIEF
With the development of these conclusions in re
gard to the miraculous element in the New Tes
tament, the decline of Unitarian belief in Christian
ity as a supernatural religion has been as inevitable
as the decline of darkness with the development of
the morning light. But there has been much toil of
scholarship co-operant to this happy end, and pre
eminently that which has set forth the natural his
tory of the New Testament, the process of its grad
ual agglomeration, and the manner of its ultimate
arrival at a standing of authority equal to that of the
Old Testament. One might, without irreverence, —
nay, with the deepest reverence possible, — be bold
to say that a God were imbecile who, desiring to mi
raculously reveal himself to men, should go about it
in this fashion. A man of average ability would
have done a great deal better. He would have made
it clear from the start what books were compre
hended within the limits of the revelation that he
wished to make. He would not have dropped one
in a corner here, another in a corner there, on the
mere chance of some one's stumbling on them in the
dark. He would not have jumbled them up with
other books of similar appearance, and left men at
their wits' end to discover which was the honest
coin and which the counterfeit. Did I say the God
were imbecile who, wishing to miraculously reveal
himself in a collection of books, should go about it
thus ? I take it back, to say he were a mocking
fiend. He could (from the standpoint of the super-
naturalist) have made it all so plain that a way-far
ing man, though a fool, might not err therein ; and,

CHRISTIANITY 1 3 1
as it is, he has involved it in obscurities and doubts
that make it every day more difficult for the intel
ligent and sincere to accept the proffered revelation
as his supernatural gift.
But our increasing knowledge of the times suc
ceeding those of Jesus has not done more to bring
the supernaturalist doctrine of Christianity into dis
respect than our increasing knowledge of the times
immediately preceding his too brief career. Chan
ning maintained with absolute sincerity that " Chris
tianity was not the growth of any of the circum
stances, principles, or feelings of the age in which
it appeared," that " one of the great distinctions of
the gospel is that it did not grow. . . . We detect
no signs of it," he says, "and no efforts to realize it
before the time of Jesus." It would be hard to find
in all the history of thought anything less true to
our present knowledge and belief than these expres
sions. It is true that our general belief in evolution
has begotten us to a lively faith in the development
of Christianity from preceding elements of belief and
life ; but, as the philosopher said, " If there were no
God, we should have to invent one," so he might
say, "If we had no general theory of evolution, we
should have to invent one to formulate the results
of studious investigation into the relations of Jesus
and his thought to the immediately preceding and
remoter times." To-day we have no greater Unita
rian scholar than Professor Toy, who was but yes
terday a member of the Baptist Church in good and
regular standing; and we have his declaration that
Jesus taught no new doctrine, and that " there was

I32 UNITARIAN BELIEF
no reason why his followers should not remain Jews
in their religious belief." The spring does not fore
tell the summer with a clearer prophecy than that
foretelling Jesus and his religion in the period cor
responding to the gap between the Old Testament
and New, — a period represented in our Bibles here
tofore by two or three blank leaves for the inscrip
tion of our family births, deaths, and marriages. He
took up into himself not only the passion of the
Prophets and the holy beauty of the Psalms, but the
ethical nobility of the rabbis, and the mysterious
hopes and aspirations that were filling the bosom of
Judea with a profound and tragical unrest. Spirit
ual genius, like intellectual, is often a high priest
after the manner of Melchizedek, without father,
without mother ; but, if this phenomenon demanded
a supernaturalist explanation, Shakspere and Lincoln
would demand it just as much as Joseph's peasant
son. Another body of opinion which in Channing's
time was without form or comeliness, and was given
over to the eager care of those called infidels, has
since grown strong and fair, and has acquired an
honorable name, — The Science of Comparative Re
ligion. For Socinus there was no religion outside
of Christianity. Channing's position was very dif
ferent from that. He taught at last that Christ's
character was "excellent and glorious rather for
what it had in common with other good beings "
than for what it had in singularity. But it is never
safe to go to Dr. Channing for the average Unita
rian opinion of his time : he was always in advance

CHRISTIANITY I33
of that. Dr. Gannett heard the sermon from which
I have quoted, and went home, and wrote it down in
his journal as "suited to do more harm than good."
But gradually it came to be allowed that the other
great religions were at least poor relations of Chris
tianity. They were no longer distinguished from it
as false from true, and there was soon a large and
wide appreciation of their ethical and spiritual con
tents. Generally, you will find that those who led
the way in this appreciation were the "suspects,"
the radicals, the men and women on the outer verge
of the denomination, — Lydia Maria Child with her
' Progress of Religious Ideas,' and Samuel Johnson
with the lectures which became at length his great
octavos upon India, China, and Persia. I am glad
to think that those lectures were read to this society ;
for Samuel Longfellow and Samuel Johnson, ever
the best of friends, were especially of one mind and
heart in this matter of the " sympathy of religions."
T. W. Higginson, to whom we owe this happy des
ignation, was a third with them some forty years
ago. In the next decade came James Freeman
Clarke's 'Ten Great Religions,' a book too anx
ious to make out that Christianity is a pleroma, con
taining everything that is good in all the other
faiths, which, nevertheless, has done more than any
other of our time to break down the old invidious
distinctions between them and Christianity. Dur
ing the last thirty years the Science of Comparative
Religion has created a splendid body of literature,
re-enforcing the noble confidence of our Unitarian
pioneers with every needed argument and illustra-

I34 UNITARIAN BELIEF
tion. It was no accident that the great Parliament
of Religions recently held in Chicago was so largely
Unitarian in its inception, in the predominance of
Unitarian thought, and in the multitude of familiar
faces in the sympathetic throng. It was the natural
expression of a confidence in religion and humanity
as much greater things than Christianity, which has
grown with our growth and strengthened with our
strength for half a century. And this confidence
would of itself, ere this, have been fatal to the super
natural theory of Christianity, could it have had no
great allies. For in the other great religions Chris
tianity has seen its supernaturalist pretensions as in
a glass, and seen that they have no beauty that it
should desire them any more. The same processes
of thought and feeling which have produced these
pretensions in Christianity have been elsewhere at
work, and to everywhere accept them or reject them
has been found to be the only rational thing. Chris
tianity has become for us one of the great religions
of the world, one of the great historic manifesta
tions of the religious sentiment which is of universal
scope ; and we are less anxious to establish its supe
riority to its companions than to find in them some
confirmation of the best in it, and some rebuke and
shame for what is feeble in our thought and faith
less in our lives.
Time was when some among us were intent on
purging the denomination of those persons who
could not, they imagined, " without usurpation, as
sume the honorable style of a Christian." But lat
terly our Unitarian conservatives have been more

CHRISTIANITY 135
intent on showing those who cannot read their
Christian title clear how easily it can be done.
" Are we still Christians ? " is a question that has
agitated many earnest minds and many noble hearts.
It is a question that brings us back to the point
from which we set out, — the different meanings that
the words " Christian " and ¦' Christianity " have
taken on from first to last. We are not Christians
by the sacramental standard of Rome or the dog
matic standard of Geneva. But, then, no more was
Jesus, whom they called the Christ, a Christian by
these standards. Nothing could be much further
from his way in religion than their way. If near
ness to his way decides, we dare believe that we are
a hundred times more near to him than they. We
are not Christians, if, in order to be Christians, we
must accept Christianity as a supernatural religion,
and the New Testament as its supernatural report.
But doubtless we are Christians in the statistician's
liberal sense. We are inhabitants of Christendom,
inheritors and sharers of a Christian civilization,
which for good and ill has, and has had, incalcula
ble influence upon our lives. To call ourselves
Christians in this sense is but to acknowledge a his
toric origin and obligation. But we have another rea
son, as deep as this is broad, for so calling ourselves,
for daring to believe that we may so call ourselves
without presumption or absurdity ; namely, that we
find ourselves in vital sympathy with everything
that is most fundamental in the character and teach
ings of Jesus, — his love of God and man, his eleva
tion of morality above ritual or creed, his demand for

I36 UNITARIAN BELIEF
a right spirit in our actions as well as an external
conformity to the moral law, his sympathy with the
poor and miserable, his compassionate tenderness
for t1 ose who had been overborne by the tempta
tions of their lot. Something of these things, no
doubt, we find in all the great religions. Why, then,
choose him to give our faith a name ? We have not
chosen him, but he has chosen us. We are in the
line of his succession. And then, too, I see not
how, so long as the grand and sweet humanity of
Jesus is miserably obscured and ravaged and de
spoiled by honest but mistaken zeal, we can help
thrilling with a generous loyalty to him, can help
putting forth some good endeavor to rescue him
from those who do him grievous wrong, if possibly
we may restore him to his rightful place among the
bravest and the simplest of mankind. If such is our
behavior, it will matter little by what name we call
ourselves or by what name we are called.

VI.
CONCERNING JESUS.
It was long since conceded by many Roman Cath
olic and Anglican scholars that the Trinitarian con
ception of Jesus could not be found in the New
Testament. It is, they say, a conception arrived at
by the Church divinely guided by the Holy Spirit.
It would be very difficult to establish the truth of
this assertion in its entirety, but it is not so mani
festly untrue as the assertion of the uncritical Prot
estant that the Trinitarian doctrine can be found
completely fashioned in the New Testament. I say
the uncritical Protestant ; for it would be impossi
ble to find a critical Protestant, either an able
scholar or a careful student of the New Testament,
who would hazard this assertion. Every Trinitarian
scholar knows and teaches that his Trinitarian doc
trine is at best an inference from certain passages
in the New Testament. Whether a sound inference
or not can be decided only by the weight of scholar
ship. But, in truth, it is absurd to talk about the
New Testament teachings concerning this or that,
as if the New Testament were a single book, and not
a collection of twenty-seven books, varying from
twenty-seven pages to half a page in length. And
it is equally absurd to quote from one of these books

I38 UNITARIAN BELIEF
or another as if they were all of equal value in de
ciding any question of the most primitive conception
of Jesus. It is to the first three Gospels that we
must go for that most primitive conception. It is
true that in their present form their date is later
than that of Paul's genuine Epistles by from twenty-
five to fifty years. But because they are so much
more traditional than Paul's Epistles, so much less
speculative, they bring us much nearer to the foun
tain-head of early Christian thought. Even within
their limits we have not a perfectly consistent repre
sentation of the nature of Jesus any more than of
the order of his life and the details of his experience.
It is in ' Matthew ' that we reach the highest point of
exaltation : " All power is given unto me in heaven
and on earth." Even this reflection of the afterglow
of pious adulation is still within the bounds of a
purely humanitarian conception. The idea is of a
dignity and office to be bestowed on Jesus as a re
ward of his faithfulness unto death and through the
medium of his resurrection. And let me say, in
passing, that we have here exactly the Socinian con
ception of Jesus, Socinus and his followers building
up their doctrine from this and allied phrases, while
Arius and his followers built up theirs from phrases
of Paul's later Epistles and the Fourth Gospel. The
diversified contents of the New Testament and the
irrational conception of their unity are responsible
for many of the differences and quarrels of the
Christian world. Nowhere in the Synoptics is there
anything fundamentally inconsistent with the human
ity of Jesus. When we consider that they were not

CONCERNING JESUS 1 39
written, as we now have them, until from forty to
seventy years after the death of Jesus, and that in the
mean time Paul's genuine Epistles and the ' Epistle
to the Hebrews ' had all been written, it is astonish
ing how little the Synoptics are colored by these im
portant writings. It only proves with what tenacity
the human idea of Jesus held its ground, and how
slowly the speculative theories of Paul fought their
way to general recognition. The Synoptic Gospels
are the Gospels of the early church, the church of
the apostles, the Jewish Christians. They embody
their beliefs. And it does not admit of any doubt
that the early church, the earliest church, the Jew
ish Christian, was absolutely Unitarian, and strictly
humanitarian in its conception of Jesus, for the
reason that it was Jewish and that its central dogma
was that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. That even
here we have arrived at the simplicity of Jesus can
not be affirmed with perfect confidence, seeing that
so great a scholar as Dr. Martineau holds that. Jesus
was wholly innocent of the Messianic r61e ; that it
was imposed upon him by his followers after he was
powerless to resist. But accepting, as I think we
must, the general truth of the New Testament
representation of the conscious and acknowledged
Messiahship of Jesus, by that sign he was a man ; for
the Jewish Messiah was never conceived as being
anything else. The suggestion that he was God
would have impressed any pious Jew as the most
monstrous blasphemy. With every successive step
in the exaltation of Jesus Judaism became alienated
from Christianity more and more, and with his arrival

I40 UNITARIAN BELIEF
at divine honors the last hope of an extended Jewish
Christianity ceased, and the long centuries of Jewish
suffering at Christian hands, the punishment of Uni
tarian fidelity, began.
The Synoptics are Unitarian, humanitarian Gos
pels. The Jesus of their representation is a human
being. He works miracles, but the ability to work
miracles was not supposed to be inconsistent with
the nature of a human being. It is ascribed to the
disciples of Jesus, to various Old Testament per
sonages, even to the enemies of Jesus by himself:
" If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your
children cast them out ? " The average humanita
rian is perhaps too quick to argue from the promi
nence of the title "Son of Man" as compared
with the title "Son of God." Jesus never applies
the latter to himself. In what sense did he use the
former? The ablest critics are not here agreed.
(Compare Kuenen and Carpenter, for example.) If
in the sense of ' Daniel,' where the phrase occurs,
and where Jesus found it, then it was not a phrase of
individual application. " The coming of the Son of
Man " meant the coming of the true Israel. Much
of the evidence looks as if Jesus used it in this sense,
and that afterward it came to be used as descriptive
of himself. This is one of the nicest critical ques
tions, about which I could easily say more than you
would care to hear. But, if Jesus liked to so desig
nate himself, why did he like to ? Certainly " the Son
of Man " is one of the last phrases by which a man
would choose to designate himself if he wished to be
considered in any special way the Son of God or

CONCERNING JESUS I4I
God himself. The title " Son of God " had no refer
ence originally to the miraculous birth of Jesus as
celebrated in ' Matthew ' and ' Luke.' This doctrine
formed no part of the earliest conception of Jesus'
nature or origin ; for side by side with the stories of
his miraculous birth we have genealogies tracing
the line of his descent from David through Joseph,
and these genealogies must have been written be
fore the stories of miraculous birth became current.
Even so late as 75 a.d., when ' Mark ' appeared, they
were unknown to the author or had not been ac
cepted as a valid part of the received tradition.
This in ' Mark ' and in the ' Gospel to the Hebrews,'
which was apparently the basis of our ' Matthew,'
began with the baptism of Jesus. The ' Gospel to
the Hebrews ' began, " There was a certain man
named Jesus, about thirty years old, who chose us
out." Here from the descent of the Spirit at the
baptism of Jesus, as in the Synoptics, dates the
Messianic dignity of Jesus. Not only was he purely
human, but he was not invested with the attributes
of his official 'station till he had come well-nigh to
middle age. The stories of his miraculous birth
make his Messiahship congenital, but they do noth
ing more. In the Synoptics there is not a hint of
those doctrines of pre-existence which play so con
spicuous a part in Paul, in the ' Epistle to the He
brews ' and in the Fourth Gospel. The miraculous
birth did not detract from the humanity of Jesus for
the mythologists who fashioned it. They had never
questioned the entire humanity of Samuel and Isaac,
both, as they thought, miraculously born.

142 UNITARIAN BELIEF
The doctrine of the sinless Jesus was another step
forward in the process of his deification. The bap
tism of John was a baptism of repentance, and con
sequently implied the consciousness of sin ; and in
the ' Gospel to the Hebrews ' Jesus says, " What sin
have I committed, that I should go and be baptized
of him ? " and then adds, " Unless my saying this
very thing is sinful." An exquisite moral percep
tion went to the framing of this story. There are
whole chapters of our received New Testament that
are not worth so much. The writer saw that for
Jesus to consider himself sinless would convict him
of the sin of spiritual pride. No wonder that. the
tendency to exalt the person of Jesus more and more
allowed the Gospel which contained this penetrat
ing remark to lapse into obscurity, although it had,
as had no other, the look of an authentic apostolic
document. In the Epistles of Saint Paul the glorification of
Jesus is much further advanced than in the Synop
tics ; but, if the limits of humanity are overpassed,
the measure of Deity is not attained. To the actual
historical Jesus Paul was quite indifferent. He
does not quote his words. He does not recount his
deeds. His thought did not centre in the historic
Jesus, but in an ideal Christ of his own conception.
This ideal Christ was a man. Paul never calls him
God, and would no doubt have resented the imputa
tion that he was tending to do so. But Paul's "man
Christ Jesus " was a very different man from him
of the Synoptics. He is "the second man from
heaven." Paul was not a consistent thinker; and,

CONCERNING JESUS I43
if we try to make all that he said hold fast together,
we shall only weary ourselves without result. This
was his first thought, — that Jesus was glorified by
his death and resurrection; but this could not sat
isfy his speculative genius. So far, his is a doctrine
after the Socinian Unitarian's own heart. But a
glory "put on" by Jesus did not satisfy him. He
wanted a glory essential to his personality ; and so,
finally, his death and resurrection became only the
means of his resuming a glory which he had ages
before his earthly manifestation, — the glory of a
heavenly, archetypal man. Henceforth to Paul the
human life of Jesus was the merest episode in the
career of the heavenly man, an image of the divine
glory, but not less an image of the possible glory of
-mankind. Here is sufficient proof that, however
Paul might exalt the attributes of Jesus, he never
thought of him as God.
The New Testament carries us one step beyond
Paul, even supposing that ' Colossians ' and ' Philip
pians,' if not 'Ephesians,' were the work of his hand.
The Fourth Gospel is that step beyond. This Gos
pel was one of many and various attempts to state
the doctrine of Christ's nature in terms of the Alex
andrian philosophy ; and, as the most consistent, the
most brilliant, the most imaginative, it threw every
other attempt into the shade. It originated (per
haps early) in the second quarter of the second cen
tury.* On the one hand, the writer found the Alex
andrian doctrine of the Logos, — the divine reason,
the creative agency, — and on the other hand he
* See Dr. Emil Schurer 's statement of the question.

144 UNITARIAN BELIEF
found a conception of Jesus expressed in terms the
most exalted, and bearing a very strong resem
blance to the terms of the Logos -doctrine of Philo
Judaeus, the great Alexandrian teacher of the doc
trine. Philo had never dreamed of a human incar
nation of the Logos, and Paul had never identified
his exalted Christ with the Alexandrian Word. The
first to do this was pretty certainly not the writer of
the Fourth Gospel. It occurred to many writers
about the same time. To effect an alliance between
Christianity and Alexandrian Platonism was the one
passionate enthusiasm midway of the second cen
tury. In the Fourth Gospel this enthusiasm shrivels
the humanity of Jesus in its eager flame. Having
such a book to reckon with, it is astonishing that
a humanitarian conception of Jesus has still confi
dently appealed to the whole New Testament. Hu
manitarian this book is not, but it is still Unitarian,
— Unitarian in the most precarious manner, but still
Unitarian. For all the likeness between the Logos-
Christ and God, there is also difference, and there is
subordination. " As the Father hath life in himself,
so hath he given the Son to have life in himself."
These words express the idea of the independent
personality and subordination of the Logos. Thus
the New Testament Jesus, on the topmost height of
his development, though infinitely more than man,
is still not God. If the dictum of the Fourth Gos
pel were final, nothing would remain for us but to
consider Jesus a super-angelic being, coexistent with
God, the Creator of the world, and still — not God.
This is Unitarianism of the least humanitarian type,

CONCERNING JESUS I45
the creed of Arius. But why should we accept the
dictum of this Gospel as final, when we know the
circumstances of its origin, and know how widely it
departs from the primitive tradition and how arbi
trary was its identification of Jesus with the Logos
of the schools ? A book so written comes to us with
no more authority than any other piece of ancient
speculation, and its doctrine is to be accepted or re
jected according as it does or does not square with
the historic facts and with a rational conception of
the world.
The Fourth Gospel was chronologically about one-
third of the way along from the ethical teachings
of Jesus to the theological, non-ethical Nicene
Creed of 325 a.d. It was a losing battle for the hu
manitarian conception of Jesus all the way ; a losing
battle for the Unitarian conception, too, but the bat
tle for this was not lost when the last word of the
New Testament was spoken. But the wonder is
that after this, as the Jewish Christians, cherishing
the humanitarian tradition, became an ever smaller
party, the Greeks and Romans, unembarrassed by
that tradition, and conceiving Jesus merely as a sub
ject for free speculation, took nearly two centuries to
traverse the short distance between the Fourth Gos
pel and the Nicene Creed. Evidently the Unitarian
ism of the early church died hard. From 150 to 325
a.d. there was a perfect medley of beliefs. Tertul
lian, about 200 a.d., the first to use the word "Trin
ity," thought the deifiers much more dangerous than
the humanitarians. Fifty years later Sabellius advo
cated the doctrine that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

I46 UNITARIAN BELIEF
are all emanations of the one supreme God, — sub
stantially the Unitarian doctrine which emerged in
the sixteenth century, with Michael Servetus for its
defender unto death. But about the same time Ori
gen announced the doctrine of Christ's eternal gen
eration ; and this was the doctrine which triumphed
at Nicaea, whereat the peasant son of Joseph, the
carpenter of Nazareth, ended the long journey of his
ideal transformation, and became "of one substance
with the Father." The deification was at length
complete. The details of that completion furnish the most
interesting chapter in the history of the early
church. You will find them admirably set forth in
Dean Stanley's chapter on the council of Nicaea in
his ' Eastern Church.' They are by no means re
assuring to those who go to the early councils for
the oracles of God. It is true that the council of
Nicaea, the first oecumenical council, was less furi
ous and murderous than some others ; but, in the
conduct of its delegates and the motives that actu
ate them, a modern political convention is not more
disreputable. There, too, subserviency to the boss
was the controlling principle ; and the boss was Con-
stantine, the first Christian emperor, who delayed
his baptism so that it might wash out his prospec
tive sins. Arius was knocked down by an opposing
bishop ; and, when his creed was read, a storm of dis
approbation greeted it, and it was torn in pieces by
his enemies. What was the creed of Arius ? It
was that the Son was subordinate to the Father, and
created by him out of nothing. To this strange

CONCERNING JESUS 147
complexion had the Unitarian doctrine come at
length, to this in opposition to the Athanasian doc
trine that the Son was eternally begotten. The
spirit of verbal compromise appeared upon the scene
in the person of Eusebius of Caesarea. He produced
a creed of which the emperor had approved, and to
which the Athanasians could make no objection ex
cept that an Arian had offered it and that the
Arians would agree to it. What the Athanasians
wanted was a creed that the Arians could not ac
cept ; and, when a letter was read from an Arian
bishop, protesting that " to assert the Son to be un
created would be to say that he was homoousion, —
that is, of one substance with the Father," — clearly
the thing to do was to frame a creed embodying the
obnoxious word. And this was done; and he that
had once been the teacher of Nazareth became " very
God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one
substance with the Father." Constantine agreed to
this, and advised Eusebius to do so with his own
private understanding that "of one substance"
should mean "of like substance"; that is, that the
Athanasian word should have an Arian meaning.
You will find it difficult, perhaps, to adjust your
sympathies in this matter. Between Arius dating
his Jesus from before all worlds and hailing him as
their Creator, and Athanasius holding him eternally
begotten, you will think there was not much to
choose. You will imagine that the general course
of Christendom would have been much the same if
Arius had triumphed. It is true that Unitarians
have generally sided with Arius in that weary fight ;

I48 UNITARIAN BELIEF
but it is also true that of late years the thought of
Athanasius has approved itself to a good many of
our theologians as less mechanical, more philosophi
cal. Then, too, it has seemed to save the humanity
of Jesus, making him God, to be sure, but also man,
having two natures ; while the doctrine of Arius
swallowed up his humanity entirely in the nature of
a being as unique as God himself. A few years ago
we used to class a few of our older men as Arians ;
but theirs was a modified Arianism at the worst, and
they have no successors.
Neither the ends nor the beginnings of historic
movements are so sharp and sudden as the chronol-
ogists represent them. The Arian party did not at
once become extinct when shadowed by the impe
rial frown. For two or three centuries after that it
had its ups and downs, sometimes with a council or
the court in its favor, and sometimes in imperial or
ecclesiastical disgrace. Meantime the Trinitarian
scheme, which was by no means completed at Nicaea,
was gradually completed by the personification of
the Holy Spirit ; and Mary, at the council of Ephesus,
where one bishop was trampled to death by another
in the fury of debate, was declared theotokos, the
mother of God ! For centuries Unitarianism in any
form was a thing unnamed, unknown. It remained
unnamed as Unitarian until the sixteenth century.
It became known again with the beginnings of the
Protestant Reformation. Luther and Melanchthon
had their own doubts about the orthodox dogma
which they violently suppressed. Here and there
the orthodox dogma was impeached at almost every

CONCERNING JESUS I49
point, and one variation from it was very apt to lead
to another. Men differing in their particular results
were attracted to each other by their common spirit
of inquiry and the common danger it involved. Italy
and Spain were the countries most prolific of heresy
as distinguished from the schism of the Protestant
revolt. The papal jurisdiction and the Inquisition
sent tbe heretics abroad in search of sympathy.
Many came to England; and in the Strangers'
Church in London, upon which Archbishop Cran-
mer smiled, there was many a tentative departure
from the orthodox creed. Chief among the Italians
associated with this movement of thought was Ber
nardino Ochino, a lofty spirit, whose story should be
better known by those who love to read about " the
brave light-bringers " of the world. Born in 1487,
he died in 1564, driven out from Zurich to starve in
exile because of his ' Thirty Dialogues ' in which he
had ventured doubts about the Trinity which he
could not solve. The name of Servetus is much bet
ter known. His Spanish name was Miguel Serveto ;
and he was born in Tuleda, Navarre, in 1509. His
was a strong and brilliant mind, insatiably curious,
in biology going far toward the discovery of the cir
culation of the blood. He was a scholar of very
great ability, a thinker of immense originality, often
extremely modern in the substance and the form of
his discourse. He was not coldly intellectual, but a
man of lively sensibility, eager and emotional, of a
too trustful disposition, as shown by the event ; no
irresponsible free-lance, but a man of passionate de
votion to the truth and to his own convictions, — not

I50 UNITARIAN BELIEF
content with privately enjoying them, but demand
ing their consideration in the highest court of Prot
estant appeal, that which John Calvin, born in the
same year, held in Geneva. If he had gone to Cal
vin, seeking his advice and counsel, or even cultivat
ing a decent appearance of deference to his opinion,
he might have died in his bed, and Calvin need not
have been his murderer. When he sent Calvin the
manuscript of his 'Christianity Restored,' in 1546,
and reopened a correspondence with him, Calvin
had long been aware of his heretical opinions. But
now Servetus proposed to set him right, and
that made all the difference in the world. There
was mutual recrimination. The correspondence was
broken off ; and Calvin wrote to this one and that,
that, if Servetus came to Geneva, he should never
leave the place alive. Servetus knew of his resolve.
Mihi ob earn rem moriendum esse certo sew, — " On
account of this thing I know that I must die." His
prophecy and Calvin's threat were both fulfilled.
What possessed him to dare the tiger in his den we
do not know. He came to Geneva, Aug. 13, 1553,
meaning to get off as soon as possible. But the
next day was Sunday, and he could not get a boat.
Moreover, not to appear singular, he had to go to
church. He was seen, recognized, and arrested. A
trial was absurd, for Calvin had condemned him
in advance. Nevertheless, once instituted, it dragged
along until October 26 ; and on October 27 he was
burned to death over a slow fire. He was made of
softer stuff than Calvin, but he would not recant to
save his life. Even his last despairing cry attested
his unwavering faith in what he had believed.

CONCERNING JESUS 151
Calvin's reason for his course is obvious : his spir
itual supremacy had been impeached. His excuse
is hard to find. Few of our modern orthodox would
be able to detect the flaw which differentiated the
opinions of Servetus from his own. They were not
the opinions of Arius, whom he found "unequal to
the glory of Christ." They were not the doctrines
of his contemporaries, the Socini, who reproduced
the humanitarian conception of the Synoptic Gos
pels in its most exalted form. They were those
Sabellian doctrines of the third century which had
been pushed into a corner by the Arians and Atha
nasians, wrestling for the mastery. Servetus held
that Jesus was a manifestation of the Father from
before all worlds and time, yet not from all eternity.
The spurious text of the "Three Heavenly Wit
nesses," which has been dropped from the revised
translation, the only approximately Trinitarian text
in the authorized version, was not too Trinitarian for
his belief. Few of our modern orthodox are as or
thodox as he. In the annals of persecution it would
be difficult to find a victim sacrificed for a more in
finitesimal variation from the persecutor's creed.
Many in those times were the variations from the
orthodox standards ; and, seeking for their cause, we
find it in the enthusiastic study of the New Testa
ment, a natural sequel to the substitution of the
Bible for the Church as the fountain of authoritative
truth. But the New Testament, as we have seen,
teaches one thing here, and another there. In one
set of texts Servetus found his Sabellian doctrine;
in another set some found the hair-breadth dif-

152 UNITARIAN BELIEF
ference from that of the Arian doctrine. But on
neither of these lines was Unitarianism to found a
school and build a church. Rather on that of the
Socini, Laelius and Faustus, uncle and nephew of
that name, both born at Siena, — the uncle in 1525,
the nephew in 1539. Were it true, as often stated,
that the younger did but publish what the elder
thought and wrote in secret, it would be harder than
it is now to explain the friendly relations that sub
sisted between the elder and Calvin, though he had
been as cautious and obsequious as Servetus was
rash and self-confident. The uncle had at once
the more sceptical and the more religious mind.
The interrogation point was his favorite stop. The
period was the nephew's. He was essentially a dog
matist. His genius was ecclesiastical. His darling
scheme was a common worship of Calvinists, Arians,
and those of his own way of thinking. This now
concerns us only in its relation to Jesus. Here, as
I have before indicated, his doctrine was the human
itarian doctrine of the Synoptic Gospels in its high
est range. For his life of service and his obedience
unto death, Jesus was highly exalted, invested with
divine honors, and was therefore to be worshipped
as God. On this worship of Jesus Faustus Socinus
insisted to the bitter end, tacitly sacrificing to it
Francis David, the noble Transylvanian, whose im
prisonment for his opinion's sake made him a Uni
tarian martyr at his brethren's hands. Far more
important than the Socinian doctrine of Christ's
nature, so mechanical and artificial, was the substi
tution of the life and teachings of Jesus for his death

CONCERNING JESUS 1 53
as the true centre of gravity, the power of God unto
salvation. The Socinian doctrine was embodied in the Ra-
covian Catechism, which found its way to Eng
land early in the seventeenth century, and soon,
widely planted, bore abundant fruit after its kind.
Owen, one of the stiffest of the Calvinists, averred
that there was not a city, town, and scarce a village
where some of this poison was not poured forth.
The father of English Unitarianism was John Biddle
(or Bidle), whose books were burned by the hang
man in 1654, and who narrowly escaped their fate,
only to die in prison after the Restoration. From
this time forward the Socinian type of Unitarianism
was pre-eminently the English type, though John
Milton and John Locke and Sir Isaac Newton held
to the Arian doctrine, as did also Dr. Price and
many others more or less famous in the eighteenth
century. But it must not be forgotten that a ra
tional temper was inseparable from the development,
and that Socinianism in the hands of Priestley and
Lindsey and Belsham and their kind became some
thing very different from Socinianism as originally
taught. Even John Biddle swept aside at once that
worship of Jesus which to the younger Socinus was
a matter of first-rate importance, the chief corner
stone of his ecclesiastical building.
Nature does not more abhor a leap than does the
ology. Very gradual were the steps by which the
New England mind passed from the theology of
Edwards and Whitefield to that of Channing and
Parker. The moral reaction from predestination

I54 UNITARIAN BELIEF
preceded the intellectual revolt from the doctrine
of the Deity of Christ. The first Unitarian church
in America was that of the Episcopal King's Chapel,
Boston ; and Dr. Freeman, the minister of the
church, the grandfather by marriage of James Free
man Clarke, was apparently a Socinian in his Chris
tology. But the first Episcopal church was the last
to become Unitarian. New England Unitarianism
was developed in the Congregational churches even
more universally than that of England in the Pres
byterian. And, while the English Christology was
generally Socinian, that of New England was gen
erally Arian. But it was little preached. The stress
of Channing and Dewey and Gannett was not upon
the nature and the offices, but upon the character,
of Jesus. If in terms they pleaded for the miracles
as sanctions of his teachings, what actually per
suaded them was their intrinsic excellence. And,
when the Arian conception no longer satisfied, it
was not generally exchanged for the Socinian.
Never was any time less suited than that of the
New England Transcendentalists to the acceptance
of a conception so arbitrary and mechanical. Many
of these, under the lead of Emerson and Parker,
passed suddenly, with startled looks, into the full
light of a conception of Jesus simply and entirely
human. Even now, as we read Parker's words, our
hearts are swayed as pendent vines are swayed that
swing in summer air. Channing had preached the
imitableness of Christ's character. But how much
more human was the conception of Parker ! He
spoke of " the imperfections of Jesus," and men half

CONCERNING JESUS 155
expected that he would be struck with lightning
from the sky. But, from beyond that sky, others
could almost hear the voice of Jesus, saying, " This
is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased."
How good, how sweet, how excellent, after the long
centuries of exile, to be welcomed back once more to
the warm precincts of humanity, and folded to a
loving human heart ! To be once more in Boston
what he had been in Nazareth and Jerusalem, — a
man among his fellow-men !
But Parker's thought at first was meat for strong
men only : it was not milk for babes. Indeed, the
advance of thought in one direction meant its re
tardation in another. Men's growing sense of con
tradictory and imperfect elements in the New Tes
tament suggested the temporary subterfuge that it
was not a revelation, but the record of a revelation,
the real revelation being the life and character of
Jesus, the perfect revelation of God in perfect man.
This, which is exactly the position held by Dr.
Lyman Abbott at the present time, was the position
of Unitarians generally about forty years ago, — a
much more advanced and liberal position than that
of the earlier Unitarians, a much less rational and
consistent position than that to which the great ma
jority of Unitarians have now arrived.
It is a position hardly less mechanical and arti
ficial than that of the Socinian dogma, with its in
vestiture of the human Jesus with divine honors
which require for him the adoration of the heart, the
invocation of men's spoken prayers. That Jesus
was a perfect man is an assertion as impossible to

156 UNITARIAN BELIEF
prove as that the inhabitants of Mars eat nothing
but unleavened bread. To adduce anything to the
contrary would be a most ungracious business. But
certainly there are things about Jesus in the New
Testament which are not helpful to the doctrine of
his impeccability, — for example, that dreadful treat
ment of his mother, and that cursing of the fig-tree
for not bearing fruit before the time. Some forty
years ago this question was argued by Dr. Mar
tineau and Francis Newman, a younger brother of
the cardinal. The whole trend of Dr. Martineau's
argument was to the discrediting of the New Testa
ment and the putting of an ideal conception in its
place. In discrediting the New Testament, probably
he did not go too far. Certainly, he did no more
than was necessary for his argument ; for it is impos
sible to accept the New Testament representation
of Jesus, and at the same time hold that he was
" tempted in all points like as we are, and yet with
out sin." But we may believe that the actual char
acter of Jesus was much higher than that of the
New Testament representation, and still find our
selves unable to accept the doctrine that he was a
perfect man. Yet there is one particular of that
representation which, in this connection, is deserv
ing of the most serious consideration. It is where
Jesus, called " Good Master," answers : " Why callest
thou me good ? There is none good but one, and
that is God." That, it would seem, must be a gen
uine report ; for it is just the kind of thing not to be
interpolated,— just the kind of thing to be got rid of,
if it could be without violence. If moral perfection

CONCERNING JESUS 1 57
means the doing of no conscious wrong, this would
be final. But moral perfection means not only the
doing of no conscious wrong, but the doing of no
actual wrong. If we know too little of the inner
life of Jesus to predicate of him the doing of no con
scious wrong, and know that he himself refused to
let another call him good, we know enough about
him to know that he was not intellectually infallible.
Yet without being this he could not be absolutely
free from actual wrong. We often hear the remark,
"To say that he was without fault would be to say
that he was not human." That makes it clear that
humanity carries with it the presumption of some
faultiness. To establish a particular exception would
require the certainty that the inward voice was
never disobeyed, and that it always made an infal
lible pronouncement as to what ought to be done.
It is hardly less than wicked or insane to pretend
that in the case of Jesus we have this double cer
tainty, especially with his clear voice saying to us
across the centuries, " Why callest thou me good ? "
But the intellectual hardihood of our Unitarians
forty years ago, who affirmed the moral perfection
of Jesus, was greatly in excess of what it would have
been if they had merely affirmed this. For they
at the same time affirmed that Jesus was the only
perfect man ; while yet it was possible, and always
had been possible, for other men to be as good as he.
Such an affirmation implies little short of absolute
omniscience in the person making it. How does he
know the inmost heart and life of all the millions
who have lived and died upon the earth? If by

158 UNITARIAN BELIEF
moral perfection is meant freedom from conscious
sin, some of us have known men and women of
whom we think we could affirm so much. Why,
then, deny of Jesus what we concede is possible for
men as such ? We do not deny it. We only say
we do not, cannot, know about a thing so secret
and obscure. And then, besides, that inexpugnable
saying will recur, "Why callest thou me good?"
Moreover, moral perfection is much more than doing
nothing which is evidently wrong to us. It is doing
the rightest possible thing under the circumstances
every time. To do this, a man must be much more
infallible than the pope pretends to be. For he pre
tends to be infallible only when speaking ex cathedra,
not in the innumerable exigencies of each social
and domestic day.
So, then, without appealing to certain passages in
the New Testament, which, however consonant with
" the second person of the Trinity " do not reflect a
perfect human goodness, it is evident that, when our
Unitarians of forty years ago affirmed the moral per
fection of Jesus, they did so without intellectual
seriousness. It is evident that those who still hold
to this conception, Unitarians or others, do not suf
ficiently consider what they say. For they imply
not only the omniscience of Jesus, but their own.
But even if the golden haze with which Martineau
invested himself when contending with Newman had
made him impervious to Newman's solid shot, even
if the moral perfection of Jesus had then been estab
lished, whether in the narrower or in the wider and
the truer sense, what should we have to say of the

CONCERNING JESUS 1 59
other part of the conception, — the perfect revelation
of God in this perfect man ? What, if not this ?
That, however such a conception may have agreed
with the pre-scientific thought of God, it has no
agreement with the thought of him which science
has revealed. The Christ of Arius and the " second
person of the Trinity " is the Creator and Sustainer
of all worlds. But his attributes cannot be trans
ferred to a man, however perfect, to suit the exigen
cies of an irrational phrase. Those who delight in
this phrase — the perfect revelation of God in per
fect man — do not pretend that the immeasurably
great and glorious revelation of modern science is
any part of that revelation which we have in the
mind and character of the Man of Nazareth. But,
surely, it is no little part of God's revelation of him
self to us. Surely, a revelation in which this has no
part cannot be a perfect one. Nor any more can
that which is exclusive of the beseeching beauty of
the world, of the great course of history, of the
genius of Homer and Shakspere, of Raphael and
Rembrandt, of Beethoven and Wagner, of Washing
ton and Lincoln, of the heroism and devotion of in
numerable brave and tender men and women who
have lived and died for truth and righteousness.
Bright is the laurel upon Jesus' brow which once
the brier mocked. We would not rob it of one shin
ing leaf. But thousands besides him have done
their part, with sea and land, with sun and stars,
with history and art, in revealing to us something of
the perfection of the Eternal. And when we con
sider the vastness of his revelation in the order and

l60 UNITARIAN BELIEF
the beauty of the world and in the course of history,
in the genius of his poets and the goodness of his
saints, though we know that this revelation is far
from perfect, yet is it so much more perfect than
that vouchsafed to us in the mind and heart of Jesus
that to speak of this as perfect seems either foolish
ness or blasphemy. It does not so much bespeak a
lively sense of the commanding excellence of Jesus
as it bespeaks a strange and miserable indifference
to the boundless majesty of God.
I have dwelt longer on this phase of Unitarian
thought than I should have done, if, while less and
less attractive for the Unitarian mind, it had not
passed over into the keeping of the progressive or
thodoxy of our time. But the objections I have
urged have naturally appealed to many, and the an
swer that they make is that the revelation in Jesus
is a revelation of the perfect moral, not universal,
nature and character of God. The answer does not
help. The moral perfection of God is a perfection
that expresses his relation to innumerable worlds,
incalculable times. To imagine that we have a per
fect revelation of it in the provincial life of Jesus,
known for a few months only, seen through a mist
which no critical splendor can entirely dissipate, is
to imagine as irrationally and unworthily as it is
possible for men of natural intelligence to do. For
God's thoughts are not our thoughts ; neither are
his ways our ways. As the heavens are higher than
the earth, so are his thoughts higher than our
thoughts, and his ways than our ways.
To-day the pure humanity of Jesus is the prevail-

CONCERNING JESUS l6l
ing doctrine of the Unitarian body. It would be
hard to find among us an Arian thinking of Jesus as
the creator of all worlds, himself created before
time began to be. It would be only less hard to find
a true Socinian thinking of Jesus as a human being
exalted to the rank of God. But there are not a
few who still think of him as a perfect man ; and
many more who speak of him as such, without think
ing much about it. There are also those who think
of him as working miracles, not to attest his mis
sion, but from the fulness of his love ; and others
who accept some of the miracles as facts, but tell us
they were as natural as the blowing clover and the
falling rain. But the natural thing is the habitual
thing, and so we cannot go with these. The laws
of Nature are her habitual processes, and that one
should be allowed to play fast and loose with these
as a reward for keeping the law of righteousness is a
doctrine which not even the enthusiastic conviction
of Dr. Furness can commend to our intelligence.
There are few, if any, who now believe in the mi
raculous birth of Jesus ; and those who believe in his
resurrection from the dead wear their belief with
such a difference from that of the Unitarian fathers
that it is but the shadow of a shade. Maintaining
the past rate of progress, before the century com
pletes its round the pure humanity of Jesus will be
as generally received among us as the unity of God.
Such a conclusion v/ill not be very different from
that held by the first Christian Unitarians in the
first decades of the Christian era, before Paul had
written, and the first Gospels had assumed their

1 62 UNITARIAN BELIEF
present form. Those who hold back from it because
it implies that Jesus was " a mere man " would do
well to consider what a man may be and do before
they qualify the noun with any adjective of contempt
or disrespect. Such is man's body, such his mind,
such his affections, such his conscience, such his
sense of infinite and eternal things, that within the
scope of his terrestrial and immortal possibility there
is room enough for all that Jesus was and did to
swing with easy motion, like planets on their heav
enly way. Not " a mere man," but a man, and such
a man that, when we have torn veil after veil of myth
ological illusion, and come face to face with him
at length, or as nearly as may be, all our minds go
out to him in gladsome recognition of his spiritual
genius, and all our hearts in loving admiration of his
broad humanity, his compassion for the poor and
miserable, his demand for inward holiness, as well as
outward homage to the moral law. There is nothing
in the ultimate Jesus of our critical investigation
that need be concealed or that invites the least apol
ogy. That he partook of the imperfect notions of
his time means that he was not a monster, but a
natural man. That he identified his mission with
the Messianic office means that he conceived that
office so loftily that he could not but identify it with
his own spiritual ideal. Where was the mistake,
seeing that the conception had always been as plas
tic as the artist's clay to every prophet's mind?
But, if it was a mistake, it was such an one as hu
manity will cherish when it has forgotten all the
millions who have never been mistaken because they

CONCERNING JESUS I63
never ventured anything for man or God. And the
pure humanity of Jesus is the talisman by which he
shall keep off the dangers that are threatening his
name and fame. Isolated from humanity as God or
demi-god or wonder-worker or the one perfect man,
he will dwindle more and more, and shine with dim
mer light. But set him frankly among men, and the
fierce light that beats upon him there will but the
more reveal the greatness of his mind, the goodness
of his heart, the splendor of his soul. The greatest
of his fellow-men, — such is the modesty of greatness,
— shall hail him as a greater than themselves. The
kindest and the best shall find in him a blessing on
their good endeavor, a summons to the ardors and
the satisfactions of an endless quest.

VII.
THE FUTURE LIFE.
Beginning, as we have done heretofore, with the
first Christian times, we find that the Unitarians of
those times — that is, the first disciples of Jesus —
were Jews ; and, as Jews, their doctrine of a future
life was that of a physical resurrection from the
dead. This was a doctrine which the Jews had only
recently acquired. The first hint of it in the Old
Testament is in the ' Book of Daniel,' one of the last
books admitted into the Old Testament canon for
the good reason that it was one of the last written ;
for, while it is given out as a book written six cen
turies before Christ, it was actually written in the
year 162 B.C., or very near that year on one side or
the other. Always famous borrowers, the Jews had
borrowed this doctrine from their Persian con
querors. There are texts in the Old Testament
before that in ' Daniel ' which have been forced to
yield a similar meaning, but a competent criticism
sets them all aside as accidental resemblances or
metaphorical allusions. Before borrowing the doc
trine of the resurrection ot the body, the Jews had
their doctrine of Sheol, which hardly could be called
a doctrine of a future life. It was not a doctrine pe
culiar to the Jews, but the common property of the

THE FUTURE LIFE 1 65
Semitic peoples, — the doctrine of a miserable pit or
underworld in which the ghosts of men endured a
dull, half -conscious life in death, utterly joyless and
forlorn, having no beauty that any one should desire
it. It would seem that it should have been an easy
matter to develop this doctrine into something
better, especially as the Jews had originally had the
advantage of a lively contact with the Egyptians,
with whom a future life was as real as the present,
organized as completely as their own dynasties, with
judges passing upon every man's earthly conduct
and apportioning his due reward, with sanctions ap
pealing to men's constant hope and fear. That the
Hebrews of the Exodus, spoiling the Egyptians, left
this treasure behind as if it were the merest dross,
while they took along the rite of circumcision, is
evidence of their carnal mind. Nevertheless, it was
from Egypt that the Jews first got a real doctrine of
immortality, not, however, until a thousand years
after the Exodus. You will find this doctrine in
'The Wisdom of Solomon,' a book not included in
the Jewish canon nor in any Protestant canon on a
level with the Old Testament and New. It is one
of the books of the Apocrypha, unfortunately one
the date of which is hard to fix, the critics varying
from 200 b.c. to 50 a.d. If the earlier date, that of
Professor Toy, is the true one, this real doctrine of
immortality antedates the resurrection doctrine
of ' Daniel.' I say it came from Egypt, and by this
I mean something more than that 'The Wisdom of
Solomon ' was written by some Alexandrian Jew.
It was, and by one strongly subject to Greek influ-

1 66 unitarian belief
ences ; but Greek influences alone do not account
for his doctrine of immortality. The air of Egypt
was full of this doctrine, and the Greek influences
themselves were saturated with it. " For God
created man to be immortal, and made him an
image of his own eternity." Nowhere in the Old
Testament or New is there a doctrine of immortal
ity so large and full as this of a book which Jews re
ject, which Protestants but half receive, to which
only Roman Catholics give an honored place among
the best, as it so well deserves.
Evidently, this real doctrine of immortality was
less congenial to the Jewish mind than the resurrec
tion of the body. It was the latter that prevailed.
For one thing it was a doctrine of Yahweh's partial
ity for the Jewish people. The resurrection was
for Jews alone. In Daniel's representation some
should awake to shame and everlasting contempt,
and some to everlasting life. But the bane and
blessing were exclusively a Jewish matter. The
' Book of Enoch,' later than ' Daniel,' quoted as
Holy Scripture in the New Testament, but never
admitted to any canon but that of the Abyssinian
Church, teaches a general resurrection ; but this doc
trine did not at once prevail. It was not that of the
Jews, and presumably it was not that of the Chris
tians in the first Christian century. Indeed, the
Christians still further narrowed it. The brave sin
cerity of Dr. Hedge could find but two texts in the
New Testament affirming a general resurrection,
and Professor Toy objects to one of these. The
resurrection was for " the chosen people " only ; and

THE FUTURE LIFE 1 67
"the chosen people" were, in early Christian thought,
the faithful followers of Christ.
How was the doctrine of the resurrection related
to the resurrection of Jesus from the dead ? In
later Christian thought the former has been based
upon the latter. We have had Unitarian ministers
within twenty years insisting that without the
resurrection of Jesus we have no ground for a be
lief in immortality. Paul did not so conceive. He
said, "If we rise not, then is Christ not risen."
There is not in the New Testament a more sugges
tive text. The doctrine of a physical resurrection
was no such strain on the imagination for men who
lived in constant expectation of the last trump as for
men anticipating an indefinite inhumation and com
plete decay. Early Christianity was but one of
many Jewish movements that involved a more or
less extended resurrection of the dead as one feature
of the quick-coming day of the Lord. The resurrec
tion of Jesus, therefore, was not so very wonderful
to the early Christian mind. It was merely " the
first fruits of them that slept." The rest would fol
low soon. The general expectation made the partic
ular belief concerning the resurrection ten times, a
hundred times, easier to accept than it would other
wise have been. That the particular belief also did
much to confirm the general expectation there can
be no doubt ; but it played no such part in early as
it has played in later Christian thought. Its func
tion, in Paul's thinking, was to establish the Messiah-
ship of Jesus, and to show that in making him ac
cursed by the manner of his death, — " Cursed be he

1 68 unitarian belief
that hangeth on a tree " — the Jewish law was "hoist
with its own petard," self-cursed, self-abolished.
Later there came a time when, in the last book of
the New Testament, the ' Second Epistle of Peter,'
we find a writer lamenting that "since the fathers
fell asleep all things remain as they were from the
beginning." Jesus had not come back, and no resur
rection trumpet had awakened the faithful from their
last long sleep. Gradually the hope of such things
died away or was indefinitely deferred. Then, very
naturally, the resurrection of Jesus assumed a differ
ent rdle, and became the ground of an illogical per
suasion of man's general immortality.
So long as there were any Unitarians in the early
Christian Church, — that is to say, for some five cen
turies, — the Unitarian doctrine of a future life was
that of other Christians, the doctrine of a physical
resurrection from the dead. This doctrine remained
the universal doctrine of Christendom during the
thousand years which were for Unitarianism a period
of dire eclipse. It did not even maintain itself at
the height of Paul's " spiritual body," in his letter to
the Corinthians, which was related to the decaying
flesh as sprouting grain to seed. This doctrine,
which no modern Unitarian believes, is still thought
good enough for purposes of pious consolation by
many Unitarian preachers, and, with slack con
science, is incorporated in our liturgical books ; but
it was a much better doctrine than the one which
afterward prevailed. Thomas Aquinas, mightiest
doctor of the Church, contended " that no other sub
stance would be raised except that which belonged

THE FUTURE LIFE 1 69
to the individual at the moment of death," — a view
that would make an emaciating sickness for some
of us an end to be desired. The Roman Catholic
Church indorsed this view at the Council of Trent,
declaring for the resurrection of the identical body
of flesh without deformities or superfluities. This
view has never been expressed with more revolting
frankness and absurdity than by Dr. Gardiner
Spring, who was still fulminating from the pulpit of
the Brick Church in New York when I began to
preach in Brooklyn, thirty years ago. Indeed, I can
remember when a real shock was given to the sensi
bilities of a Unitarian congregation by a preacher
who came to Marblehead and preached a sermon
setting forth the inconsistencies and absurdities of
a physical resurrection of the buried flesh. But all
the way along there was a serious limitation and
practical nullification of the doctrine of a physical
resurrection by the doctrine of an intermediate state.
Jesus upon the cross is represented as saying to the
repentant thief, " This day shalt thou be with me in
Paradise," showing that thus early some conceived of
an independent existence of the soul, untrammelled
by the fortunes of the body. A good many have
contended that the soul until the resurrection of the
body is kept in strict abeyance, without sense or
motion ; and the logic of the situation has been all
upon their side. " For, if," as Dr. Hedge inquires,
" the soul can exist for ages and fulfil the conditions
of a moral agent without a body, why should the per
ished body be revived and reannexed ? " But the
heart has its own logic, and this very generally pre-

170 UNITARIAN belief
vailed. The resurrection of the body has been for
the most part throughout the Christian centuries a
superfluity, a survival, the fifth wheel to a coach.
Good churchmen go on year after year solemnly
affirming that they believe in "the resurrection of
the dead." But what they actually believe in is
" the life everlasting," which makes the resurrection
of the dead of no account.
" In vain shalt thou, or any, call
The spirits from their golden day,
Unless thou, too, like them, canst say,
My spirit is at peace with all."
For those who have attained to such a thought as
this, the thought of their beloved dead engaged
upon " such tasks as suit the full-grown energies of
heaven," the resurrection of the body retires into a
background of impenetrable shade.
When Unitarianism emerged from its millennial
sleep, its doctrine of a future life was related to the
resurrection of Jesus somewhat differently from that
of the Romanists and Calvinists. The younger So
cinus denied the orthodox doctrine that death came
into the world because of sin. He contended that
"mortality, not immortality, is the normal issue of
human life." By mortality he meant the death of
the body and the soul. The resurrection of Jesus
was a reward of his faithfulness unto death ; and the
faithfulness of his followers would enjoy a like re
ward. The utter destruction of the heathen and the
wicked is a logical deduction from his teachings, but
he declined to work it out.* I am left to infer that
* I follow the exposition of Dr. Alexander Gordon, an English Unitarian scholar
of the highest rank.

THE FUTURE LIFE

171

for Socinus there was no post-mortem existence for
the soul until the resurrection of the body. It is not
conceivable that Socinian Unitarians generally ac
cepted a doctrine so repulsive to the instincts of the
affectionate and yearning heart. It is probable that
they availed themselves of the inconsistency of their
predecessors, and supplemented the doctrine of a
fleshly resurrection with the belief that the souls of
the righteous are, pending that, in conscious peace.
But two centuries later the doctrine of Priestley, the
chief Unitarian of his day, and in his scientific ac
quirements equal to any of his time, would seem to
have held very closely to the doctrine of Socinus
that soul and body naturally die together, and that,
if they renew their life, it must be by the miraculous
act of God. In such renewal he believed. He was
not so illogical as to find any proof of the natural
immortality of mankind in the supernatural resur
rection of Jesus from the dead. That was a miracle
of infinite power, and without such a miracle he
conceived no resurrection to be possible. A fresh
miracle for every individual believer was his rule.
Do you think this was a strange belief for the discov
erer of oxygen, the Huxley of his generation, born
in 1733? But it was logically coherent; and, given
one miracle, why should the Infinite Power hold
back from as many more as might be necessary to
resuscitate the saints he wished to have with him
in glory everlasting ?
The beginning of Channing's ministry coincided
very nearly with the end of Priestley's life. In their
religious thinking they were very far apart. Chan-

172 UNITARIAN BELIEF
ning had the greatest admiration for Priestley's
character and scientific genius ; but, himself a New
England Federalist, Priestley's sympathy with the
French Revolution must have seemed to him a very
doubtful matter, and for his thinking on Socinian
lines he had habitual distrust. Channing's Unita
rianism was not a foreign importation. It was the
fruit of the reaction of his own lofty mind, benevo
lent heart, and exigent morality on the New Eng
land orthodoxy in which he had been reared, and
from which had come some of the best impulses of
his religious life. Nothing could be further from
Channing's thought than the doctrine of Socinus
and Priestley that the soul, equally with the body,
dies a natural death, and that immortality is the
miraculous gift of God. His thought was that of
the great early thinker who wrote the ' Wisdom of
Solomon,' —
" And scorned to blot it with a name."
He believed that " God created man to be immor
tal, and made him an image of his own eternity." He
taught that Jesus by his teachings and resurrection
made immortality a certainty. But he did not dwell
on either of these arguments. Had he attempted to
do so, he would have found the teachings of Jesus
singularly meagre on this head, and his resurrection
more in need of proof than yielding it. In his great
sermon upon Immortality he barely mentions the
resurrection of Jesus, and then proceeds to show
that the marks of man's immortal destination are in
his very constitution, that God has impressed them

THE FUTURE LIFE 1 73
on his soul. It is wonderful how little this discourse
has suffered from the wear of time. It anticipates
all that is best in Theodore Parker's great sermon
on the same subject. It has the wonderful elevation
that always marked the thought of Channing, and
it has it to a remarkable degree. He could never
speak of the human mind without a sudden glow and
flame ; and here he finds in its creative, boundless
energy a proof of its undying strength. Turning to
the moral nature, he finds in crime itself the proofs
of human greatness and an immortal nature. How
but because crime is impossible without moral free
dom, and because temptation is the stuff that has in
it the making of a man ! He has a vision of the
future life that is a magnificent rebuke of those who
find in the desire for immortality only the selfish
ness which can never have enough. The French
philosopher said that, if there were no God, we should
have to invent one. If there were no immortality,
we should have to invent one for the realization of
Channing's glorious dream. He had so little body
of his own that to his friends he seemed almost pure
spirit ; but a life exempt from the material aspects
of the world had for him no attraction. The hymn
which sings rejoicingly, —
" Ye golden lamps of heaven, farewell ! "
could not have been a favorite with him. He con
fessed that he could not, without depression, think of
breaking all his ties to the material universe. " When
I think," he said, " of its infinite extent, of the count
less worlds which astronomy discloses to me, I feel

I74 UNITARIAN BELIEF
that material nature, including all the beings con
nected with it, must offer infinite food for the mind,
unbounded and inexhaustible discoveries of God.
Then I find that, just as fast as my mind unfolds, my
delight in the universe increases ; new correspond
ences are revealed between the inward and the out
ward world ; a new light beams from the creation ; a
more thrilling voice comes from it. I cannot endure
the thought of being severed from this harmonious
and glorious universe. I expect death to multiply
my connections with it." It is interesting to find
this man, to whom the satisfactions of the moral life
were almost unexampled in his generation, demand
ing something more than this for his immortal food,
— demanding "an increasing variety of exquisite sen
sations," together with the larger mind, the loftier
conscience, and the deeper heart.
I must again remind you that Channing's thought
must not be taken as a measure of the average Uni
tarian thinking of his time. It was far more liberal
than that, far more interior and spiritual. There
were those who feared his liberality, his inwardness,
his spirituality. They thought he did not make
enough of the outward things, — the miracles, the
authority of the Bible and Jesus and the Church.
Strangely enough, the lineal descendants of these
very men have vaunted themselves as Channing
Unitarians, while differing from him in their temper
and their spirit as cold from heat and darkness from
the light. The average Unitarian of Channing's
time laid much more stress than he did on the res
urrection of Jesus as a proof of immortality. He

THE FUTURE LIFE 175
depreciated all those intellectual and moral and emo
tional arguments for it of which Channing thought
so much. And just as the anti-slavery movement
after 1830 intensified the pro-slavery spirit, so the
Transcendental movement, nearly contemporaneous,
intensified the spirit of reliance upon supernatural
authority. Without the resurrection of Jesus, it was
insisted, we have no evidence for immortality. But
the argument was not well thought out. Even if the
fact of Jesus' resurrection could be established from
a mass of evidence so vague and contradictory as
that furnished by the New Testament, if it proved
anything concerning the fate of mankind, it would
evidently prove too much. For the resurrection of
Jesus was a resurrection of the material body, his
ascension was an ascension of the material body, —
" with his flesh and bones and all things appertain
ing to the perfection of man's nature " : so says the
English article; and his immortality had the same
physical concomitants. What proof is here of our
physical resurrection thousands of years hence, or
of our immediate immortality in some new investi
ture in the event of death? Moreover, the resur
rection of Jesus (including the ascension) was the
crowning act of his miraculous career. As such,
what evidence does it furnish for the resurrection or
the immortality of those who have no miraculous
powers ? To be logical in this regard, we must fol
low Socinus and Priestley, and suppose a miracle for
every individual resurrection from the dead. Of this
the resurrection of Jesus might be regarded as a
sign, but how it could be regarded as a pledge or
proof we cannot possibly make out.

176 UNITARIAN BELIEF
When we consider these things, it is at first hard
to understand why Dr. Furness, when he published
his first studies of the New Testament and the life
of Jesus, was received so coldly by the Unitarian
conservatives. It is j ust sixty years since his study
of the resurrection appeared in the Christian Exam
iner (January, 1834) ; and, as he is now ninety-two,
he must then have been thirty-two years old. Cer
tainly, no one before had ever done so much to rec
oncile the differences and contradictions of the
gospel histories. Who of us has not been "almost
persuaded," as we have read those pages glowing
with enthusiasm, so brilliant in their ingenuity that
we can easily appreciate how some famous lawyer
hailed Dr. Furness as a master in his special craft ?
Moreover, Dr. Furness's Jesus was a man, and his
miracles were hailed as the perfection of his natural
manhood. Hence there was soundness in his in
ference of man's general triumph over death that
was wholly wanting to such inference in the op
posing camp.
But, if it is hard at first to understand the indiffer
ence and coldness of the conservative Unitarians to
the young writer's daring thought, it becomes easy
after brief consideration. The conservatives were
by no means ready to believe that Jesus was a man.
They were by no means ready to believe that his
" miracles " were effected in an entirely natural
manner. If every one of them could thus be saved
as fact, it would be lost as supernatural fact ; and it
was not the fact, but the supernatural fact for which
they greatly cared, and which they would not let go.

THE FUTURE LIFE 177
It is true that Dr. Furness urged the fact as a sanc
tion of the spiritual authority of Jesus, but what the
conservatives wanted was a supernatural authority;
and this a natural fact, however wonderful or excep
tional, did not secure to them.
Moreover, Dr. Furness was with Channing, and
not with the externalists, in his conviction that the
resurrection of Jesus was not necessary to establish
the immortality of the soul. He had proof enough
of that in the soul's " thoughts that wander through
eternity," its boundless aspiration for the good and
true. It was the moral grandeur of Jesus that con
firmed his natural faith. To be sure, the resurrec
tion of Jesus was a resultant of this moral grandeur ;
and in this way an indirect connection was estab
lished between it and the faith in immortality. But
facit per alium facit per se ; and hence the moral
grandeur was the corner-stone on which he built,
and this did not satisfy the supernaturalist party.
There were objections from the opposite extreme, —
from those who could not find anything in the gen
eral course of life to persuade them that moral excel
lence, however exalted, entailed superiority to the
laws of nature's orderly procedure. In the old Jew
ish ritual the rule might be, "The priests in the
temple profane the law of the temple, and are
blameless." It is not so in the ritual of Science.
The best men in her temple are the most obedient
to her law.
But there was a deeper reason than any we have
yet observed why Dr. Furness's naturalism in the
third decade of the century was a sign that should

I78 UNITARIAN BELIEF
be spoken against. It maximized nature : it mini
mized the supernatural. That was the method of
Emerson's ' Nature ' and the ' Divinity School Ad
dress.' That was the method of the Transcenden-
talists generally. Now, for the genuine supernatu
ralist, the more miracles, the better. Dr. Furness
said, The less ! The more so-called miracles he could
interpret naturally, the better. Thus Jesus did not
say : " Peace ! Be still ! " to the raging sea, but to his
scared disciples ; and, when their hearts were quieted,
the waves did not appall. Here was a tendency
which ultimated in the famous South Boston sermon
of Theodore Parker in 1841. Even Channing re
gretted that Parker was so depreciatory of the mira
cles ; but he had little need of them ; none whatever
to confirm his faith in immortality. He was a thou
sand times more sure of man's immortal destiny
than of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
He was conscious of it, — as conscious of it, he de
clared, as of his own existence. Mankind as such,
he said, have an instinct of immortality, an intuition,
just as they have an instinct, an intuition, of moral
ity and God. Here was a boldness far in excess of
Kant, the great German founder of the Transcen
dental School. Here was a boldness far in excess of
Emerson and Hedge and others of our own Tran-
scendentalists. It may not have been philosophy,
but it was magnificent. I do not know where else
to go, unless it be to Walt Whitman, for such splen
did confidence, such joyous certainty, such absolute
assurance of a future life as we find in Theodore
Parker. Such confidence, such certainty, could not

THE FUTURE LIFE 179
but be contagious. Some — the majority — settled
back more resolutely than ever into the supernatural
position. But many, and for some time a growing
company, entered into the sunshine, ardor, glow, of
Parker's strong assurance, and became partakers of
his joy. That was the golden age of immortality for
Unitarians. It was very hard for the conservatives
to forgive those who believed so easily, and who be
lieved so much. Here was, indeed, a special revela
tion vouchsafed to every individual soul. It was
strange that Parker should resort to argument to
convince men of something they were conscious of,
something that they knew by intuition. But he did,
and we have his arguments. Some of them are as
good to-day as ever. Some of them surprise us by
their rendering of facts. We do not find the belief
in immortality so universal as he found it. We do
not find the desire for it so universal as he found
it. There are those who have the belief, but have
not the desire. Many a good man would give much
to know that he should have his end-all here.
But it wasn't Parker's arguments that convinced his
hearers and his readers : it was his unwavering con
fidence that communicated itself to them. Those
who were caught up into the sacred fury of that
confidence, but who have since felt themselves
obliged to forego its passion of heroic affirmation and
divine content, can never go back with memory to
the departed days without a pang of sorrow and re
gret. Their later way of thought and feeling may
be better, but it is not the same. I remember well
enough how hard it was for me to give up the super-

180 UNITARIAN BELIEF
naturalist position. Body and soul seemed parting
company. But I remember with much sadder self-
compassion the agony of mind and heart when I
could not maintain any longer the cause of Tran
scendentalism as formulated by Theodore Parker,
or prophesy any more in its name. But from out
the darkness there came hands that plucked me out
of the horrible pit and miry clay, and set my feet
upon a rock ; and I found a new song in my mouth.
It was the development of the scientific spirit that
made such a change come o'er the spirit of our
dream. This development made the supernatural-
ist's position more untenable than ever. It brought
to the criticism of the New Testament a more
searching light, and demonstrated how irrational and
immoral it would be to accept as something actual
an event so much at variance with the habitual
course of things as the resurrection of Jesus upon
evidence so contradictory and uncertain. Here was
no longer any talk of the impossibility of miracles.
The method of science is to accept anything, no
matter how wonderful it may be, upon sufficient evi
dence ; but it knows not the supernatural. Given
a fact, and it must have its law, though we should
have to wait for its discovery a thousand years.
But the method of science was hardly less fatal to
the certainties of Transcendental metaphysic than to
those of supernaturalist theology. Resolving the
various instincts of the animal and human world into
the products of experience transmitted by heredity,
it proposed to do as much for the instincts or intui
tions of morals and religion, to seek their origin and

THE FUTURE LIFE l8l
trace their growth, and see if these were such as to
justify them in the court of reason, tried by a judge
and jury not to be swayed by any solicitation of af
fection to the one side or the other. You will see
what a tremendous difference it made. Those out
givings of the mind called consciousness and intui
tion, which the Transcendentalist had accepted as
ultimate realities, indivisible units of thought, and as
the very impress of God's mind upon our own, must
now give an account of themselves, and show reason
why they should be accorded those seignorial rights
which had been heretofore accorded them. How
Parker would have met the challenge we shall never
know. He died before the battle had been fairly
joined, laying down the pen which had been a battle-
axe and sword and spear in the same year that Dar
win's ' Origin of Species ' tacitly demanded a revi
sion of the whole range of those moral and religious
ideas which, like animal and vegetable species, had
been regarded as special creations of the Deity.
I think I am not wrong in my imagination that
for many Unitarians of the more thoughtful kind
there was a period of thick darkness somewhere
along from i860 to 1880, sooner or later as the in
dividual was quick or slow to recognize the force of
the scientific criticism on both the supernaturalist
and the Transcendentalist positions. There were
some who never recognized the force of that criti
cism, and these went on their way rejoicing. There
were others who, intellectually accepting the result
of science, could not resist the habit of high hope
and blessed confidence which so long had etched

l82 UNITARIAN BELIEF
and moulded in their minds. Here and there a man
settled down doggedly to his work, resolved to
preach only what he honestly believed and had
reason for believing, and was sometimes surprised
to find how much it was. Gradually there came the
consciousness that, if science had no warrant for the
belief in immortality, neither had it any countermand
of the belief. It was, then, permitted us to hope ;
and we made the most of that. The hope was cer
tainly a noble and exalting one, whatever those
might say who too exclusively regarded certain of
its baser manifestations. The next step was to the
conclusion that it was a reasonable hope, — a long
step, and involving many impulses co-operative to a
single end. Some of these were intellectual, some
emotional, some moral.
Of the first sort was that derived from the quick,
sharp, absolute collapse of the materialistic ren
dering of the world with its depressing maxims,
"Thought is a secretion of the brain," and "The
brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile."
There was something almost comical in the sudden
ness of the collapse. It was like the breaking of a
bubble that Herr Buchner had blown up to a porten
tous size. When the more thoughtful saw how little
there was in it, they wondered that they had been
so terribly scared. But the materialistic set had
made great noise and shouting, and we thought
them the vanguard of an army when they were
but an awkward squad. Materialism was found to
be " the explanation of a world of which we know
something " — the world of mind — "by a world of

THE FUTURE LIFE 1 83
which we know absolutely nothing," the world of
matter. Science and philosophy came at once to
this conclusion. But here was only negative help.
And the same is true of the collapse of that lovely
vision which we once enjoyed of humanity upon the
earth advancing endlessly to an ever-greatening,
never absolute, perfection. Here was a substitute for
immortality which a good many thought would an
swer all the better purposes of the original article.
Then came the astronomer, and told us that one in
cident of evolution would be the destruction of the
earth and the solar system and the resolution of all
the starry heavens into a fiery mist, much the same
as that from which the process originally set out, — a
consummation very much like Omar Khayyam's —
"The phantom Caravan has reached the Nothing it
set out from." Certainly there was nothing here of
positive evidence for human immortality. But such
a consummation made the hope of an immortal life
more necessary than it had ever been before, neces
sary for God as well as man. We could almost for
get ourselves in pitying him if such a thing could be,
and leave no universe of souls whose immortality
would justify the course of astronomic time, and the
final resolution of all stars that shine into a homoge
neous cloud. I may be reminded that the catas
trophe which will extinguish our own planet is a
great way off, to say nothing of the general collapse.
That does not help the moral situation. The higher
the perfection which humanity attains, the more
pitiful the tragedy which makes all that perfection
as if it had never been.

I84 UNITARIAN BELIEF
If so far our help is only negative, there is some
positive help in the scientific doctrine of the persist
ency of force. For all the forces that we know,
the most efficient, the most wonderful, is that of
conscious personality. This harnesses the steam
and lightning to its triumphant car. But how much
of all the force which Wellington or any other great
one " made his own being here," persisted, was con
served, if their souls perished when we gave their
dust to dust ? Nay, but we do not have to state our
problem in terms of human greatness, to bring it
home with an impressive gesture to our minds and
hearts. How much of the force that made your
own father, mother, here ; your own husband, wife ;
your own precious child ; your own comrade, teacher,
friend, persists and is conserved, if there is no
" hope of answer or redress,
Behind the veil, behind the veil " ?
There is further scientific help, not negative, but
positive, in that doctrine of correlated growth which
plays such a conspicuous part in the biology of Dar
win and other thinkers of his school. It is the doc
trine that in animal structures there goes along with
the development of special organs, parts, and func
tions, the development of certain others. Now in the
spiritual life of man there goes along with all that
is best in his intelligence, noblest in his affection,
grandest and sweetest in his moral life, when all
these are working normally, the development of the
hope of an immortal life. Here is a correlated
growth ; and, if the hope that is thus developed is

THE FUTURE LIFE 1 85
not a valid one, if it is not a solemn and majestic
portent of a divine reality that we can trust with
calm assurance, then have we a radical contradic
tion set in our moral nature, — a contradiction that
becomes more obvious and revolting with every
higher thought and nobler act and purer purpose of
our lives. Can this be possible ? Not unless Nat
ure's house is divided against itself, the spiritual
against the material, the latter subject to the more
rational and benignant sway. Men said of old, " It
is impossible for God to lie " ; and, unless that doc
trine must be given up, we are obliged to think that
the same Power that organizes in us the purest
splendors of our thought and love, and organizes in
us the correlated hope of an immortal life, will see to
•it that the hope thus organized is not in vain.
There is still further scientific help in the Darwin
ian doctrine of the survival of the fittest. I know
that by "the fittest" here is meant the fittest, that
is, the ablest, to survive. But, once the human stage
is reached, it means much more than this. The fit
test means the best. And what is the fittest in this
ideal sense ? Shall we say truth, beauty, goodness ?
But no one denies that these survive, and that their
music is the gladness of the world. But these are
not the fittest ; these are not the best. The fittest
and the best is the living personality which delights
in these and from which these proceed. We may
not say with a great authority in science, " Without
spirit-immortality the cosmos has no meaning ; " but
we must say that, so far as we can see, the meaning
it would have with this is to the meaning it would

1 86 UNITARIAN BELIEF
have without it as morning to the morning star.
And it is the part of modesty and wisdom to doubt
if we can think a better thing than God. In the
same direction works that subtlety of matter which
has been brought home to us by all the later course
of science and the increasing wonderfulness of scien
tific knowledge. Henceforth nothing is too wonder
ful to be true. The more truly wonderful, the like
lier the truth.
Such are a few considerations drawn from the
scientific aspect of the world that lend themselves
with either negative or positive force to the confir
mation of our immortal hope. They have left the old
sources from which the hope has fed itself for cen
turies flowing with unabated energy. These are the
craving of the mind for knowledge, the craving of
the heart for love, the craving of the moral will for a
more absolute conquest of its low ambitions and its
base desires. Never have the realms of knowledge
been so much enlarged as in these later years, but
with the better food the appetite has been increased.
We will not speak of the indignity that is done us if
from the heights that we have won we are cast down
into a cavernous abyss of absolute blindness and
nonentity. It is a horrid thought ; but as I would
rather be the growing vine or tree than the cold sod
from which it springs, as I would rather be a con
scious animal than the growing vine or tree, so I
would rather be a man with knowledge, conscience,
and affection than animal or tree or clod, no matter
what impends. Happy the days between the uncon
scious nights, and happy life between the silences

THE FUTURE LIFE 1 87
before and after, even if there be no more ! But to
have some liberal knowledge of the universe, to have
some manful struggle with besetting sins, to have
our nearest and our dearest taken from our sight,
and not desire with strong desire some great re
newal of our life, some opportunity for wider knowl
edge, more dutiful observance, and more satisfying
love, this would not so much argue a noble stoicism
or a divine unselfishness as some poverty of nature,
some paralysis of will, some deadness of the heart.
The old incitements and the new have wrought to
gether during the last five-and-twenty years to make
the Unitarian hope of immortality more strong and
brave, and to give it a more rational character.
This is, of course, a matter of personal impression,
and the inference may not be warranted by the col
lective facts ; but that the tendency of the more
thoughtful minds has been of late towards immortal
ity, and not away from it, there can be little doubt.
It has been so in other circles as well as in our own.
It is not many years since Dr. Felix Adler preached
a sermon here in our church in which he assailed the
doctrine of immortality, not only as an irrational
doctrine, but as one utterly selfish and demoraliz
ing, a stumbling-block in the path of righteousness.
Some of you have read the report of his discourse on
Easter Day, a week ago, which has since appeared
with every mark of an authoritative presentation.
It was very different from the sermon which you and
I remember him as preaching here. He insisted in
this last discourse with great force and eloquence on
the moral excellence and beauty of the hope of im-

1 88 UNITARIAN BELIEF
mortality, and claimed for it a rational consistency
with the great laws that dominate our human life.
He was not shuffling, as many do, and talking of
immortality, while meaning a perpetuity of social in
fluence, like that of George Eliot's " choir invisible."
He did full justice to that glorious thought, but said
that it was not enough ; that reason, heart, and con
science must have more. This utterance, coming
from a thinker so profound and serious as Dr. Adler,
from a man so perfectly sincere, had more than a
mere personal significance. It was a sign of the
times. It was one shining crest of a great tide that
is making in, and freshening a strand that has not,
for many a day, known anything so sweet and good.
There are other changes that have from time
to time affected more or less seriously the Unitarian
doctrine of a future life. One of these relates to
the doctrine of future punishment. There is reason
to believe that until quite recently the Unitarian
belief upon this head was that of other Christians.
The latest editors of the Racovian Catechism, which
is an admirable exposition of the Socinian doctrine,
rejected as "a mere calumny" the idea that Socin
ians did not accept the dogma of eternal punishment.
But, in truth, Socinus himself has been thought to
imply the annihilation of the wicked; and the Ra
covian Catechism is commendably silent with re
gard to a matter of which the Calvinists had much
to say. So far as I can make out, even while the
doctrine was formally accepted, it was very generally
allowed to remain in harmless desuetude by the
majority of Unitarian preachers and writers. In

THE FUTURE LIFE 1 89
England these had generally discarded it for a doc
trine of universal restoration. In America, where
the progress of theology has always been at a slower
rate than in England, the ancient doctrine had a
firmer grip upon the Unitarian mind ; and this was
tightened by the anxiety of many not to be con
founded with the Universalists, who were doing
violence to the kingdom of universal salvation, and
taking it by force. That Channing took no pains to
correct those who charged him with Universalist
opinions is evidence that he was at least more
in sympathy with them than with the Calvinistic.
But others were more cautious or less brave.
There was, I fear, a good deal of intellectual and
social cowardice involved, a good deal of shameful
silence and of verbal ingenuity, if haply the reproach
of believing such good things of God as those of the
Universalists might not come upon the Unitarians
or be taken away. In truth there was among Uni
tarians little disposition to accept Hosea Ballou's
doctrine of death's magical operation, the sinners all
becoming saints in articulo mortis. The probation
doctrine was hardly more attractive to the saner
minds. The God would be a devil who should give
men but seventy or eighty years, at the longest, and
on the average not half of that, to determine their
eternal good or ill. The tendency was clear from
Channing down to a belief that we begin another
life where we leave off in this, and work out our sal
vation there, " hope-lifted, doubt-depressed," as we do
here, it may be finding the new circumstances more
favorable to our good endeavor than the old. For

I90 UNITARIAN BELIEF
these things we must wait, and also for the right
answer to that deepest question of the heart, Will
there be mutual recognition in another world on the
part of those who have been friends in this ? Yes,
I should say, if there we are to know ourselves.
" Were it not thus, O God of our salvation,
Many would curse to thee, and I for one ;
Fling thee thy bliss, and snatch at thy damnation,
Scorn and abhor the shining of the sun."
That is the first impulsive thought ; but there is a
better in the great words of Emerson, serene and
calm, " Shall not the heart which has received so
much , trust the power by which it lives ? " Yea,
though our hope were wholly vain, would it not still
be possible to keep our hearts in perfect peace be
cause they are stayed on Him ? This is the highest
faith. We ask for nothing that his wisdom cannot
freely give. Secure of this, we sail on an unerring
course, by an unfailing star.
" If our bark sinks, 'tis to another sea."

VIII.
THE GREAT SALVATION.
The understanding of beliefs cherished nearly two
thousand years ago is attended with great difficulties.
If our English words were the exact equivalents
of the New Testament Greek, — as they are not in
many instances, — it would still be difficult and some
times impossible to know exactly what the New
Testament writers thought, what words suggest at
any time is so much more significant than what they
formally denote. The modern theological scheme of
salvation is honestly believed by the majority of
Christian people to have been that of all the centu
ries from our own to that of Jesus, and as honestly it
is conceived by the majority to be clearly set forth
in the New Testament. But nothing is surer than
that, could Jesus have encountered it, he would have
said, " Depart from me ! I never knew you," and
that Paul, from whose language it has been deduced
for the most part, would have imagined it some kind
of "speaking with tongues," much needing an inter
preter. The supposed resemblance between Paul's
thought and Calvin's, for example, is largely due to
the carrying back of Calvin's thought, and putting it
into Paul's. Much has been made of the relation
of Paul's doctrine to the Old Testament doctrine

192

UNITARIAN BELIEF

of sacrifice ; but now it looks very much as if that
Old Testament doctrine had been radically distorted
by the stress upon it of the substitutionary doctrine
of the atonement, which before the eleventh century
had no recognition in the Christian Church.
Out of the haze and dimness that pertain to things
so far away there gradually emerges the conviction
that within the limits of the New Testament we
have at least three different representations of " the
saving work of Christ." The earliest of these is
that of the Synoptic Gospels ; and it may safely
be regarded as substantially the representation of
the first Christian Unitarians, the first followers of
Jesus. It is rather a collective and national than an
individualist representation. It is best understood
by comparing it with the teachings of the Hebrew
prophets. It was a continuation of that teaching,
" Salvation is of the Jews." But not to these even
without swift repentance ; for the kingdom of heaven
was at hand. " There is here," as Martineau has
said, " no magic office needing an agent superhuman
or divine." As the last of the prophets, or the great
herald of the Messianic kingdom, or as the Messi
anic king, there was no suggestion in the function
of Jesus of a superhuman character. If it was borne
in upon him that he " must suffer many things," and
this feeling, as seems highly probable, was shaped
upon the conception of the suffering Servant of
Jehovah in the fifty-third chapter of ' Isaiah,' we have
no suggestion here of suffering that paid the sinner's
debt, and made his record clean. Moreover, it was
left for Jesus to identify the suffering Servant with

THE GREAT SALVATION 193
the Messiah. He is not the Messiah in the Old
Testament connection, and he was not interpreted
Messianically before the time of Jesus.
The death of Jesus, so conspicuous in the tradi
tional scheme of salvation, was thrust upon him as a
necessity of his position, and was for him and his
disciples the harbinger of his return to conquer
and to reign. Here, again, the influence of ' Isaiah '
liii. seems evident. But the passages are so few
which ascribe to his death any sacrificial character
that it is natural, if not necessary, to suppose that
they are the reflections backward of the Pauline
theology upon his simpler speech. If his atoning
blood had any such place in his thought as it has in
the popular theology, his silence about it is astonish
ing. In the various accounts of his crucifixion we
have not a hint of anything sacrificial. Each is the
story of a martyrdom.
We have, then, for our first conception of the
great salvation, the salvation of the countrymen of
Jesus from their sins, through genuine repentance
following upon his teachings, making them worthy
to become partakers of that kingdom of heaven
which he and they fondly believed was very near at
hand. Next we have the conception of Saint Paul.
It offers many difficulties, and sublime must be their
self-confidence who can reconcile them all in a co
herent view that allows to every part its proper
force. But it has, I think, been shown abundantly
that, seeking the most salient and distinctive ele
ment of Paul's doctrine of salvation, we find it in the
' Epistle to the Galatians ' : " Christ redeemed us

I94 UNITARIAN BELIEF
from the curse of the law, having become a curse for
us. For it is written, Cursed be every one that hangs
on a tree." As Jew or Christian, Paul's religious feel
ing was equally intense. He hated the Christians ;
and he persecuted them because they dared to hail
as the Messiah a man whom the law, by crucifying
him, had made a thing accursed. But there came a
day when the conclusion that Jesus was the Messiah
was borne in upon his mind with irresistible and
startling force. It was the day when those who had
half-stripped themselves for the stoning of Stephen
laid their garments at his feet. For all his intellect
ual force, Paul was pre-eminently a man of moral
sensibility, and something in the dying face of
Stephen so lingered in his memory that, shortly
after, it was, as it were, projected on the sky,
became the face of Jesus, and a voice, as if from
heaven, cried, " Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou
me ? " We speak of this event as his conversion,
but it was only a small part of it. The dying face of
Stephen was much more than this, a cause produc
ing this effect. Another was the argument, "If
Jesus was the Messiah, then the law in cursing him
was self -abolished." Was he the Messiah ? He
was proved so by his resurrection from the dead.
What was Paul's argument for this. Evidently, that
Stephen's calm assurance of it must have been well
founded for him to die so well. And thus for Paul
Christ's death and resurrection made every Christian
free from the Jewish ritual and moral law, while they
opened wide the gates for all, both Jews and Gen
tiles, who would make the spirit of Jesus their own,

THE GREAT SALVATION 195
to find a joy and peace which the old law could never
give. Let a man do his best, and how could he dis
cern his errors and cleanse himself from secret
faults ? But let his heart be full of love, and he
could trust himself to do right in the main, and trust
to God's forgiveness for the rest.
This, so far as I can well make out, was Paul's doc
trine of salvation. The death of Christ had no such
part in it as in the popular theology. It would have
been wholly ineffectual without his resurrection and
the curse of the law on him who had been crucified.
It would have been wholly ineffectual, even with
these adjuncts, without the spirit of Jesus in the be
liever's mind and heart. " For if, while we were
enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of
his Son, much more, being reconciled, shall we be
saved by his life." This, I take it, is the key-note
of Paul's doctrine of the great spiritual salvation.
The death and resurrection of Jesus effected nothing
but the abolition of the law. But Christ formed in
men was the hope of glory. It must be confessed
that Paul's argument for the abolition of the law is
frightfully unreal to us. It was not so to him. But
there is nothing unreal for us in his doctrine of a
true spiritual salvation through sympathetic appro
priation of the spirit that was in Jesus.*
Whatever the immediate impression made by Paul,
we have ample evidence that it was not continuous
and progressive. But for the heretics who took his
writings into their keeping, they would probably
•This whole matter is worked out beautifully by Professor C C Everett in his
¦ Gospel of Paul.' See also Pfleiderer's ' Paulinismus ' and Baur's ' Paul's Life and
Works.'

I96 UNITARIAN BELIEF
never have come down to us. In the second century
the author of the Fourth Gospel, whom we cannot
identify, developed his theory of "the work of
Christ" as freely as if Paul had never written a line;
and he developed it in such a fashion that, if the later
Christendom had gone to him for its doctrine of sal
vation, it would have been wholly different from that
which is familiar to our minds. So long as he re
mained with his disciples, the ministry of Jesus had
a much narrower range in the Fourth Gospel than in
the Synoptics. There it was for the Jewish nation,
here for those separated from the world. For these
only would he pray. " I pray not for the world, but
for them whom thou hast given me ; for they are
thine." Even his death is sometimes represented as
being only for the inner circle : " Greater love hath
no man than this, that he lay down his life for his
friends." What, not if he lay it down for his ene
mies ? Happily, the writer had this better thought :
" If I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men
unto me." His death would have a double opera
tion. Crowned by his resurrection, it would flash
the glory of the manifested Father into all human
hearts ; and it would enable Jesus, who could not
remain indefinitely on the earth, to send the Holy
Spirit, the Paraclete, the Comforter, to be with his
disciples always, and with them who should believe
on him through their word.
But this mystical interpretation was not any more
than Paul's to be the doctrine that would finally pre
vail, and hold its own against all comers for a thou
sand years. It was too mystical by far, as Paul's was

THE GREAT SALVATION 197
too complicated and obscure. Nevertheless, the doc
trine that finally triumphed may have found its point
of departure in the Fourth Gospel. It certainly did
not find it in Paul, who had no devil to speak of, and
no hell. But the Fourth Gospel is as full of the
devil as the Zoroastrian theology ; and the dramatic
interest of that document inheres in the thwarting of
the "power of darkness," "the prince of this world,"
the devil, by the power of God manifested in Jesus.
But the New Testament had other hints of the com
ing doctrine, the most concrete in the Epistle to the
Hebrews : " That through death he might bring to
naught him that had the power of death, namely,
the devil." Martineau's statement of the new doc
trine is so good that I will give it in his words :
"The Devil, as Prince of the realm of evil and
death, had acquired by the transgression of Adam,
and the sinfulness of his children, a legal right to
have the souls of men for his own world. But his
right was contingent on the sinfulness of humanity ;
and the moment he laid his hand upon the sinless
Christ, and seized him for the shades below, he over
stepped his prerogative, and forfeited his right by
usurpation. Two things, therefore, ensued : having
clutched an immortal victim, he could not hold him
from passing into heaven and touching the earth by
resurrection on the way ; and, having sacrilegiously
robbed the treasure-house of divine life, he was con
demned to make reparation by signing a release for
the whole brotherhood of Christ." If there is any
trouble with this statement of Martineau's, it is that
the dignity of the language lends a dignity to the con-

I98 UNITARIAN BELIEF
ception which does not belong to it. As stated by
the early fathers and the later doctors of the Church,
it sounds much less impressive. Thus Peter Lom
bard tells us that Christ set his cross as a trap for
the devil, and baited it with his blood. Saint Au
gustine admired the justice of the thing, and urged
men to profit by its good example. But Gregory of
Nyssa, on the contrary, admired the cheat, and said
it served the devil right for cheating our first parents
so in Paradise. Christ put on "the guise of sinful
flesh " on purpose to deceive the devil, and, remain
ing in Hades for thirty-six hours, rescued from
thence an innumerable company of saints for all
eternity. It is to the time that fashioned such opinions, so
utterly monstrous and absurd, that great scholars
and thinkers, like Cardinal Newman, turn their ask
ing eyes for spiritual enlightenment. For some
centuries they were the opinions of both Unitarians
and Trinitarians, as these struggled for the suprem
acy of the growing Church. It was not until the
eleventh century that Anselm, substituting the "jus
tice of God " for the devil, brought the doctrine of
the atonement into that shape of which every subse
quent development within orthodox limits has been a
modification. "Resolving the whole transaction,"
as Martineau has written, "into a juggle between
conflicting attributes of the infinite perfection,"
Anselm "did but replace a childish forensic fiction
by a monstrous moral enormity." His book was
called Cur Deus Homo, — 'Why God was made
Man.' Why? His answer is, To furnish a satis-

THE GREAT SALVATION 1 99
faction for sin that would satisfy the justice of God
in forgiving it. Better the universe should perish
than that man should sin. Therefore, the satisfac
tion must be worth more than the universe. No
man's life is that. Only God's can be. But it is
man that owes the satisfaction which only God can
pay. And hence God was made man. But why not
God the Father? Because that would have made
two grandchildren in the Trinity. The Father
would have been the grandchild of Mary's parents,
and the Son would have been Mary's. Why two
grandchildren would have been an extravagant num
ber we are not informed. There is more of the
same sort, but I forbear. Why do I even mention
it ? Because Anselm's Cur Deus Homo is the most
influential book that has ever been injected into the
docrine of the atoning sacrifice of Christ. But, influ
ential as it was, it did not at once displace the doc
trine of the outwitted devil; nor did it clearly ex
press the doctrine of penal substitution which is
commonly attributed to it. But this was sure to
come upon its heels ; and in Luther we have it in
full swing : " God sent his only Son into the world,
threw upon him the sins of all men, and thus spoke
to him, Be thou Peter who denied, Paul who perse
cuted, blasphemed, and used all violence, David who
committed adultery, also the sinner who ate the
apple in Paradise, the murderer who hung upon the
cross, — in a word, thou shalt be what all men are, as
if thou hadst committed the sins of all men."
And now the rebirth of Unitarianism was not far
away. Luther had thirteen years to live and injure

200 UNITARIAN BELIEF
his own work when Servetus published his 'False
Views of the Trinity ' in 1533. And Servetus wrote,
" To save is to make whole, to heal those who are
sick." He had praise for good works, which to
Luther must have been abhorrent. Even the justi
fied had need of them. But it was reserved for the
Socini, uncle and nephew, to bring to the doctrine
of Anselm and its subsequent developments a criti
cism that was at once bold and masterly. It re
versed the order of ideas, contending that the recon
ciling work of Christ was that of reconciling men to
God, and not God to men. And men were recon
ciled to God by the teachings and example of Jesus,
confirmed by his heroic death and by his glorious
resurrection. It is not the death, it is the life, of
Jesus that is the saving power. His death was but
the climax of a life of pure unselfishness. There is
a "sweet reasonableness" in the Racovian Catechism
(1609), our best expression of the Socinian doctrine,
which is in happy and refreshing contrast with such
doctrines as those that we have been considering.
Christ, we are told, has two ways of saving us.
" First, he inspires us with a certain hope of salva
tion, and also incites us both to enter on the way of
salvation and to persevere in it. In the next place,
he is with us in every struggle and temptation, suf
fering or danger, affords us assistance, and at length
delivers us from eternal death." " It was," the Cat
echism continues, "exceedingly conducive to both
these methods of saving us that Christ, our Captain,
should not enter upon his eternal life and glory
otherwise than through sufferings and through a

THE GREAT SALVATION 201
death of this kind. For, as to the former, since we
perceive in his case that the termination of that way
which seemed to lead to destruction is so happy,
following our leader with the utmost firmness, we
enter this way, and persevere in it, with the certain
hope that the same end remains for us also ; and, as
to the latter, since having himself experienced how
heavy and of themselves intolerable to human nat
ure such trials are, and being not ignorant of suffer
ings, he might learn to succor the distressed." There
is a touch of real humanity in this which warms our
hearts where Anselm left them like a frozen stone.
It was characteristic of the Socini to appeal to
Scripture, where Anselm had spun his doctrine
almost entirely out of his own inner consciousness.
A return upon Scripture was one of the most char
acteristic aspects of Socinian Unitarianism. Won
derful was the ingenuity with which the most differ
ent and contradictory texts were made to yield a
similar or identical meaning. Just as I was writing
this, there came to me a book-agent with a book on
the Millennium, in which there was a chart which,
he said, harmonized every text from ' Genesis ' to
' Revelation ' and all the doctrines of the different
sects ; and I wondered if it was any more ingenious
than the Socinian catechism. But Socinianism was
not more Scriptural than rational ; and on its rational
side it demanded how, unless man were infinite, he
could sin to an infinite degree, and how, unless God
died, there was an infinite atonement. There came
a lawyer to the rescue, the great Grotius, with the
shrewd suggestion that it was not necessary for Jesus

202 UNITARIAN BELIEF
to "pay it all," the whole debt of human wickedness.
It was only necessary that God should accept the
sufferings and death of Jesus as a full satisfaction.
When the Socinian flank was thus adroitly turned,
there was great rejoicing in the orthodox camp; but
the victory was a complete surrender of the doctrine
of Anselm that the divine justice must be satisfied.
Justice is not satisfied when a creditor takes a part
of his debt for the whole. It is mercy that does that.
From the time of Grotius until now there have
been almost as many different orthodox theories of
the atonement as there have been orthodox theolo
gians of intellectual force and genius. Our own
century has been extremely fertile in new render
ings, Taylor and Bushnell and others making their
several departures from the doctrine of Grotius or
Anselm, as Campbell was doing in Scotland, and
Dorner in Germany. One ¦ of the latest of these
departures is Socinian in all but name. It argues
that a man is only justified when he is just. The
prophet Habbakuk knew as much as that when
he said, "The just shall live by their faithfulness,"
which Paul misquoted thus, "The just shall live
by faith " ; and Luther made that misquotation the
chief corner-stone of his great doctrine of justifica
tion by faith alone.
English Unitarianism in its earlier stages was, as
we have before seen, very generally Socinian ; and in
no respect was it so more consistently than in its
doctrines of atonement and salvation. The empha
sis was on the life of Jesus, not upon his death. To
reconcile men to God, not to reconcile God to men,

THE GREAT SALVATION 203
was the purpose of his life and teaching. His teach
ing and example were the realities to which men
must look for help and healing, not his death and
resurrection. These were the signs and sanctions
of his prophetic office and his kingly rule. American
Unitarianism in its earlier stages advanced on par
allel lines. Although generally, here, the Arian view
of Christ prevailed over the Socinian, this did not
mean, so far as I have yet been able to discover, any
doctrine of the atoning work of Jesus more sympa
thetic with the orthodox tradition than with the So
cinian. The moral energy and opposition of our
early Unitarianism was aroused much more by the
Calvinistic doctrines of vicarious atonement, total
depravity, and predestination than by the doctrine
of the Trinity considered by itself. Negative it was
not. But it could not affirm our moral freedom with
out denying predestination. It could not affirm the
dignity of human nature without denying total de
pravity. It could not affirm God's infinite perfec
tion and keep any terms whatever with the doctrine
that the blood of Christ flowed to appease the wrath
of God, that all men's sins and their punishment
were heaped upon the innocent Jesus, that the
mercy of God was purchased by the voluntary death
of his beloved Son. If the ideas of moral freedom,
the dignity of human nature, and the infinite perfec
tion of God are negative ideas, then were the doc
trines of our early Unitarians "pale negations," but
not otherwise. Every affirmation is at the same
time a denial. If you affirm a thing is round, you
deny that it is square. If you affirm that it is white,

204 UNITARIAN BELIEF
you deny that it is black. If you affirm that it is
sweet, you deny that it is sour. The question be
tween the early Unitarians and their opponents is,
Which denied and which affirmed the greater, better
things? Is predestination greater and better than
moral freedom, total depravity greater and better
than the dignity of human nature, a God of wrath
and vengeance greater and better than a God of infi
nite perfection ? It was largely, if not mainly, be
cause of the evil associations of the doctrine of the
Trinity with the doctrines peculiarly Calvinistic that
it was intolerable to Channing and his Unitarian
contemporaries. The most offensive words that
Channing ever spoke were those of his New York
dedication sermon of 1826, in which he charged the
orthodox doctrine with setting forth " that the Cre
ator, in order to pardon his own children, erected a
gallows in the centre of the universe, and had pub
licly executed upon it, in room of the offenders, an
Infinite Being, the partaker of his own Supreme
Divinity." But this representation of the atonement
was very mild and gracious in comparison with
thousands made by orthodox scholars and popular
preachers in Channing's time. The word " gallows "
was, I believe, particularly offensive. But it was
merely a translation of " the offence of the cross "
into the New England vernacular. The symbolic
use of the cross in churches, the wearing of it as an
ornament upon gentle bosoms, had robbed it of its
original significance. Crucifixion was not more re
fined and elegant than hanging. It was the most
cruel and degrading kind of execution. If hanging

THE GREAT SALVATION 205
had been considered more cruel and degrading, Jesus
would certainly have been hanged.
Has our Unitarian way of thinking about these
things remained substantially the same as it was
when the great soul of Channing was housed in his
frail body ? Yes, in its heart of hearts. For there
it was and is that the atonement, the at-one-ment,
between God and man is a matter of personal right
eousness. And there it was, and is, secondarily, that
it is not to the death, but to the life, of Jesus that
we must go for the best moral help that he affords ; to
his teachings and example, not to his broken limbs
and wounded side. But with this community of
thought between the earliest and latest decades of
the century there is also a great deal of difference.
All the resources of Parker's manly wit and his
immeasurable scorn were drawn upon to show forth
the vicarious system in all the absurdity of its in
tellectual contradictions and all the enormity of
its impeachment of the Eternal Goodness, the Al
mighty Love. But it is not to this aspect of his
prophecy that we go for that in it which was most
significant and impressive. For this was the sincer
ity and boldness with which he went about to rescue
Jesus from the singularity, the isolation, in which he
still remained after the earlier Unitarians had said
their bravest word and done their most emancipating
work. These had their " scheme of salvation " quite
as obviously as the Calvinistic party. It was a dif-
erent scheme ; but it was still a scheme, something
formal, artificial, and mechanical, — not an illustra
tion of the unswerving laws and the abiding forces

206 UNITARIAN BELIEF
of the moral and spiritual world. According to this
scheme Jesus was sent into the world. He was an
ambassador accredited from God to men. His cre
dentials were his miracles : those of which he was
the object, his miraculous birth and resurrection;
and those of which he was the subject, those which
he wrought. Theodore Parker saw very clearly how
formal, artificial, and mechanical all this was ; and
he swept it all aside. So doing, he aroused great
opposition, in which his Unitarian brethren took a
leading part. But his thought is now the common
thought of Unitarians. Many survivals of the old
theological mechanics linger in the speech of men,
who, whatever they may have a conscience for, have
not a conscience for the sincerest possible use of
words. But what Emerson meant when he said,
"The soul knows no persons," is now the general
creed of Unitarian sincerity. For, of course, he did
not mean that the soul is indifferent to personal
greatness or goodness. Are not his essays starred
all over with the names of
" Our loftier brothers, but one in blood "?
What he meant was that the spiritual laws recognize
no isolated and exceptional persons, that they are
always and everywhere the same, and that the best
that Jesus or any other person can do for us is to
furnish us with an illustration of these laws, — how
they lift up the faithful and how they smite the
wicked down.
To find in Jesus frankly and unreservedly a man
among men is not to question his moral and spiritual

THE GREAT SALVATION 207
pre-eminence. Still less is it to question the con
currence of events which made his personality and
teaching central to the great tides of human history.
But is it not to diminish the force of his teaching
and example ? Many will think so ; but others are
perfectly assured that he needs no artificial prop, no
arbitrary isolation ; that he can be safely trusted to
the great universal brotherhood of souls ; that, so
trusted, his appeal to what is best in us will be more
vital and impressive than it has been heretofore.
The relation of Jesus to that salvation by charac
ter, which for the modern Unitarian is the only
great salvation, has in some other respects been pro
foundly affected by the continuous study of the New
Testament simultaneously with the study of our
personal and social needs and duties and responsi
bilities. In the teachings of Jesus the universal
element is large. The texts, the parables, are many
that speak straight to our consciences, our hearts,
comforting us in our sorrow, convicting us of sin,
encouraging our tried and tempted wills. But there
are many others which are local and temporal to
a greater or less degree. The expectation of a
great social catastrophe had an enormous bias on
the ethics of Jesus. His doctrine of marriage was
ascetic, his doctrine of property was communistic,
his doctrine of charity was sentimental, his doctrine
of non-resistance was such as commends itself to
Tolstoi, but not to many others in our time. With
the example of Jesus it is much the same as with
his teachings. Followed unreservedly, would it not
justify those who say, "The hope of the race is in

208 UNITARIAN BELIEF
its extinction," and bring all our joys and sorrows
to a sudden end? Moreover, conduct and circum
stances go together; and our circumstances are in
evitably so different from those of Jesus that his
special actions very seldom furnish us with the light
and leading necessary for us to tread with confi
dence a dark and dangerous way. But, while con
scious of his limitations as a teacher and exemplar to
a degree formerly inconceivable, the modern Unita
rian does not feel that Jesus represents for him a
moral help, a spiritual reality, unworthy to be named
beside the conceptions of him cherished by the
fathers of the faith. " The spirit giveth life " ; and
the spirit of Jesus has not suffered any least
abatement, any slightest obscuration, from the criti
cism of the New Testament bearing upon his pre
cepts and example, and suggesting their inadequacy
to the exigencies of our modern life. Rather by
this criticism has it been set free to work upon our
lives with a more vital efficacy than before. And
what was the spirit that was in him ? It was the
spirit of trust towards God and love towards man, of
compassion for the sinful and the suffering, of kind
ness to the miserable and weak, of inwardness in
conduct, Tightness of the heart. It is not to be con
ceived that a time will ever come when this spirit
will not appeal to what is best in man. If there
should ever come a time when this spirit covers the
earth as the waters cover the depths of the sea, the
name of Jesus will then stand among the highest
on the roll of those whose blameless lives revealed
it in an evil time, far off in some dim morning of the
early world.

THE GREAT SALVATION 209
That the Bible contains "all things that are neces
sary to salvation " is one of the most liberal state
ments of the English articles, one that has made it
easier for many liberal Episcopalians to establish for
themselves a modus vivendi in the Church of their
baptism or their thoughtless youth. And certainly
for those who go to the Bible, not with the hope
or the determination of forcing from it a consistent
body of doctrine, but with the resolve to take the
sweetest and the best, and let the other go, it con
tains a wonderful amount of moral and religious help
and inspiration. The life and death, the teachings
and example, and, above all, the spirit of Jesus are
only a part, although the greatest, of the large and
splendid whole. For in the New Testament we
have not only Jesus, but Paul, and besides the New
Testament we have the Old ; and in that we have,
within the compass of the ' Psalms,' chords that vi
brate in unison with almost every possible joy or
sorrow of the private heart, and, within the compass
of the Prophets, we have, as nowhere else in litera
ture, the passion of the patriot mind. Then, too, in
'Job,' incomparably grand, we have the one great
protest of the centuries against the measurement of
God's goodness or man's righteousness by the stand
ards of an outward, visible success. We are still
far from exhausting the riches of " the Bible old " ;
but, if we had done so, we should find that for our
latest Unitarian mind there is a conception of the
great salvation which does not find all things neces
sary to it within the Bible's glorious range. For
this conception is of a salvation of the whole man

2IO UNITARIAN BELIEF
now and here, and not merely of his soul from the
impending horrors of a future state. It is a con
ception of salvation which does not find so much
in lost souls as in wasted lives the misery to be
escaped. The great salvation ! It is man's com
plete possession and enjoyment of his various
powers in their full scope, each mutually sustaining
and sustained, and the use of these in furtherance
of a present social good and an immortal destiny.
It is first of all, then, a salvation of the body ; and
we have here something that is worth saving. Paul
knew or thought he knew that in his flesh dwelt
no good thing ; but he was much mistaken. How
much wiser was the Old Testament psalmist, who
found himself curiously and wonderfully made ! How
curiously and wonderfully we know, as he could not,
thanks to the revelations of the chemist, the anato
mist, the biologist, and the physiologist of the mod
ern world. But not only wonder dwells in it, but
also beauty ; more than in any other object under the
heaven's cope ; and not only wonder and beauty,
but also joy. It is the avenue through which the
outward universe streams in upon the mind, and
bathes the heart with a most pure delight. It is
the fountain of life, safe in whose keeping are the
unfailing generations of the world. Certainly, we
might have a great salvation without the salvation
of the body, but not the greatest nor the best.
This, however, is something that our churches do
not meddle with at all, and our schools not over
much. But the boy or girl who cannot ride and
swim is more imperfectly educated than the boy or

THE GREAT SALVATION 211
girl who, able in these things, is lacking in " small
Latin and less Greek " ; and it is not as if the body's
powers and graces ended in themselves. They are
the stuff out of which intellect is made, and will.
To starve the stomach is to starve the brain. Sick
bodies mean sick minds. Dr. Johnson may have
put the case too strongly when he said, " Every
man is a rascal as soon as he is sick." We often
hear and know of men and women who somehow
do contrive to make stepping-stones of their sick
and dying selves to higher things. But that, in the
main, good health means easier access to all good
things of the spirit is sound doctrine ; and the great
salvation that does not include the element of physi
cal health is not by any means the greatest that can
be conceived.
According to the canons of the traditional theol
ogy, the intellectual part of man as little comes
within the scope of his salvation as the physical
part. It is often lumped with that, and called " the
carnal mind." The salvation of the traditional the
ology has been a salvation of the soul, whatever that
may be, — some thin, mysterious abstraction, — from
some extra-mundane ill. But the great salvation of
our modern thought and purpose is, with whatever
else, a salvation of the mind, thinking, loving, con
versant with beauty, willing justice and beneficence.
Time was when such a thing as ethics of the in
tellect had hardly dawned upon the mind. But the
immoral intellect is, perhaps, the most characteristic
form of modern immorality ; and the preachers and
teachers of theology furnish its most striking illus-

212 UNITARIAN BELIEF
trations. It was this fact that made ' Robert Els-
mere,' as a novel of theological transition, one of
the timeliest novels that was ever written, search
ing almost as many consciences as ' Romola ' with
its relentless thrust. One of the deadliest op
positions from which the mind needs saving is
that of Biblical theology, which is forever asking,
not " What is the simple truth ? " but " How can
the Bible statement be made to harmonize with
science ? " The notion that with sufficient ingenu
ity every part of the Bible can be made to agree
with every other has been prolific of enormous in
tellectual waste. The literature of the Bible, put
ting aside some of the earliest fragments, covers a
period of just about one thousand years' duration, as
long as from King Alfred to Queen Victoria. What
should we think of the endeavor to make every part
of English literature for a thousand years agree with
every other ? But such an attempt would be hardly
more immoral than the attempt to bring the litera
ture of the Bible into one consistent scheme of doc
trine made up of mutually consenting parts.
The range of intellect in the Bible is a very nar
row range as compared with that of modern science
and philosophy and political economy and general
literature, in which last our intellectual life finds
its most admirable expression. Yet these, too, are
necessary to salvation in its broadest sense, more
necessary than nine-tenths of the Old Testament
and five or six-tenths of the New. But the range
of beauty there is even more contracted. It is not
wholly absent ; for we have something of it in many

THE GREAT SALVATION 21 3
psalms, in the Book of ' Ruth,' in ' Job,' in some
parts of the Prophets. In the New Testament the
parables of Jesus are often full of it, and it touches
many passages in the Gospels and Epistles with a
fitful gleam. But, surely, all things necessary to the
salvation which is beauty are not here. It is to
Greece, not to Judea, that we go for this, — to
Greece for architecture and sculpture, to Italy for
Raphael and his peers, to Holland for Rembrandt,
to England for Shakspere, names that are lifted like
the highest peaks out of a multitude which hold up
to the sun their shining shields, heralds of morning
and beautiful with the mystery of the departing
days. All these are not too much.* The mind in
love with beauty needs them all, to satisfy its thirst
and hunger for these perfect things of God.
Surely, the great salvation is none other than the
harmonious development of our many-sided life ; and,
therefore, just as surely the volume that contains
all things sufficient for this end is none other than
the book of universal life, the total universe of God.
We cannot spare a star from out the sky, a crys
tal from the rocks, a drop of water from the wander
ing clouds, a ray of the all-conquering sun. We can
not spare a day of the experience of men from the
far-off beginning of their upward climb until this
present hour. We cannot spare one word of any
scripture of whatever nation under heaven, of what
ever time, one saint or hero out of whom the holiest
books have drained their vital blood. It were a
•So, too, with the affections. Mr. H. T. Finck, a careful and unbiassed
student, does not find anywhere in the Bible a suggestion of ideal or romantic love.
See his 'Romantic Love and Personal Beauty,' p. no.

214 UNITARIAN BELIEF
terrible mistake to think that any single book, albeit
summing up the various experience of a thousand
years, could be sufficient for these things. It were a
terrible mistake to think that any life, albeit that of
Jesus, so trustful, so compassionate, so tender, and
so strong, and set where all the highways of the na
tions meet and part, could fully answer to our ut
most need. Mankind for its salvation needs all the
best that science, art, philosophy, religion, literature,
and life contain within their boundless scope. It is
no definite result. It is no "far-off divine event."
It is a process, not a goal.
" Profounder, profounder
Man's spirit must dive ;
To his aye-rolling orbit
No goal can arrive.
The heavens that now draw him
With sweetness untold,
Once found, — for new heavens
He spurneth the old."
It is a far cry from the soteriology of Paul or
Anselm or Socinus to this which is demanded by
the conditions of our modern thought and life. We
have here a doctrine which, however we may rever
ence the man of Nazareth and prize his goodness
and his truth, makes it not less than impious to
specialize him and isolate him as he has been spe
cialized and isolated in the theology and worship of
the Christian Church. "The first born of many
brethren " ! That he may have been in Joseph's
narrow house, from Mary's fertile womb ; but in

THE GREAT SALVATION 215
the countless family of God he was not the first.
Millions of brethren had preceded him. But the
thought of Christendom has not been faithful even
to the Scripture phrase. He has not been " the first
born of many brethen " : he has been " the only be
gotten of the Father." To-day our criticism, science,
and philosophy welcome him into the largeness of
humanity. Within that largeness there is room for
all his gifts and graces, all his breadth of spirit, all
his height of soul. Let us be patient, let us give
him time ; and, thus rescued and restored, he shall
yet be the object of a more sincere affection and the
medium of a more genuine help than ever heretofore
in all the years since he went up and down Judea on
his errands of good will to men.
Martineau tells us that the salvation of Paul's con
templation was a transaction carried on by God and
Christ wholly behind men's backs. They had noth
ing to do with it. It is very different with the great
salvation of our vision, hope, and dream. Here are
ten thousand helps of science, literature, and life ;
here are Bibles and great leaders of religion. But
they have no compulsory force. It is for us to say
whether they are to be our glory or our shame. It
is according to the use we make of them in our
daily business, in our domestic cares, in our home
duties and affections, in our social relations, in our
citizenship, in our most inward life, that they mean
much for us or little. When we are told in the
New Testament, "Work out your own salvation
with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh
in you both to will and to do," we seem to have a

2l6 UNITARIAN BELIEF
piece of contradictory advice. But no ! " God can
not make Antonio Stradivari's violins without An
tonio." That is the noblest trust in God, — to trust him in
the strength of our own arms, the stubbornness of
our own wills, the warmth of our own beating hearts.
Then, and then only, is our salvation an accom
plished fact when we have masterfully taken to our
selves the countless opportunities and inspirations of
the world, and out of them shaped and firmly built
together a character of which we have no call to be
ashamed in any presence, human or diwine.

IX.
LOSS AND GAIN.
Fifty years ago Channing was less than two years
dead ; Dewey, well named, forever fresh and sweet,
was in the full tide of his New York ministry, writ
ing sermons full of the greatness of men's oppor
tunity and the awfulness of God ; Gannett was
forty-three, a bush afire with God, not unconsumed ;
Furness was forty-two, and had published his ' Re
marks on the Four Gospels ' and his ' Jesus and his
Biographers ' eight and six years before ; Bellows was
just thirty (June n), and had been for six years the
minister of that society which was his life-long joy
and crown ; Hedge, nine years older, was preaching
to the lumber merchants of Bangor, and building
sentences massive as Doric columns, rich as Corin
thian capitals ; Theodore Parker, thirty-four years
old, was in Europe, resting awhile after his first
great battle, and writing Dr. Francis in the Divinity
School letters little, if any, shorter than his West
Roxbury sermons, at once the insatiable reader, the
eager combatant, and the religious soul ; James
Freeman Clarke, born in the same year with Parker,
was drawing nigh to the great heroism of his life,
* An address suggested by the fiftieth anniversary of the Meadville Theological
School, and read before the Middle States Conference at Meadville, Pa., June 12,
1894. The concluding part, as here printed, is from an address before the Western
Conference May 17, 1893, upon the Unitarian name.

2l8 UNITARIAN BELIEF
— that exchange with Parker which cost him the
secession of fifteen valued members of his church ;
Emerson, born the year after Furness (1803), was
still preaching here and there in Unitarian pulpits as
occasion offered, though he had resigned the charge
of the Second Church in Boston a dozen years be
fore. But one of these remains with us to-day, —
Furness, obedient to the voice at eve, obeyed at
prime. Whatever our clear gains, immeasurable
the loss of these, and such as these ! Of a truth,
no man's vacant place is ever filled. New places
for new men, and the good work goes on. Does
it seem to us that there are none coming up
with shoulders broad enough to wear the mantles
which the translated ones have left behind ? The
spirit has its ebb and flow ; but to what generation
has the real apostolical succession not appeared to
fail ? What we know is that in 1844 men all un
known — among them Allen, King, Longfellow,
Johnson, Frothingham, and Weiss — were standing
patiently without, tuning their instruments for a
music just as pure and sweet as any that was res
onant within or any that had died away. Was
Channing's spirit more devout than Potter's, his
thought so deep and high, his courage more serene ?
And we must have a care to notice that not all the
work is done, nor the best part of it, by those who
are most prominent in the public eye, most welcome
to the public ear. Our ordinary standards are as
absurd as if we measured the progress of a train or
carriage by the rattle of the wheels.
To estimate our loss and gain in these particulars

LOSS AND GAIN

219

would be a difficult matter, fraught with invidious
comparisons and fruitful of no good result. We
mourn the good we miss : we trust we shall not
prove unworthy of our sacred trusts. In the mean
time how do we stand in point of numbers and effi
ciency to-day as compared with 1844, and by what
processes and ratios have the old facts and figures
been transmuted into the facts and figures of to-day ?
When the Unitarian controversy, which had long
been smouldering, burst out in 181 5 into a lively
flame, we had more than 100 churches that were
Unitarian in everything but name. In 1820 about
130 had joined themselves for good and ill to the Uni
tarian movement, not one of which, Dr. Allen tells
us, bore individually the Unitarian name or, with one
exception, has since assumed it, — an interesting
comment on the seriousness with which the Unita
rian name is now sometimes discarded. Probably as
few churches were called Christian as were called
Unitarian. They were called Congregational, — a
name expressive of a polity, not of a doctrine, which
never should have been allowed to lapse into a doc
trinal significance. After the first ranging in oppos
ing camps, the Unitarian gains were slight from year
to year, but very regular, exactly as many being
added from 1820 to 1840 as from 1840 to i860, in
each period forty-five, giving us 175 in 1840 and 220
in i860. Since i860 the number has a little more
than doubled, our churches numbering at present
444, of which only 197 are incorporated as Unitarian.
I follow Dr. Allen * in these computations, so that
you may trust them perfectly, as you might less
•'The Unitarian Movement since the Reformation.'

220 UNITARIAN BELIEF
safely do if they were mine. The rate of increase
also has doubled, or very nearly, during the same
period. These figures do not lend themselves heart
ily to the proposition, stalest of the stale, that the
Unitarians are dying out. But they might easily be
understood too flatteringly of our numerical strength.
Some of the old New England churches that were
once filled with a multitude that kept holy-day have
now their " Seas of silence round each separate star."
A general decline in the habit of church-going is
partly to blame for this, but still more the exodus
from New England to the West, where the young
people, whom the New England churches sadly miss,
are the life of the new organizations. But here and
there also, it must be confessed, there are churches
which have suffered from a succession of preachers
unequal to their opportunity, — men who have reaped
where they sowed not, and gathered where they have
not strewn. I do not know of anything more pa
thetic than the fidelity with which the men, and still
more the women, of these churches have strength
ened the things that remained that were ready to
die. That which the palmer-worm hath left hath the
locust eaten, and that which the locust hath left hath
the canker-worm eaten, and that which the canker-
worm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten ; but the
few whom the Unitarian principle hath chosen and
found worthy of itself have gone on hoping against
hope, from each fresh disappointment rallying for a
fresh endeavor.

LOSS AND GAIN 221
There were those in 1844, Channing their lost
leader, who did not care how slow the spread
of nominal and avowed Unitarianism might be,
if only the Unitarian principles and the Unita
rian ideas might have free course and find wide ac
ceptance. Some of these lived to see of the travail
of their souls, and to be satisfied with the result ;
and others died without the sight. Few, I imagine,
dared to hope for changes so far-reaching and pro
found as those which the body of orthodox belief
has actually undergone. " All can raise the flowers now,
For all have got the seed."
But not all of it is Unitarian seed. We are too apt
to think it is. The leavening process, of which
something has been said from time to time, our
sweetest consolation for our numerical insignifi
cance, has not been exclusively a Unitarian process.
Not all the leaven by a good deal has been Uni
tarian leaven. It has also been scientific leaven,
the leaven of the modern spirit which has often
struggled with our Unitarian lumpishness in vain.
We have refused to rise. But, Unitarian leaven or
what not, the leaven has been there; and the work
ing of it has been something wonderful. Any
intelligent orthodox minister or layman is far more
liberal in 1894 in his average thinking than the
Unitarian minister or layman fifty years ago. In
my social contacts with orthodox ministers I tacitly
assume that they believe just about the same as I

222 UNITARIAN BELIEF
do, and they do not often disappoint my expectation.
There are those who tell us that, if the silent brother
hood had had their way in 1815, the whole body of
Congregationalism would have become Unitarian in
twenty years. It does not seem too much to be
believed. But how could they keep silent any
longer? They had kept silent too long. To-day
the silent brotherhood, those in orthodox pulpits
who are no longer orthodox, is probably ten to one
as compared with 181 5. How long will they remain
standing on one leg ? Will there not be soon another
challenge which will oblige them to declare them
selves, and rank themselves with us or make a party
by themselves ? It is a consummation devoutly to
be wished.
Eagerness to have others think our way, swell
our ranks, march to our music, is not necessarily
something fine and good, and may easily degenerate
into something very bad ; but to cherish principles,
ideas, and beliefs which are for us sources of im
measurable strength and joy and peace, and not be
passionately eager to make those who sit in dark
ness see the light in which we so rejoice, is a moral
contradiction than which a grosser is not easily to
be conceived. What has our progress or decadence
been as measured by these tests ? Measured by the
money given for missionary work, we make a very
creditable exhibit. If men may be presumed to care
more for the things they give their money for, then
it would seem that Unitarians care a good deal more
for their religion now than they did formerly. In
1844 our missionary work was costing us about

LOSS AND GAIN 223
$5,000 a year. Now $100,000 does not pay the bills.
For twenty years after 1 844 there was no appreciable
gain in this respect. During those years the aspect
of the Unitarian rooms in Boston was more that of
a mortuary chapel than that of a missionary work
shop of the living God. Then our annual issue of
tracts was about 25,000; now that of the American
Unitarian Association is 400,000, while the Western
Conference, the Women's National Alliance, and
other channels speed at least another 100,000 on
their cheerful way. But in 1865 we had our great
awakening. As the burden of the Sanitary Commis
sion slipped from Dr. Bellows's shoulders, he found
them aching for some other of commensurate weight ;
and he found it in the need of a compacter organiza
tion of our Unitarian body and a more active mis
sionary spirit. Time and again since then, when
some great thing was to be done, we have rolled up
a subscription aggregating more than the sum total
of the twenty years before, — ay, more than doub
ling that sum total once, twice, and thrice. And, if
in 1865 we had had the courage of our convictions
instead of the timidity of our opinions, what we have
done might have been vastly more. We have made
many brave discoveries since then, and sought out
many excellent inventions, — our national and local
conferences, our Ministers' Institute, and, best of all,
our Women's National Alliance, even less admirable
for its general missionary operations than for its
strengthening of our several churches, many a time
putting a soul under the ribs of death.
And now the question rises whether with this ap-

224 UNITARIAN BELIEF
parent gain there has been any real loss of that un-
sectarian spirit which was the grace and glory of the
best early Unitarians. There are those who have a
fear of this. They tell us, and they tell us truly,
that dread of the sectarian spirit was an insuperable
bar to Unitarian denominational activity in the ear
lier course of our development. Men who gave right
and left for social charities and public institutions
would give nothing for denominational work, because
they thought that we had sects enough already.
That such views were wholly groundless and irra
tional only the most foolhardy will deny. The
common asseveration, " I am a good Unitarian,"
often means, " I am as rigid a sectarian as you will
find in any of the orthodox sects." But there are
better Unitarians, who do not think that we have all
the truth there is with us, nor all the goodness, who
believe in our ideas, and still more in our principles,
and would fain give them freest course, but who are
not anxious by what name they shall be called, and
whose hope is for an ever-livelier sympathy among
all Christian sects and all the great religions of the
world. And these, I think, have been in the as
cendant in that denominational expansion and that
missionary spirit which have been characteristic of
our recent times. I do not know of any better dif
ferentiation of the sectarian from the true mission
ary spirit than that of the New Testament words,
" Not that we would have dominion over your faith,
but that we would be helpers of your joy"; and
these words express, I dare believe, the general
spirit in which our later Unitarian operations look-

LOSS AND GAIN

225

ing to denominational expansion and the spread of
our ideas have been carried on.
With the clear gain in missionary zeal, has there
been any loss of that social enterprise and public
spirit which were not less characteristic of our early
Unitarianism than its theological position ? It is
much easier to ask this question than to answer it.
Miserable is that minister among us who cannot
justly feel that no worthy social enterprise or move
ment of enlightened public spirit counts in vain
upon the support and furtherance of his people.
But to read Channing's ' Life and Letters ' is to
find ourselves invited to an altitude in these re
spects much higher than that of the average Unita
rian pulpit of our time, and breathing there a more
invigorating than our common air. It must of
course be remembered that Channing was excep
tionally noble in these things, and also that social
problems presented themselves with a naive simplic
ity fifty years ago which they have gradually lost.
That Dr. Bellows was the first president of our New
York Civil Service Reform Association, that our
own Curtis followed him, and was for twenty years
the inspiring soul of the reform, — these are not
solitary consolations ; and yet we must look well to
our laurels if we would not have them shamed by
those our fathers wore with easy and unconscious
grace. To go back to Channing in these things is
to go forward. Young men should leave him alone,
they should not open his books nor read the story of
his life, if they are contemplating an ecclesiastical
ministry, and not one whose church is the world,

226 UNITARIAN BELIEF
and they do not wish to have their placid dream dis
turbed by the supreme nobility of Channing's vision
of a ministry of public spirit and of social help.
In this connection, as well as in another, it may
be noted that we have lost here and there something
of our Puritan simplicity of worship, and, as a body,
we have gained a certain catholic appreciation of
what is beautiful and spiritual in the liturgical forms
of other bodies. It is certainly a gain that individ
ual or congregational taste and judgment may now
be trusted to indulge a ritualistic temper without
suspicion of Roman Catholic or even Episcopalian
leanings. But the hopes of some and the fears
of others that the ritualistic tendency among us
is setting in with great force get an instructive
comment from the melancholy failure of the new
' Book of Prayer and Praise ' to commend itself to
more than two or three of all our churches. Evi
dently, the liturgy that our people want, so far as
they want any, is no last and faintest possible atten
uation of the traditional thing, but something which
has the accent of freshness and reality. We have
had some individual aberrations remarkable for their
absurdity, as where the remembrance of that tender
scene, the tenderest in history, where Jesus on the
eve of his departure broke the paschal bread and
gave it to his disciples, is advertised as "the cele
bration of the holy communion," and such or such
an one as the "celebrant." But such aping of
other people's foolishness is a bane that genders its
own antidote, the inevitable disgust which it excites.
For those who like this sort of thing there is such a

LOSS AND GAIN 227
great abundance pf it spread elsewhere that they are
not likely to be long content with such meagre
crumbs of it as have been smuggled to our board,
and they will go to their own place.
Lyman Beecher wrote in 1823 that "all the liter
ary men of Massachusetts were Unitarian, all the
trustees and professors of Harvard College were
Unitarian, all the elite of wealth and fashion
crowded Unitarian churches." In 1844 these several
counts were quite as true as in 1823. Not only so,
but in the interval several of our major poets had
come of age, and all of them but Whittier (and in the
spirit none so much as he) had joined the Unitarian
choir. In 1823 Bryant was the only Unitarian poet :
in 1844 Longfellow and Emerson and Holmes and
Lowell had already wrapped us in the mantle of their
early fame. It is a little thing that each of these
men wore our colors on his breast ; it is a great and
blessed thing that, seeing deep and seeing musically
they saw the sovereignty of ethics and the brother
hood of man and the eternal fatherhood of God.
Of all these great ones, only Holmes, the most direct
and conscious Unitarian of them all, remains. And
it is just as well that latterly we have been able
to claim no such monopoly of literary excellence as
we could formerly. There was danger of our being
exalted above measure. Our catalogue of Unitarian
poets and historians and orators was getting stale
and wearisome. But, if we have lost the old
monopoly, it is not because literature has taken sides
against us in the deep things of the spirit. It is
with . us every time. Science has not more grandly
•Since dead, October 7, 1894.

228 UNITARIAN BELIEF
re-enforced our doctrine of the unity of God than
literature has re-enforced our doctrine of the dignity
of human nature and our doctrines of the free
intellect and the superiority of character to creed.
As with our monopoly of literature, so with our
monopoly of Harvard College. It is a thing past
and gone. So much the better. The wider hence
forth will be its influence. And, the wider its
influence, the wider will be the extent of liberal
religion; for culture is an atmosphere in which the
traditional dogmas cannot keep alive. Best of all is
the transformation of the Divinity School from a
Unitarian Theological School into a School of Scien
tific Criticism and Theology and Comparative Re
ligion ; and, so long as the professors are chosen for
their real ability, we need not fret ourselves about
the cultivation of a non-sectarian appearance by the
institution of a happy family of professors of the
most various ecclesiastical antecedents. The trouble
possibly may be that the Presbyterian professors
may not hold fast their Presbyterianism, nor the
Baptist professors the constructions peculiar to the
Baptist sect, and so on. Look at Professor Toy !
Given the scientific method of criticism and theology
and comparative religion, and you have a solvent
which the traditional dogmas can no more withstand
than wood, hay, and stubble the devouring flame.
And how about the third of Lyman Beecher's
counts, — all the elite of wealth and fashion crowding
Unitarian churches. Thank God, that is no longer
true ! The Episcopalians have come into our inher
itance. It is a good thing, no doubt, that the rich

LOSS AND GAIN 229
should have the gospel preached to them. They
often need it much. But it has not been a good
thing for Unitarianism that it has been attainted as
a doctrine only suitable for the rich and cultivated
classes of the community. It does make its appeal
to sound intelligence, but there is as much sound in
telligence among the poor and cultureless as among
the rich and cultivated. The proof of this has been
the prime justification of our Post-office Mission. It
has found plenty of sound intelligence among the
humbler folk, and it has not appealed to it in vain.
Would it be otherwise with the preacher's living
voice ? I warrant you it would not. For years we
bore complacently the accusation that we had a high
and mighty doctrine which only "the elite of wealth
and fashion" could appreciate and enjoy. And all
the time the trouble was that we were trying to
make out that our doctrine was as orthodox as the
traditional doctrine, or a little more so, and so had a
mongrel type that was " neither fish, flesh, nor fowl,
nor good red herring." Let us preach consistently
and clearly the unity of God, the dignity of human
nature, the sovereignty of ethics, salvation by
character, — that
" 'Tis the deed, and not the creed,
That helps us in our utmost need," — '¦
and the common people will hear us no less gladly"
than they heard the man of Nazareth when he went
about preaching such a doctrine many centuries
ago. The fault, dear Unitarians, is not in your
starry truths, but in yourselves, that you are under-

23O UNITARIAN BELIEF
lings. Go hitch your wagon to their shining team,
and fairly let them out, and you shall ride trium
phantly and gloriously, and set the heavens of the
common heart on fire.
But I must not permit myself to suffer from the
imputation that I am speaking of the Unitarian doc
trine as if it were the same yesterday, to-day, and
forever. There is a very common misconception
that it is somehow so, and this misconception has
been the occasion of a great deal of Unitarian com
placency. The common Unitarian idea is that for
the last fifty years, and half as long again, Unitarian
ism, both in its doctrine and spirit, has been an un
changeable entity to which all the orthodox sects
have been gradually approximating ; while the truth
is that our doctrine and our spirit have been chang
ing all the time and quite as rapidly as the doc
trine and the spirit of the other churches round
about. Let any one whose memory is good recall
the tone of our theology and piety as these ex
pressed themselves in the denominational gatherings
of thirty, forty, fifty years ago, and compare it with
the tone now characteristic of such gatherings.
How much less " Christocentric " it has become, how
much more Theocentric, Anthropocentric ! How
much less formally Christian, how much more
frankly human, and so more truly Christian, if the
spirit that was in Jesus is to have anything to do
with the determination of the meaning of the Chris
tian name ! There are various landmarks by which
the tidal change might easily be measured. In 1866
we had our " Battle of Syracuse," a discussion of

LOSS AND GAIN 23 1
the present preamble of our National Conference, —
the most grave and eloquent discussion that I have
ever heard. Look up the record, and see what was
then suggested by the progressive party. Francis E.
Abbot wrote it ; and very recently he has written
that the proposition to amend the constitution of
the Conference now put forth by a committee ap
pointed by the Conference at its last meeting is sub
stantially the same as his own proposition of 1866.
Therein he mightily deceives himself. Those who
are most strenuous in their opposition to the new
amendment* would accept Abbot's of 1866 "with tu
mult of acclaim," but it would meet with not a little
opposition from the more radical members of the
Conference. Here is one sign of many that we
have all been on the move. The most conservative
to-day would have been radicals among us fifty,
forty, even thirty years ago.
Given such principles as those of Truth for Au
thority, not authority for truth, Reason the only test
of Truth, Character, not creed, the end of Life, and
Honest thought the best thought wherever it may
lead, and you have something harder than the teeth
of time. To improve upon such principles is as
difficult as to improve upon the axioms of Euclid and
the certainties of mathematics. Having such princi
ples, we could only change them for the worse. But
* The amendment here referred to did not prevail at the Saratoga Conference of
1894, but another and much better form, which, though carried without one dissent
ing voice, is much simpler than Dr. Abbot's proposition of 1866, and every whit as
broad. For the phrases of an effete Christology it substitutes the honest statement
that the churches of the Conference accept the religion of Jesus as love to God and
man, and it heartily welcomes to our fellowship all who, however they may differ
from us in belief, are in general sympathy with our spirit and our work.

232 UNITARIAN BELIEF
we could change for the better our allegiance to
these principles, and this we certainly have done.
Channing's faith in them we have too often counted
to his contemporaries and ourselves for righteous
ness. For often they were false to them, and we
have been no less so. Fifty years gone next winter
the Parker controversy was at its utmost height.
The gravamen of the charge against him was that
he believed the teachings of Jesus not because they
were "approved by signs and wonders," but because
they appealed to him as true and good. The Boston
Association felt itself compromised by his teachings,
and wished him to withdraw ; but the wish was
never formally expressed, and Parker did not accept
the tacit invitation. " Couldn't they withdraw ? " he
said. Our later critics of that time have frequently
confounded the Boston Association of Ministers with
the American Unitarian Association, which never
lifted up its hand against him or his church. It
is a very interesting fact that, notwithstanding the
friendly attitude of James Freeman Clarke towards
Parker, and the consequent rupture of his society in
February, 1845, ne was made a director of the
American Unitarian Association the May following,
which was the clearest possible intimation that the
Association was not going to sell the Holy Ghost
for money. Again and again since then have we
had our silly seasons, our moments of cowardice,
when, as mirrored by our principles, our practice
has shown a halting gait, a miserable shamefaced-
ness. We have forgotten that the slightest creedal
test violates the principle of intellectual liberty as

LOSS AND GAIN 233
logically as the Westminster Confession. And
others have forgotten that practically it makes a
mighty difference whether the creed contended for
is that of election and reprobation or that of God the
Father and Jesus as the image of his loving heart.
But, with whatever haltings and stumblings, the real
ization of our principles in our habital walk and con
versation is, I trust, much fuller now than it was
fifty years ago.
These are fixed stars, incapable of change ; but our
beliefs from first to last have altered much, and our
present opportunity is, in good part, to show forth
unreservedly how much they have altered with the
lapse of time and with the advance of critical
studies and scientific thought. We could not have
a more significant year for our starting-point than
the year 1844; for in that year Andrews Norton
published his ' Note ' on the Old Testament which
denied the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch
in unqualified terms, and in the same year F. C.
Baur published his tremendous impeachment of the
Fourth Gospel's authenticity and historic character.
Here were the two centres of that ellipse which crit
icism was to describe during the next fifty years, —
the two main positions about which the battle was to
rage. The year before, Theodore Parker had pub
lished his translation of De Wette's ' Introduction to
the Old Testament,' clear in its teaching of the frag
mentary character of the Pentateuch and in its as
signment of ' Deuteronomy ' to 621 b.c, seven cen
turies later than its traditional date. Dr. Noyes, in
1834, had demonstrated the artificial relation of

234 UNITARIAN BELIEF
the New Testament fulfilments to the Old Testa
ment prophecies, and, in general, the immediateness
and yet frequent fallibility of the latter. Few, in
deed, are the results of the higher criticism of to-day
which are any higher than those to which he after
ward attained and frankly taught the young men of
the Divinity School. But for his caution in announc
ing views of which he was not absolutely convinced,
he might have anticipated Kuenen' s doctrine of the
late origin of the Levitical legislation by some
twenty years. The acceptance of this doctrine has
been the critical event of the last quarter of the nine
teenth century. It has built again the chronology
and inter-relationship of the Old Testament litera
ture, hardly with one stone upon the other as it was
before, but with a symmetry and architectural ex
pression that it did not before possess. Many have
been the losses incidental to the general reconstruc
tion : Moses as the author of the Pentateuch, the law
which it contains, or even the Ten Commandments
as they have come down to us ; David as the sweet
singer of Israel ; Solomon as the author of the tril
ogy, ' Ecclesiastes,' ' Proverbs,' and the ' Song of
Songs ' ; Isaiah as the author of two-thirds of the
book that bears his name ; and many another
prophet's title to the whole or part of that attributed
to him. But what are losses such as these to that
tremendous gain which is involved in the apprehen
sion of the Old Testament literature and the Old
Testament religion as an evolution from the lower
to the higher things, from the savagery of Deborah's
song to the deep inwardness of the penitential

LOSS AND GAIN 235
psalms, from a brutal polytheism and idolatry to that
thought of God and that love of man, which were in
Jesus' mind and heart !
Within the range of New Testament criticism the
balance of our gains and losses is not less satisfac
tory. Unquestionably there has been some abate
ment from the rigor of Baur's limitation of Paul's
genuine Epistles to ' Romans,' ' Corinthians,' and
' Galatians ' ; a concession of ' First Thessalonians '
and ' Philippians,' with possibly a genuine element in
volved in ' Colossians ' and ' Ephesians.' We have
lost all personal associations from the Gospels and
from the Apocalypse, long denied to John for no
better reason than its refusal to be ascribed to him
together with the Fourth Gospel, now for much bet
ter reasons. For twenty-five years after Baur's im
peachment of the Fourth Gospel in 1844 the ten
dency was counter to his view ; but since then it has
been the other way, though not without the opposi
tion of Dr. Ezra Abbot, our most learned textual
scholar, while Martineau, never having retreated
from the position of Baur, has kept his place, and
seen the world come round to him. With these
losses of traditional association there has been some
loss of the former confidence that Saint Paul was a
Unitarian save in the most high and mighty Arian
way, and that the New Testament, in general, is an
armory of Unitarian texts with few, if any others, in
termixed. But here also

"There are gains for all our losses,
There are balms for all our pains."

236 UNITARIAN BELIEF
The intense humanity of Paul, as we now apprehend
him, — such a good lover, such a good hater ! — is a
flame that touches his theology with its tongues of
fire, and makes it lyrical with a human interest. And,
as the higher criticism gives us in the Old Testament
a new chronological order, and with that an evolution
of ideas, so does the New ; but this evolution is, like
much besides, a degeneration, the simple humanity of
Jesus in the synoptics ever more miserably sophisti
cated and concealed until in the Fourth Gospel he is
but a little short of that divinity, that deity, to which
two centuries later he arrived. We have lost one
reason after another for varying Jesus from "the
kindly race of men," only to find him in the complete
ness of his unqualified humanity more fascinating to
our minds and more attractive to our reverence and
affection than he was before.
To-day the Unitarian name takes up into itself a
wealth of meaning in which it had at first no part
nor lot. Our consciousness of the divine unity is now
a hundred times as full and rich as it was fifty years
ago. For science is but another name for the dis
covered unity of the world, and the unity of the
world reflects as in a glass the unity of that universal
soul which we call God. How grandly does each
separate science take its part in that antiphony of
responsive unities which at length breaks into
chorus in the magnificent generalization of corre
lated energies, each force the other with its visor
down, and all the various manifestations of the one
infinite and eternal Power in which we live and
move and have our being! Upon the other hand

LOSS AND GAIN 237
there was a time when Channing's "one sublime
idea," the dignity of human nature, seemed to have
met with a supreme rebuff from Darwin's theory
of human origins. That doctrine seemed the wreck
of our high faith in human nature : it has proved
its grandest confirmation. For nothing argues the
essential dignity of human nature more than man's
partial triumph over the limitations of his brute
inheritance ; while the long way that he has come
suggests as long a way to go, height beyond height,
with new horizons ever widening into view.
" All about him shadow still, but while the races flower and fade
Prophet eyes may catch a glory slowly gaining on the shade ;
Till the peoples all are one, and all their voices blend in
choric
Hallelujah to the Maker : ' It is finished ! Man is made ! ' "
I might go on and show that every Unitarian
doctrine of the past has suffered — has enjoyed! — a
wondrous transformation in these fifty years. What
is our present opportunity but to make clear this
transformation and to give it ample illustration,
wasting no precious minute in the vain endeavor to
identify or harmonize the old and new. We cannot
read the Bible now, we cannot think upon the life of
Jesus as it actually was without " a great trembling
of the heart," a swelling joy of gratitude and praise
that such a book has been preserved to us with its
"great story of a man " worthy of all our admiration,
love, and tears. As here, so everywhere ; and woe
be unto us, and shame upon us, if we do not keep
the banner of this gospel so high advanced that it

238 UNITARIAN BELIEF
shall draw to it the eyes of many a battalion fighting
against fearful odds, and strike a gladness into the
heart of many a dying soldier who by this sign has
conquered many an ugly doubt and trampled many a
hateful passion down !
Let us not be prouder of our freedom than that
we are greatly bound to earnest and intelligent co
operation with every movement looking to a more
generous sympathy of the religions and the sects,
and with every movement looking to the purification
of our politics and the improvement of our social
life. The Unitarian society which collectively, or
through its individual members, is not making itself
felt for the encouragement of every good and helpful
thing in the community, is a society which, however
it may protest that it must live, deserves the answer
made to others that came so protesting, " Pray tell
us why." As for religious sympathy I do not know
of any more unlimited than that which finds expres
sion in our conferences and churches. It is a pro
foundly interesting and inspiring fact that a correl
ative form of the name Unitarian, before it had any
theological significance, indicated a Transylvanian
league of mutual toleration, which in the sixteenth
century included Calvinists, Lutherans, and Roman
Catholics ; and, apparently, the name, a little later,
stuck to the theological Unitarians because they
stood by the principle of toleration when all the
others fell away. If it was so, I trust we shall not
prove unworthy of that great renown. I think we
are not so in these last days. Some one has said
facetiously that we have a liberal bark and a conser-

LOSS AND GAIN

239

vative bite. But it is just the other way. We have
a conservative bark, — a very feeble one, — but we
have a liberal bite. It proves all things, and holds
fast to that which is good. Can you imagine any
word of cultivated and intelligent freedom that is
not more than welcome in our assemblies ? This or
that individual may excommunicate us from his fel
lowship, but he is ever welcome back to ours to say
his bravest word. We have the courage of our con
victions ; but we have not quite, as yet, perhaps, that
intellectual and moral clearness which appreciates
the necessity of conforming the motto on the flag to
the business that we have in hand.*
I have, and I desire to have, no vision of a
great Unitarian body sweeping other sects and
many millions of believers into its invincible array.
No more have I, and no more do I desire to have,
the vision of any new organization doing this. I
have very serious doubts whether there is to be any
new aggregation of the people or the sects corre
sponding to the enlarging sympathies of religious
thought. What we are coming to, I think and hope,
is not a mighty aggregation, but a glorious sympathy.
There will be separations here and there, and re
arrangements of the atoms; and there will be new
organizations, with new names, very carefully se
lected, and very much explained, with serious loss of
energy that might be more profitably spent. There
will be such happy combinations as the recent
Congress of Liberal Religions, leaving every special
* A doubt rebuked by the happy course of things at the Saratoga Conference
of 1894.

24O UNITARIAN BELIEF
body its own autonomy, and to every individual his
special loyalty as much as ever. And out of all
the change and readjustment will come forth, with
garments white and glistening, the Free Church of
America. But it will, I hope and I believe, be
mainly an invisible church. No one church will
absorb the others, and no brand-new organization
will absorb them all under the banner of an abstract
formula from which everything historical and special
has been stripped away. There will still be Pres
byterians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Bap
tists, Methodists, Roman Catholics, cherishing their
honorable traditions, honoring their great names and
high examples, warned and shamed by the mistakes
and follies of their past, and enticed by its most
perfect inspirations to the highest things ; and their
dividing lines shall offer as little obstruction to the
preacher or the layman going back and forth among
them as the equator offers to the cruiser's gliding
keel. No vain imagination this, but one that has
already been materialized in a thousand places, and
soon will be in ten thousand more. In that Free
Church of America there will be Unitarians, too,
but more of them, I trust, and better. The Uni
tarian opportunity is not, as I take it, an opportunity
to give up our historic name and rename ourselves
with some other less concrete, if haply so it may be
more attractive to those who, wearying of this or
that orthodox enclosure, dread the renaming of
themselves by any name short of the most abstract
and universal possible. So far, our name has not
prevented some of the bravest and the best dissen-

LOSS AND GAIN 24 1
tients from the older churches from casting in their
lot with us, and they have been little chafed by the
sectarian bond or affronted by the Unitarian tradi
tion ; while some who have strayed away in hopes of
a more liberal fellowship or isolation have come back
to us again, and been right glad to find themselves
once more under the old roof and by the old fireside,
and with their legs once more under the dear old
family mahogany. We greatly overrate the names
by which we call ourselves, and the resolutions, pre
ambles, and statements that we make, as influencing
those who are, for one reason or another, attracted
to our fellowship. Call a particular church almost
anything, and let its published creed or statement
be any one of the dear five hundred that we have
produced from time to time, and, if you have a live
man in the pulpit, intelligent and earnest, sym
pathetic and humane, those that belong to him will
gravitate to him, and they will stay with him and
help him in his work. As for the general attraction
of our body, it is not that of this, that, or the other
resolution or preamble or statement. It is what
men know of Channing and Parker and Martineau
and Clarke and Gannett and Jones and Savage and
Potter. It is what they know of our people as they
come among us, and find that we are working cheer
ily for God and man. But it is different with those
of us who have been for a long time in the old
household of faith, birthright members it may be.
"Scrooge never painted out old Marley's name";
and, though in most particulars he was not a pattern
of things holy, in this particular he was wise unto

242 UNITARIAN BELIEF
salvation. He recognized the inspiring force of a
tradition, as did George Eliot, who put her thought,
as he could not, into impressive words, saying:
"The eminence, the nobility, of a people depends
on its capability of being stirred by memories of
striving for what we call spiritual ends, — ends which
consist, not in immediate material possession, but in
the satisfaction of a great feeling that animates the
collective body as with one soul. A people having
the seed of worthiness in it must feel an answering
thrill when it is adjured by the deaths of its heroes,
who died to preserve its national existence ; when it
is reminded of its small beginnings and gradual
growth through past labors and struggles, such as
are still demanded of it in order that the freedom
and well-being thus inherited may be transmitted
unimpaired to children's children ; when an appeal
against the permission of injustice is made to great
precedents in its history, and to the better genius
breathing in its institutions. . . . Nations so moved
will resist conquest with the very breasts of their
women, will pay their millions and their blood to
abolish slavery, will share privation in famine and all
calamity, will produce poets to sing 'some great
story of a man,' and thinkers whose theories will
bear the test of action."
There is hardly a word of this that is not just as
true of the religious as of the national community.
Indeed, it was in a religious community — a nation
only in virtue of being such, the Jews — that George
Eliot found the finest illustration of her inspiring
thought. And, if the Unitarians of the present time

LOSS AND GAIN 243
are wise, they will take it well to heart. They will
not waste their strength in devising some new name,
only to waste as much again in subsequent explana
tion. "When a God would ride, anything serves
him for a chariot " ; and let our Unitarianism be
something godlike, let it be even manly, and the
name will carry anything of grace or glory that we
can impose. Names have their rights as well as
breathing men; and the Unitarian name, with its
great historical and personal associations, carrying
along with it, as the sun its planetary stars, the
names of Priestley and Lindsey and Channing
and Dewey and Martineau and Parker and Bartol
and Hedge and Bellows and Clarke and Emerson and
Furness and Gannett — no matter which — and Sum
ner and Curtis, and a host besides, too great for
numbering, is a name to conjure with, to bring
bright spirits from the vasty deep of thought and
moral will, to bring dark spirits out of hiding to re
ceive their doom. What if the name has been used
once, twice, or thrice to marshal men some meaner
way ? All the more reason that for raising it aloft,
and honoring it with higher purpose and with fresh
resolve. If in the thick of battle men should drag
the standard in the mire with weak or coward
hands, would that be a signal for the men who know
what victories it has inspired to let it go, meaning
to have a nice new one which will be all innocent of
smoke and rent, and to which no forlorn hope has ever
lifted up the eyes of passionate desire? Would it
not rather be a signal for them to make themselves
a wall about it, and to raise it up, "not a stripe

244 UNITARIAN BELIEF
erased, not a star obscured," the crying need their
call of God to deeds of high emprise ? Let every
man be fully persuaded concerning these things in
his own mind.
As for the original meaning of the word " Unita
rian," were we entirely sure of that, it ought not to
have a feather's weight in determining the present
use of it. In what unfathomable abysses of absurd
ity should we be landed every day if we attempted
to fasten upon others or ourselves the original mean
ings of the words which we habitually use ! Then
every pin would be a feather, and every style a
graving tool. Then all our pecuniary transactions
would be in flocks and herds ; and every sycophant
would be an informer against persons stealing figs.
Unquestionably, what it denoted in the early
American history of our denomination was the doc
trine of God's oneness as opposed to the doctrine of
his trinity. That meaning, also, was a good mean
ing, and one of which we need not be ashamed,
especially as it is a meaning that has gathered to
itself immeasurable addition, scope, and illustration
with the advance of time. Originally, the doctrine
was a doctrine of God as the Divine Unit : now it is
a doctrine of the Divine Unity ; and, as such, it takes
up into itself the whole gist of modern science, the
correlation of forces, the transmutation of species,
the evolution and affinities of language, institutions,
art, the sympathy of religions. If there is a word
in the whole scope of moral and religious usage that
has been enlarged and glorified by the process of
the suns, it is the word " Unitarian " ; and for every

LOSS AND GAIN 245
reason there was for assuming it a century ago there
are a hundred reasons now for retaining it and wear
ing it like a decoration on our breasts, — a sign of
that nobility which compels us to be good and true.
Emerson said that there should be a statement of
religion that should make atheism impossible. Such
a statement is the doctrine of the Divine Unity as
science teaches it. The name which stands for such
a statement is as good a name as can be fashioned
by the human voice. Are we good enough for it ?
That is the deeper question which we have to meet.
But that which the name " Unitarian " denotes is
nothing in comparison with what it connotes. It
connotes the principles and ideas that have been
associated with it ; a movement of thought in
sympathy with science; a movement of ethics in
sympathy with reform ; the subjection of all opinions
and beliefs to reason as the sole authority ; " the
supremacy of ethics," deed, and not creed, the one
important thing ; that dignity of human nature
which Channing called his one sublime idea, and
which the march of science has confirmed as grandly
as it has confirmed the unity of God. A name that
has connoted all these things, and, with all these,
innumerable heroisms, sacrifices, and devotions of
the men and women who have called themselves
Unitarians, is not a name to be lightly, or even
carefully, set aside for any other in the vocabulary
of spiritual ideas. 'Tis mightiest for the mightiest.
'Twould become a sceptred monarch better than his
crown. 'Tis a name which those will cherish most
affectionately and least willingly resign who have

246 UNITARIAN BELIEF
entered deepest into all that it suggests of generous
thought and noble consecration. The man or
church that is entirely true to its best meaning is
as free as only those can be who recognize them
selves as greatly bound to service of all righteous
ness and truth and love.
" Nurse of the future, daughter of the past,
That stern phylactery best becomes thee now :
Lift to the morning star thy fearless brow !
Cast thy brave truth on every warring blast !
Stretch thy white hand to the forbidden bough,
And let thine earliest symbol be thy last."

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