UNITARIAN THOUGHT
EPHRAIM EMERTON

UNITARIAN THOUGHT

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UNITARIAN THOUGHT

BY
EPHRAIM EMERTON
PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Neto gorft
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1916
Ail rights reserved

•« • * * *
, 'BV THE MACMIllLAt/^OlJpANYj
• • •••
Set up and e|ecf(oty^4Sf Fublishe^J&nuvyt X911.

• Reprinted November, igiS.

NntiDaoti jptesg
J. 8. Gushing Co. — Berwick A Smith Co.
Norwood, MaBB., U.S.A.

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TO
FOUR UNITARIAN WOMEN
OF FOUR GENERATIONS
MY GRANDMOTHER, MY MOTHER, MY WIFE
AND MY DAUGHTER
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

PREFACE
This little book is intended for three classes of readers :
first, for those to whom Unitarianism is only a name
belonging to a body of Christians insignificantly smaU,
but, rather curiously, including a remarkable propor
tion of men who have been distinguished in English and
American life and letters ; second, for those who have
distinct, but unfavorable impressions of Unitarians as
hostile to most of the cherished beliefs of Christians,
perhaps even as wicked and dangerous persons not
safely to be intrusted with important private or public
duties; third, for Unitarians themselves, to remind
them once again of the treasure they have received
from their fathers and their obligation to see that it
be not diminished. Its purpose is neither to excite
controversy nor to settle it, but only to state fairly its
own constructive propositions. If in so doing it suggests
antagonisms, it does so only to make its own positions
clear. The right to differ, the most precious right of
the thinking man, which it claims for Unitarians, it
recognizes in fullest measure for all honest minds.

viii PREFACE
Three friends, one a Unitarian theologian, one a
Trinitarian theologian, and one a man of pure science
¦vnthout formulated rehgious opinions, have had the
great kindness to read the manuscript of these pages
and have approved their publication. To these and to
one or two others who have shown an interest in the
progress of the work, especially to my colleague. Profes
sor William Wallace Fenn, Dean of the Harvard Di
vinity School, I beg to express my deepest obligations.
E.E.
Cambridge, October, 1910.

CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface  vii
Introduction  i
CHAPTER I. The Nature of Belief  ii-'
II. Miracle  29
III. The Nature of Man  59-
IV. The Bible  no
V. Jesus  148
VI. Redemption  176
VII. The Church  203
VIII. Worship  229
IX. The Future Life  259 -
X. The Thought of God  279

IX

UNITARIAN THOUGHT

INTRODUCTION
In these days of rehgious ferment, when the per
petual conflicts of faith and knowledge, of tradition and
experience, of authority and independence, of imity and
diversity, are being revived and re-fought with increas
ing energy, it is the part of every community of religious
men to give account to themselves anew of the faith that
is in them. Only as they can do this can they properly
claim the allegiance of their followers or attract inquir
ing minds from other sources. There is indeed abroad
in the religious world as elsewhere a spirit of charity
and toleration which we must heartily welcome. No
one would openly and consciously in-vite the early zeal
of persecution to work its holy mission again in our
modem society. However much the persecuting spirit
may stUI be lying latent in the hearts of men, their
tongues are quick to repudiate any such charge. Every
where we hear the persuasive cry of indifference to de
tails, of surrender of non-esssentials, of modifying the
creeds, even of reforming the ancient mechanisms of
authority.

2 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
All this is well. We are united in a con-viction that
former times erred in too greatly emphasizing slight
and temporary differences in men's thought. We are
all glad to-day to beheve that such unimportant dis
tinctions are vanishing or at least losing something of
their value. We look forward to seeing them diminish
StiU more in number and in importance. But, mean
while, it is easy to read in the signs of the time a
gro^wing impatience with all these peace-making, com
promising processes. Together with the cry against
over-emphasis on the unimportant there sounds also the
deeper note of warning lest we forget the important. In
our anxiety not to exalt the temporary we are in danger,
so we are being warned, of losing sight of the permanent.
For very dread of non-essentials we must not diminish
in any way the really and truly essential. In a word,
the conflict of our day is not so much whether we are
to be sticklers for precious trifles or nobly superior to
them; whether we are to reject science or accept it;
whether we are to exalt the individual thinker or show
him his place under the beneficent direction of au
thority. It is rather to determine what things are
trifles, precious or otherwise. It is to determine the
true relation between exact knowledge and a worthy
faith. It is to fix, as carefuUy as may be, a just pro
portion between the freedom of the indi'vidual and the

INTRODUCTION 3
claim of authority, under whatever form it may be
disguised. The hope of the future does not lie in banishing
conflict from the world of religious thought. That end
could be accomphshed only in one of two ways : either
by a decline into general indifference, or by subjecting
aU thought to the dictation of an unquestioned au
thority. Either of these solutions is a solution of de
spair. In the last analysis they work out to the same
dismal result; for the blind acceptance of an authority
is only another expression of personal indifference.
No, the hope of the future is not in banishing conflict.
It is in the clearing and sharpening of the greater an
tagonisms, in such a fixing of what are the real essen
tials, that every thinking man can recognize them and
give his aUegiance accordingly. In this clearing process
the lesser and the fictitious antagonisms wi\l disappear.
They wiU be absorbed in the really great distinctions,
which do not rest upon mere logical argument or upon
a higher or lower culture, but upon the few fundamental
ideas which have always determined, in the last resort,
the attitude of reUgious parties. Men will learn that
when they discuss whether a Christian ought to be
baptized by putting water on his head or by plunging
him in all over, they are wasting their time in a futile
game of words, but that when they argue over again

4 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
the old question of infant or adult baptism they are
dealing ¦wdth a point of Uving, vital, and permanent
interest. ' ' "
As this clarif3dng process goes on it is to be expected
that the number of possible groupings of men in re
Ugious affairs wiU diminish. As occurs in political life
when old Unes of party division have become obUterated
by the growth of many new interests that do not fit
into the normal scheme of working parties, — after long
years of confusion, in some new crisis of the nation's
Ufe, the great, permanent issues lead again to new and
more significant re-formations, — so it must be with the
movement of religious thought. After the present long
interval of petty sectarian strife, there must come a
readjustment along the lines of real and permanent
oppositions. Men wiU see that after all the minor
compromises have been made there remain issues on
which no compromise is possible. After all the non
essentials have been eUminated, there remain a few
things on which men ¦wUl insist as essentials, and they
wiU insist ¦with aU the more zeal because these things are
few. It is too early as yet to be certain as to the signs of
this approaching readjustment. It is customary to
point to the conscious efforts at Christian imity which
many spokesmen of many sects have been urging ; but

INTRODUCTION 5
it must be confessed that so far the actual results of
such activity have been meagre enough, — a "union
church" here and there in the country, a softening of
the language of controversy, a greater readiness to co
operate in works of humanity, but not much more. Far
more ob-vious is the attempt on the part of existing sects
to define their attitude on some few burning questions
in such a way as to hold the doubtfUl aUegiance of their
members, or, in extreme cases, even to force a severing
of that aUegiance. Recent heresy trials have been of
real ser^vice in showing where the controlling powers in
several of the most important American religious bodies
are ¦wUling to make their stand against the rising tide of
serious scientific thought. They have done more than
this. They have made clear how large and respectable
a fraction of the membership in aU the "orthodox"
sects is retained only by sacrifices of sincerity which
cannot be made forever ¦with impunity. While on the
one hand they have given to the dominant powers
within the sects a security they have long been lacking,
they have, on the other hand, shown to the hesitating
minority the nature of the sacrifices they have been
making and have put before them ¦with imperative clear
ness the question how long they are wUlihg to go on
making them.
It is in the hope of contributing a Uttle to the solu-

6 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
tion of this problem in some indi^vidual minds that these
pages have been written. They are an attempt to state
clearly the attitude of mind in which one of the smaUest
of the Christian bodies that have come into existence
with the Protestant Reformation stands with reference
to present-day reUgious questions. This volume can
not in any sense of the word be regarded as an oflGicial
utterance. No person connected ¦with the administra
tion of the Unitarian body has known of its preparation.
It has been one of the boasts of Unitarianism that it
has never authorized any person or any body of per
sons to speak for it in any formal or determinate fashion.
It shares with Christianity itself the proud claim of
being ever incomplete and therefore ever ready to try
new aspects of truth to see whether they be in harmony
¦with the old truths. It is only as an indi^vidual, a
layman of the third generation of American Unitarians,
that the author ventures to give expression to what he
beUeves to be, on the whole, the consensus of Unitarians
on the main topics of reUgious discussion.
It is probably true that there are few statements of
opinion made here, to which some Unitarians would
not take exception. There are certainly many state
ments with which many non-Unitarians would be
heartily in accord. In saying, therefore, as must fre
quently be said, "Unitarians beUeve this, or that," it

INTRODUCTION 7
is not impUed that aU Unitarians beUeve this in pre
cisely this way, nor is it suggested that only Unitarians
so beUeve. What is meant is that, so far as the author
can judge, the aggregate of the -views and states of
mind here described is held by Unitarians more gener
aUy, more completely, and more frankly than by any
one else. It is this general agreement that forms the
excuse for being of the reUgious association which tries
to perpetuate and to extend these -views and to main
tain these states of mind.
There are two criticisms of Unitarianism so frequently
and so confidently made that they have come to be
the commonplaces of remark whenever the word is
mentioned. One of these criticisms is that Unitarian
ism is merely a kind of reUgious philosophy. The other
is that it is merely a system of morals. Kindly critics
are willing to add that it is a phUosophy in which they
find much to admire and that they are perfectly willing
to Uve by its moral system. What they cannot admit
is, that it has any claim whatever upon them as a form
of reUgion. "Unitarianism," it has often been said, "is
a very good thing to Uve by, but a very poor thing to
die by," the hnpUcation being, we may suppose, that
the crisis of physical death brings a man into some
relation with God essentiaUy different from that which
he held during his earthly Ufe. It is like the feeling of

8 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
the child who regularly omitted his morning prayer on
the ground that he could take care of himself in the
daytime. The Unitarian, beUeving as he does that he
is as much bound by the law and the love of God during
the daytime of Ufe as he can be in the tender darkness
of death, draws no Une between the reUgion by which
he ¦wiU Uve and that by which he is ready to die. He
needs no critic to inform him that neither philosophy
nor moraUty makes a reUgion. Only, he can accept no
reUgion which goes against a sound philosophy or which
tries to be independent of an imperative morality.
A third criticism of Unitarianism is that it is a mere
bimdle of negatives, — that its spirit is "that which
ever denies, " — that it has nothing positive to offer,
but must content itself with always being in the oppo
sition. It is gently admitted that in fact it has done
good service in this kind. Just as the opposition in a
ParUament serves the nation by wise and continuous
criticism of the power actuaUy responsible for govern
ment, so, it is admitted, Unitarianism has put a finger
on many a weak spot in the doctrine and the practice
of other Christian bodies greatly to their advantage
and to its o^wn credit. With this negative praise Uni
tarians have been fain to be content, but it in no way
expresses their own -view of themselves. It is true
that they have been compeUed by the very nature of

INTRODUCTION 9
the case to express themselves often in the language of
negation. They have done this because it was the
only way in which they could make their position clear.
Their opponents had possession of the field. It was
they, the opponents, who had tied themselves up in a
tangle of ideas largely negations of primitive and simple
Christianity; so that there was no other way of re
asserting great positive truths than to deny these.
The truths asserted and reasserted were none the less
positive on this account. Unitarians know perfectly
weU that nothing can Uve upon negations. No organi
zation can serve even as a refuge from others unless it
can show its right to exist by offering positive and per
manent principles, by which it is ready to stand or fall.
The following pages have been written ¦with these
three criticisms constantly before the author's mind.
He hopes to have sho^wn that Unitarianism is so truly
a form of religion that it ought to satisfy those who
make the highest demand upon the reUgious Ufe. By
religion the Unitarian means a recognized dependence
of man upon the power greater than himself which he
feels at the heart of things, animating, guiding, recon-
ciUng aU by the action of a ¦wiU that is neither above
law nor subject to it, but is itself Law. If he stopped
here, he would indeed incur the charge of being sat
isfied ¦with a rather abstract philosophical scheme. He

lO UNITARIAN THOUGHT
adds to his definition the element' of personal ser^vice.
Toward this power he feels those sentiments of devo
tion, of gratitude, of duty, of dependence, which lead to
rational worship on the one hand and to right deaUng
with his feUow-man on the other. Thus his philosophy
and his morals grow rationally and essentially out of
his reUgion. In it they find their explanation and their
support. Lacking this purely religious element, philoso
phy would be to him a barren abstraction and moraUty
a heartless code.

CHAPTER I
THE NATURE OF BELIEF
How happy is he born and taught.
That serveth not another's ¦will,
Whose armour is his honest thought
And simple truth his utmost skill.
— Sir Henry Wotton.
If there is anything peculiar in the mental attitude of
Unitarians toward religious questions, it is to be found
in their understanding of what constitutes beUef . There
is no word that we use more readily or less carefully.
We say we "beUeve" things that vary so widely in their
nature and content as to have no common ground on
which beUef in them can be based. We beUeve in our
o^wn existence ; we beUeve the sun wUI rise to-morrow ;
we beUeve in ¦virtue and in a high tariff. We beUeve
that Napoleon invaded Russia, that Alexander was a
great general, that aU men were created free and equal,
that Jesus turned water into ¦wine, and so on indefinitely.
If we inquire into the reasons for these several "beUefs, "
we discover at once that they rest upon the •widest
diversity of evidence. The mental process which as
sures us that the sim wUl rise to-morrow wiU give us no

12 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
comfort as to the certainty of our own existence, nor as
to the blessings of a protective tariff. We may estabUsh
to our satisfaction the Napoleonic invasion of Russia,
but the kind of evidence that satisfies us here ¦wiU not
convince us of the freedom and equaUty of aU men.
BeUef, as we loosely employ the word, seems to rest upon
an almost infinite variety of kinds of e-vidence having
little or no relation with each other. The only thing
common to them is the certainty of the con^viction they
bring. If the particular e^vidence is only strong enough,
we can, for practical purposes, be just as sure of one kind
of fact as of another.
We are concerned here with religious beliefs, and it is
therefore of the first importance that we should be clear
at the outset what we mean by belief as applied to reli
gious matters. We are inclined to say at first thought
that aU beUef must rest upon e-vidence, but it needs only
a moment's observation to convince us that in fact this
is not true. An immense proportion of the most cher
ished beUefs of mankind rest, not upon e^vidence, but
upon a great variety of other sanctions. Chief of these
is the force of tradition j( We beUeve things because per
sons in whom we "beUeve" have taught us that they
are true. By far the larger part of this teaching is im
personal and involuntary. We get such ideas, we say,
by inheritance or by suggestion, and this suggestion comes

THE NATURE OF BELIEF

13

largely from the same persons from whom we may inherit
our instincts. Or, we take our beUefs from the human
society in which we happen to be placed. There are
family beUefs, race beliefs, national beUefs, intense often
in proportion to the absence of any reflection on our
own part. When we begin to reflect upon or inquire
into such beUefs, we almost certainly weaken their hold
on our aUegiance.
This is eminently true of reUgious beUefs. ReUgion
in many of its most impressive forms has been a thing of
traditions. It has belonged to races and nations as a
part of their common possession. It was theirs, not by
¦virtue of any personal conviction on the part of indi
viduals that this reUgion was "true," but because of its
di^vine institution certified by signs and wonders, declared
by prophetic utterance, demonstrated by success in
war and prosperity in peace. Not to accept it would be
to declare oneself outside the racial bond within which
alone a proper relation with the gods was possible. But
then have come times when men began to speculate about
the foundations of their reUgious beliefs, when traditions
have no longer sufl&ced, and when leaders of thought
have arisen to remind men that, after aU, back of aU
racial claims there lay deep, permanent instincts of the
individual man calling upon him to make clear to him
self his o^wn personal relation to the unseen world of

14 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
spirit. It is on such indi^vidual appeal that the great
universal reUgions have based their hold upon the
aUegiance of mankind. They begin by challenging the
claims of the existing racial systems through their bold
assertion of certain principles for which they ask ac
ceptance from individuals. With them there comes an
entirely new idea into the world, — the idea of personal
reUgious conviction. Whoever accepts their teaching
must do so on the ground of some individual satisfac
tion he finds in it and which he does not find elsewhere.
The Buddhist, the Mohammedan, and the Christian
alike reject aU reUgions but their own, because in each
case the appeal is absolute. What gives it its peculiar
force is precisely that it addresses itself to the indi
vidual soul. It is not possible for the true follower of
a imiversal religion to shelter himself behind racial or
national institutions. He must, especially in every
moment of stress, stand out for himself from the mass
of his feUow-beUevers and confess himself individually
to the foUowing of the principles on which the reUgion
he professes is founded. For the Christian it was the
following of the Cross.
But now, when a man stands out thus naked and
alone to confess his beUef in a reUgious system, how
shall he give account to himself and to others of the
beUef that is in him? It must rest upon something.

THE NATURE OF BELIEF

15

It is never quite enough that he repeat the formula:
"I beUeve." It cannot long satisfy even himself; for
it Ues in the very nature of a beUef of conviction that
it shaU have some means of accounting for itself. That
is what constitutes the difference between such beUef
and the merely accepted forms of tribal worship. True,
the martyr of the Cross might go steadily to his death
for the mere glory of "The Name." It was his busi
ness, not to define, but to suffer. But meanwhile,
wherever the Christian message had gone, other men
were elaborating its defence, gi^ving the grounds of their
adherence to it, and thus preparing the way for thou
sands more who might be won by their appeal. That
is the Christian "Apology," the definition of what
Christians in the growing period of the Church's Ufe
were wQling to stand by and the declaration of the
bases on which that willingness rested. It is a curious
Uterature, singularly mingled of wide learning, glowing
faith in the highest spiritual truth, childish creduUty,
fanatical enthusiasm, and plain common sense. The
grounds upon which the writers based their faith are
manifold in their variety, but they may readily be re
duced to two. The appeal is made either to the sup
port of authority or to the witness of the "Spirit." As
a rule the two are hopelessly entangled in the argu
ment, but we can generally separate them sufficiently

l6 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
to make it clear to ourselves that the minds of men
were working along these two lines.
Even from the very beginning this mingUng of the
two processes is clearly to be seen. The teaching of
Jesus was accepted, not on its merits alone. It was true,
because in Jesus men saw the fulfilment of Jewish
prophecy, or because it was accompanied by miracu
lous occurrences, or because it promised reUef from the
miseries of Ufe. The test of its real power came when
men began to see that Jewish prophecy was not being
fulfiUed, that the working of natural law was not per
manently to be interfered with, and that Ufe had as
many miseries as ever. Then it became e-vident that
back of aU these superficial motives there lay and had
lain from the beginning a profound appeal to that other
witness for which we have no other name than the
-witness of the Spirit. So it has been ever since. As
soon as there was an accepted record of the sayings of
Jesus, these were pointed to as authority. Even earlier
perhaps there were writings of his first followers, that
served the same purpose of appeal. Then these were
repeated and commented upon, and each generation of
comment added so much to the volume of e-vidence that
could be quoted in support of the faith. Then there
grew along -with this body of written authority an
organization of men, at first for the guidance and pro-

THE NATURE OF BELIEF 17
tection of the scattered and doubtful foUowers of the
Master, but soon also for their government. The inter
pretation of the written and oral tradition passed into
the hands of this organization, and when this had been
done there was henceforth a -visible and tangible human
authority to which appeal might be taken on every
doubtful point.
That is in a word the history of the growth within
Christianity of the principle of authority in beUef. It
was a process only too fataUy easy to justify. It was
supported, honestly and eagerly, by aU that element in
the Christian society which valued above aU else order
and regularity. "Canonicity" became a word of su
preme importance. Canons of belief, canons of dis
cipline, canons of worship, were pUed up one upon an
other into a portentous system, the Umits of which no
man could define or foresee. Out of the wide-open
democracy of the earUest Church there was developed
the oUgarchy of the episcopate and then, in the Roman
world, the monarchy of the Papacy, as the most con
crete expression of the principle of authority. There
was no point of doctrine or of organization upon which
an absolute decision could not be reached through an
appeal to the supreme disposer of aU the interests of
Christianity. The Great Release of the Protestant Reformation did

1 8 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
not, on its formal side, produce any immediate or de
cided change. The appeal to authority was necessary
to give countenance to the Reformers as being men of
caution and prudence rather than men of turmoU and
rebeUion. The only immediate difference was that they
substituted for the authority of a human ruler the
authority of an unchanging book. It seemed as if the
minds of men were to be bound again in a slavery as
much worse than the former as the authority was more
rigid. So far as the formal attitude of the reformed
churches went, there was certainly Uttle cause for con
gratulation. But then came out what had always been
latent in the principle of Christianity itself. Deep
under aU the bitter conflicts of the two confessions as
to the merits of their respective authorities there ran
now an ever-widening and strengthening current of
thought independent of them both. More and more
men began to caU upon the silent witness of the "Spirit"
as the true basis of reUgious faith. And, as they sought
to work themselves out into clearness along this road,
they found, looking back, that they were only the
latest prophets in a series imbroken from the beginning.
The authorities had tried in vain to quench the Spirit.
Their seductions and their terrors alike had faUed to
repress the in-vincible instinct of the human soul to seek
its deepest satisfactions in its own way.

THE NATURE OF BELIEF

19

Thus the attitude of Unitarians toward the whole sub
ject of beUef is historically prepared for. They confess
themselves in the feUowship of those who in aU ages
have tried to maintain the rights of the Spirit as
against the claims of authority, no matter by what
name this may have been called. They realize per
fectly how appealing the claim of authority is, how it
helps to solve aU doubts, reconcUe aU oppositions, and
leave the indi-vidual free to devote himself to the prac
tical sides of reUgion without troubling himself about
the real bases of his faith. They see aU this, but it
appears to them to be a subtle form of temptation to
inteUectual and spiritual sloth. Those who yield to it
seem to them to be seeking the lower kinds of satis
faction, to be evading a responsibUity that is laid upon
them by the possession of an intellectual and spiritual
nature of their o-wn, a nature so emphatically their own
that they cannot entrust its highest satisfactions to
the care of any one else. This is what they mean by
the sanctions of the Spirit. This word "Spirit" is a
large word, comprehending so much that it may readily
be misunderstood as expressing Uttle or nothing. It is
open to the charge of vagueness, and it is therefore in
cumbent upon those who use it to make it as definite
as they can.
The more general definition of the Spirit, as we are

20 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
now using the word, has already been given. It is the
opposite of authority. It is that sUent witness to the
truth whereby we become certain of things that we can
not otherwise prove. We are, indeed, helped and com
forted if we can find that others are impressed by these
same truths. EspeciaUy if we can find ourselves sup
ported by a long series of simUar experiences, we are so
much the more confident that the -witness we are bound
to beUeve is not a false witness and that we ourselves
are not abnormal in our ways of reaching truth. But,
if such support fails us, if we have to stand alone in our
o-wn day and can find no feUowship in the past, stUl we
are none the less bound. We may re-vise our own
thought as often and as carefully as we wiU. We
may humble ourselves as much as we can before the
teaching of those who ought to be better and wiser
than we ; but, after aU, if it comes to standing alone -with
the witness of the Spirit on our side, we dare not shel
ter ourselves behind the -wisdom or the -virtue of all the
ages. The armor of our honest thought must suffice for
us against aU temptations to the comforts of conform
ity. This independence of aU formal authority is thus
the Unitarian's first demand as he approaches the
subject of reUgious belief.
The second is that religious truth shall not conflict
with any other, or with aU other forms of truth. He

THE NATURE OF BELIEF 21
does not mean by this that it shaU be subject to the
same kmd of tests. He is quite aware that it cannot
be demonstrated Uke a proposition in mathematics. It
cannot be iUustrated by experiment or observation like
an aUeged fact of natural science. It cannot be proved
by syUogisms Uke a thesis in formal logic. It cannot be
estabUshed by human -witness like an event in history
or a document in law. The -witness of the Spirit is
something different from aU these. And yet we have a
right to demand that it shaU not contradict any one or
all of them. The Unitarian could not accept a reUgious
statement which would imply that two and two made
five, or that the same matter could be in two places at
the same time. He cannot beUeve that from sound
premises there can foUow a false conclusion, nor would
he accept a statement of fact -within the range of human
competency if it were contradicted by credible human
evidence. To do any of these things would be to act
against his fundamental conviction of the unity of all
truth. As he approaches any given proposition in
religion he tests it by its agreement with this basic law.
If it violates this, then, no matter how strongly it may
appeal to his sentiment, he must reject or modify it. -^
Another demand that the Unitarian makes upon be
lief is that it shall come to him with an imperative
command resulting from the nature of the beUef itself.

22 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
In other words, he reacts -with a certain horror from
every suggestion of "the wUl to beUeve." He recog
nizes, indeed, a certain attitude of mind or of temper
which might be caUed "the wUl not to beUeve anything,"
and he is quite willing to condemn this attitude as sub
versive of aU inteUigent approach to truth. To beUeve
nothing is as vacant as to beUeve everything. In neither
of these ways can the self-respecting mind arrive at
any conclusions worth having. The writer recalls hear
ing a highly educated man declare that he could see no
reason whatever why he should have any opinions on
the current subjects of religious discussion. Such
matters were well enough for theologians, whose special
business they were, but for him they were matters of
entire indifference. This man, scholar, head of a family,
good citizen, no mean artist, could not see that reUgious
con-victions, no matter how reasonable they might be,
had any bearing whatever upon the course of his daily
life and duty. In him the wUl not to beUeve could not
have any immediately dangerous consequences, but in a
Ufe less firmly planted in practical responsibUities it
may readUy lead to the grossest extravagance.
That is not the Unitarian's attitude. On the con
trary, he has the most eager wiU to be a beUever. To
go back to our first use of the word, he "beUeves" in
beUef. Without it men seem to him to be drifting on a

THE NATURE OF BELIEF 23
sea of careless impulses, carrying them no whither,
stranding them, now on this shaUow, now on that, until
their Uves are wrecked in hopeless confusion. But —
and here is the whole point of the Unitarian position —
when it comes to specific beUefs, the beUef in a certain
definite proposition, then he cannot for a moment admit
the right of the wUl to have anything to say in the
matter. To say that one beUeves a thing because one
wishes to beUeve it seems to him to be mere fooUsh-
ness. It is to him a denial of everything that makes
up the idea of beUef . Such an attitude of the mind —
if it can be caUed mind — he regards as the very nega
tion of inteUigence. On this basis the beUefs of the
world would have no other foundation than the shift
ing volitions of those who profess them. BeUef would
be a mere matter of taste or whim: I like a thing;
therefore I believe it. True it undoubtedly is that
what passes for beUef is only too often so entangled
-with our -wishes and our fancies that its real nature is
concealed even from ourselves. The mere wish to
agree with those we esteem modifies our expressions of
belief, often to such a degree that we let ourselves be
deceived as to what we are reaUy beUeving. It is quite
possible for us to go on declaring our beUefs in language
that only serves to hide the actual currents of our
thought. We use our -wiUs consciously to repress un-

24

UNITARIAN THOUGHT

comfortable stirrings of our inteUectual or higher spirit
ual nature lest these may become so strong as to inter
fere -with the calm current of our conformity. We lull
ourselves into inaction by declaring that in these matters
certainty is impossible and that we may as weU hold
the popular errors as invent others of our own.
There can be no doubt that in all these ways the
wUl to beUeve is bound to affect us more or less ; but
this cannot alter the essential foUy of the process. It
is a process of evasion and denial. It cannot lead to
constructive results. It is made up of compromises and
half-waynesses. It diverts attention from the actual,
positive needs of the indi-vidual to the minor considera
tions of expediency or beauty or order or the seductive
-charm of agreement with the multitude. There can be
no more mischievous perversion of all that makes belief
worth having than this persistent subjecti-vity of ap
proach to it. If it is folly in him who practises it, it
is something worse in him who teaches it. The Uni
tarian should be the last to allow his beliefs to be resolved
into a mere matter of fancies and habits. They are not
things that can be disposed of in any such summary
way. They are the thing most precious to him of all
his ideal possessions, and he must be prepared to defend
them by some argument better than his own preference
or the automatic action of his mind.

THE NATURE OF BELIEF 2$
But, if he may not appeal to authority, if he may not
select his beUefs according to his tastes, where shall the
Unitarian find the sanctions that wiU satisfy him?
Unitarianism is often charged with being mere cold
intellectuaUsm, as if it beUeved that religious truth
rested wholly upon inteUectual satisfactions. This
charge it distinctly denies. None knows better than
the Unitarian that the mind alone is incapable of work
ing itself out to conclusions that deserve the name of
reUgious. All that he demands is that his intellect,
because it is a part of the divine gift to man, shaU not
be degraded and insulted by being asked to accept
things that are contrary to its normal processes. In his
belief his intellect must have its rights, and so long as
this is denied him, he cannot dignify propositions -with
the name of beliefs. They may be sentiments, impulses,
feelings, fancies, — what you please, only not beUefs.
The word he Ukes best in this connection is reason, and
by reason he means, not any definable process of reason
ing, not dialectics, biit that just balancing of aU con
siderations which results in "reasonableness." This is
what reason — the ratio of the schools — has always
meant, when it was not perverted to the uses of some
hair-spUtting faction. It means that enUghtenment of
the human soul which frees it from the shadows of aU
perversions and distortions, which Ufts it up above the

26 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
reach of aU lower motives into the clearer air of a calm
certainty that nothing can confuse or diminish.
In this higher reason, the intellect has indeed its
part, but it is not the whole of it. ReUgion is primarUy
a thing of the emotions, and these have their seat, not
in that part of man we caU the inteUect, but in that
stUl vaguer region we call the soul. Precisely where
the line is to be drawn between these two we do not
know. The mind is undoubtedly influenced in its con
clusions by the working of our emotional nature. Our
emotions partake also of the intellectual within us.
Without its guiding and controUing force, the emotions
would run riot, conflicting with each other in a chaos
of misrule. Without them the reasoning powers would
work themselves out to sterile conclusions. If a re
Ugious proposition commends itself to but one of these
sides of our perceptive capacity, it remains barren, un
related to all the rest of us, a something separate from
that sum total of our qualities we caU ourself. Such
has not infrequently been the apparent solution of the
reUgious problem. Men have fancied they were ele
vating reUgion when they set it thus outside their real
every-day self. They felt this because of a deep-seated
distrust of themselves as unworthy beings — vessels of
wrath, or what not, so that reUgion came to seem a
thing foreign to their essential humanity.

THE NATURE OF BELIEF 27
Now here the Unitarian feels himself to be on ground
that is quite his o-wn. He does not beUeve himself to
be an altogether unworthy factor in the good world of
God, and therefore he is not afraid to trust himself to
the leadings of his own best thought and feeling. When ^
he says he beUeves a thing, he means that this thing
appeals to aU that is best in the whole man that he is.
The highest sanction he can find for his beUefs is in the
inner witness of his o-wn enUghtened reason and his own
disciplined emotion. Through these, and through these
alone, he hears that con-vincing voice which he cannot
otherwise define except as the voice of the spirit of all
truth. That in more precise definition is the witness of
the Spirit, which we have been setting over against the
e-vidence of authority and the power of tradition. It
means to the Unitarian the highest and the most sacred
of aU sanctions. By it he tries and measures all au
thorities and aU traditions. Whenever, for example, the
Church, most ancient and reverend of authorities, the
depositary of the most sacred and most certain of tradi
tions, asks him to accept this or that proposition as true,
he cannot do otherwise than submit it to the test of its
agreement -with this supreme judgment of the Spirit
coming to him through the agency of his o-wn highest
powers of mind and heart and soul. He uses these
words — mind, heart, soul — because they are the cur-

28 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
rent coin of discussion in these subjects, but all he means
by them is that taken together they represent himself.
In the last resort, he must rely upon his own powers of
spiritual perception to interpret to him the ways of God
with men. If they cannot do it, then nothing can do it.
What comes to him in this way as true, is true to him,
and beyond this he cannot go. It is not his concern
whether it be true to some one else ; for that he is not
responsible. Neither is he answerable for the absolute
truth as it exists "in the mind of God." All he can do
as an honest man is to examine with aU seriousness his
own thought and feeUng, get aU the Ught upon it he can
from every worthy source, and then, in aU humiUty,
confess what he finds there as for the time being his
beUef. These are the premises from which the Unitarian
goes on to make clear to himself his thought upon
the several topics which make up the sum of Christian
faith. In so far as these premises are sound, the con
clusions set forth in the foUowing chapters -wiU have
weight; in so far as they are weak, those conclusions
wiU be open to a just criticism.

CHAPTER II
MIRACLE
And so no more our hearts shall plead
For miracle and sign;
Thy order and thy faithfulness
Are all in all divine. — /. W. Chadwick.
There are some words in the traditional language of
theology for which Unitarians have an affectionate re
gard. They would be glad to retain them as aids to
their own thought, and they do retain them, stripping
away from them, so far as they can, the false and dis
torted notions that have become attached to them, and
gi-ving to them larger and truer meanings in harmony
-with their o-wn principles of interpretation. Such words
are, for example "revelation" and "inspiration," with
which we deal in another chapter. These are words
permitting various interpretations, but conveying, no
matter under what distortion, always a similar idea.
Unitarians insist, indeed, upon such definitions of these
words as give to them, in their opinion, the deepest
signfficance ; but they recognize the value and the histor
ical importance of the definitions opposed to their own.
The word "miracle" is not such a word. It has,
29

30 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
historicaUy and actuaUy, but one rational meaning. In
that meaning it has always been used for the purposes
of Christian argument, and the moment we depart from
this usage by ever so slight a shade we are in another
world of thought. Yet there is hardly a word in the
vocabulary of Christian speculation -with which such
tricks of interpretation have been played as with this.
In their desire to hold fast the something good that
might be hidden under it, men have tried consciously
to pack meanings into the word "miracle," that were
never dreamed of by the authorities on whom they
have imagined themselves to be resting. It is there
fore especiaUy important for the Unitarian to set him
self right on this point at an early stage. As he looks
over the history of the thought of Christians about the
miraculous, he finds two aspects of it that have per
sistently kept their place. First, he finds that Chris
tians, like the men of other reUgions from whom they
derived their ideas, were always reluctant to accept the
notion of a universe of law and order in which the Uves
of men were to be included. If there were any such
region at aU, where law could be thought of as prevaU
ing, it was the world of "nature" conceived as some
thing outside of and beyond human experience. Man
must be kept independent of such restraints. Wherever
he came into contact with that other world of law,

MIRACLE

31

some kind of exemption must be his pecuUar pri-vilege.
To make him subject to any fixed system of adminis
tering the universe seemed to be an infringement upon
the Uberty which was his birthright. That is one of
the presuppositions of the miraculous : the necessity of
keeping man free from any inevitable law.
The second is that di-vine power, existing outside the
world of nature and man, reserved to itself the right of
arbitrary interference in the ordinary working of "natu
ral" law, and this for some purpose connected with the
spiritual Ufe of man. God acted upon man's powers
of apprehending divine things through occasional and
direct manifestation of himself in dramatic form. Such
interference was conceived of as proof of the special
di-vine nature of the idea or the lesson with which it
was associated — a certfficate, so to speak, that here
was indeed a di-vine communication to man. Upon
these two ideas — the possibiUty of a special di-vine in
terruption in the ordinary course of a universe separate
from the God who rules it, and the necessity of such
occasional interruption in order to give a stamp of
authenticity to alleged revelations of God to man — -rests
the whole vast structure of Christian thought and ex
perience -with regard to the miraculous. First, the
possibiUty of miracle, and then its necessity, as a proof
of divine revelation.

32 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
The definition of miracle has already been impUed in
the statement just made. Miracle is the interruption
of the ordinary process by which the universe of nature
and of man is governed. Such interruption occurs
through the beneficent wiU of God at such crises in
human affairs as may seem to him best suited to im
press upon men some needed lesson of faith or morals.
That, and no other, is the definition of miracle which
makes any reasonable discussion of it possible. It is
the definition upon which the Church has always acted.
By it the whole notion of the miraculous must stand or
faU. It is true that from the beginning of the influence
of modern philosophy upon reUgious thought innumer
able attempts have been made to modify this definition,
so as to bring it into harmony -with the general tenden
cies of the modern "scientific" world. It is a Uttle
remarkable that the clearest and most positive declara
tion against both aspects of the miraculous should have
come at the very beginning of the discussion. Spinoza
(d. 1677) laid do-wn, -with a clearness that admitted of
no misunderstanding, two counter-propositions : (i) there
is no such thing as miracle. (2) If there were, it would
prove nothing as to the value of reUgious truths. Natu
raUy such distinct utterance was far too "advanced"
for Spinoza's day, and in the reaction against it various
halfway de-vices were resorted to. It was said, for

MIRACLE 33
example, that the definition of miracle as here laid down
was insufficient. Miracle was not an interference with
the law, but only -with the law as our imperfect under
standing of it shows it to us. No sane man would pre
tend that we reaUy know the laws of nature and of Ufe
with any such thoroughness that we can be positively
sure when an infringement of them takes place. All
we know is that in this vessel there is, so far as we can
perceive at this moment, water, and in the same vessel
there is at the next moment, so far as we can perceive,
and without the intervention of any natural process,
wine. How this change occurred we do not know.
There may be a law beyond the reach of our human
observation, yet quite as regular as any we can observe,
in accordance with which this phenomenon took place.
In the absence of aU power to watch the working of
such a law we are not justified in saying it does not
exist. We ought therefore to extend our definition of
miracle and say: "Miracle is an apparent but not an
actual -violation of natural law, occurring by a direct
action of the divine -wiU and designed to convey some
needed message to mankind."
Another method was to assert that in the reports of
miracles we have accounts of events that did not even
involve the supposition of occult natural laws, but only
false explanations of well-known facts of nature. When,

34 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
for example, we hear of a miraculous opening of the Red
Sea to let the IsraeUtes go over dry shod, this was only
the report of a perfectly possible occurrence. Under
certain conditions of wind and tide, a ford, known to the
inhabitants in the neighborhood, might have become
passable, and this might weU have been looked upon by
the devout IsraeUtes as a special act of di-vine Pro-vi-
dence and magnified by later times into the detaUed
narrative of the Book of the Exodus. Several conclu
sions might be dra-wn from this method of approach.
One might examine carefully all alleged miracles and
reject all those which, like the parting of the Red Sea,
can be explained on the ground of observable fact.
But what, then, of the rest ? Either they must be re
tained as miraculous untU we discover (or invent) a
"rational" explanation or they too must be rejected on
the assumption that there must be a rational explana
tion of them, though for the present it eludes our in
quiry. In either case it is obvious that this so-caUed
rationalizing process in reality does away with the idea
of the miraculous without putting in place of it any
sound and consistent doctrine of the di-vine method in
dealing with man. It has done its share in making
people accustomed to the idea of criticism of all miracu
lous narrations; but as a systematic method of ap
proach to the real question of the possibiUty and the

MIRACLE 35
value of miracle it is one of the least fruitful that can
be imagined. In so far as it is a critical method at all
it is a criticism of the reports of miracle, not of the fact
of miracle itself. The impUcation is that a better re
porter might have given us a higher degree of confidence
in the reaUty of the thing reported. That is an obvious
evasion of the point reaUy at issue.
Again, it has been said that the true way to reach
satisfaction on this whole matter is to distinguish with
the utmost care between what may be regarded as good
miracles on the one hand and bad miracles on the other.
Good miracles are such as are properly attested by
credible -witnesses, are performed without special ap
paratus of any kind, and are plainly designed for some
lofty spiritual purpose. Bad miracles are such as lack
sufficient human evidence, involve a " professional "
equipment, or are performed with an unworthy or trifling
object. It becomes, therefore, the ob-vious duty of
every one to con-vince himself upon these points. In
every case of an alleged miracle, we are bound first to
examine the e-vidence as to the occurrence of something
apparently out of the common course of human experi
ence. Then we must inquire whether this occurrence
was perhaps produced by any of the famiUar de-vices of
magic, or by whatever other name we may choose to
caU the professional occultism which has played its part

36 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
in the development of aU peoples. And then we must
con-vince ourselves that the purpose for which the al
leged miracle was performed was one worthy of the
special acti-vity of the di-vine wUl.
It is ob-vious that in foUowing out these processes of
inquiry men have taken a step toward a truly rational
comprehension of the whole subject. Their object has
generaUy been to reduce as far as possible the number
of authentic miracles. The inspiring motive of such
critical study has been to save, if possible, the few miracles
of the New Testament from the destruction that seemed
ine-vitable if they were to be put in the same category
with aU the other alleged miraculous occurrences of aU
peoples and of all times. So far this kind of effort is
worthy of aU praise. Even to reduce the scope of the
miracle-loving instinct of mankind is a service to the
cause of a reasonable faith. But it is obvious also that
when all possible criticism has been appUed along these
Unes, the fact of miracle in itself stiU remains unques
tioned and we are no nearer a real solution of the prob
lem than before. It must be noticed also that in carry
ing out the requirements of this analytical method we
are continually applying human standards to a matter
which is by its very definition beyond the reach of hu
man powers. We ask for credible human -witness to a
process which no human eye can follow and no human

MIRACLE

37

mind can grasp. We try to draw a line between profes
sional cleverness and "inspired" commission, when such
a line, if drawn at aU, must be drawn by a power greater
than any that is at our disposal. We are expected to
distinguish between worthy and trifling purposes — as
if we held the clue to the plan of God in dealing with
the universe. And after aU these impossible demands
have been met, there still remains the voluminous record
of duly attested miracles as far removed as ever from
our capacity to understand or to profit by them.
Then, once more, there is the figurative method of
dealing -with miracle. Men have pleased themselves
with saying : The real marvel of the universe is not to
be found in interruptions of law and order, but in the
law and order itself. In the stately march of the
worlds about us and their suggestion of greater worlds
beyond, in the orderly succession of the seasons, in the
blessed change of day and night, in the silent processes
of seed-time and harvest, in the shaping of man to
his birth, in the slow unfolding of his powers and in
the wonder of his accompUshment — here, we are told,
is the true miracle. Not until we can explain how the
seed becomes the tree have we any occasion to trouble
ourselves with the Uttle puzzles about water being
made -wine and sick men being healed and dead men
being brought back to Ufe. If men must be encouraged

38 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
to develop their instinct for the marveUous, let them
dweU upon the reaUy marvellous things, not upon the
fantastic inventions of priests and madmen. It is clear
that when men have gone as far as this in trying to
make the word "miracle" acceptable to a doubting
world, there is not much left of the idea with which
they started. A figurative miracle is no miracle at all.
It is only the regular process of universal harmony
presented in its most strUdng aspects. It has nothing
in common with a miracle in the true definition of the
word except its appeal to the dramatic instinct of man
kind. The two are as far removed from each other as
a serious drama of real life and the -wUdest melodrama.
Nothing remains but the word.
We are thus led by several stages to the Unitarian
thought of the miraculous. Here, as everjrwhere else,
the Unitarian is possessed by the ideas of law, order, and
harmony. He refuses to follow any of the processes
we have just outlined, in order to save a word which is
to him fuU of the most dangerous suggestions. His
reasons for this attitude are somewhat as follows. In
the first place, to his mind aU miracles must stand or
faU together. There can be no such thing as great
miracles and smaU, good miracles and bad, whole
miracles and partial ones, true miracles and false. He
has no more interest in the miracles of the New Testa-

MIRACLE

39

ment than in those of the Old or in those of all the
period since until the present moment — not to men
tion those by which aU the non-Christian reUgions of
the past and the present have maintained and stiU
maintain their hold upon the ignorance and creduUty
of their foUowers, He recognizes, of course, an infinite
variety in the detaUs of presentation, from the simple
narratives of wonder-working in the New Testament
and elsewhere to the gross brutaUties of savage fetich
ism. He is quite able to discern aU grades of motive,
from the lofty patriotic purpose of ancient Hebrew
miracle and the noble moral aim of the New Testament
to the -vulgar greed of the mediaeval priesthood and the
wild personal soUcitations of primitive passion in less
developed cults. He sees aU this and gives to it its
due weight; but he -wUl not aUow himself to be led
by these detaUs away from the one all-important fact,
that, no matter under what disguises, the miraculous
element remains always and everywhere the same. If
divine power is to be thought of as working by spas
modic and arbitrary interruptions of natural law at all,
such interruptions must be possible at any place, at any
time, and among any people. His concern is, therefore,
with the principle of the miraculous and with this alone.
If he could admit the possibUity of miracle at aU, he
would be ready to admit it everywhere.

40 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
Unitarians, then, meet the whole proposition of the
miraculous -with a general denial. There is no such
thing as miracle. They reject aU the methods we have
enumerated for making the notion of miracle accept
able to the rational mind- On many points of theology
shades and compromises may be pardoned; on this never.
They wiU not be misled by any subtleties of speculation
or of logic into any halfway settlement of this problem.
They recur once again to their fixed starting-point of
the unity of the plan by which the universe, includ
ing man, is governed, and they reject miracle because it
seems to them to be the negation of this great positive
truth. They go back to their fundamental notion of
man's native capacity to receive the highest spiritual
truths, and reject miracle because it seems to them to
be absolutely at variance with the existence of that
capacity. If men cannot comprehend spiritual things
unless they are enforced by the startling accompaniments
of -violated law, then men are very different from what
the Unitarian beUeves them to be.
It is easy, of course, to find attractive analogies in
support of the belief in miracle. ChUdren, it is said,
must be led into the ways of duty by appealing to their
sense of wonder. Dramatic episodes -wiU do for them
what no amount of insistence upon law would ever
accomphsh. Criminals may be influenced by persuad-

MIRACLE 41
ing them of the terrors that await the e-vil-doer. They
know the law weU enough, but its very sameness and
rigidity repel them, while the dread of something in
calculable and mysterious appeals to them with all the
attraction of a game of chance. The idle and indifferent
may' be waked out of their physical or mental sloth by
a sense of some pecuUar and specific consequence better
than by any insistence upon unvarying law. And if
these things are so in the deaUng of human authority
with those for whom it is responsible, shaU we not sup
pose that the di-vine governance of the universe wUl take
a simUar attitude toward the sinful world of men?
That is pretty, but it is not relevant. The Unitarian re
fuses to beUeve that the divine method is adjusted to the
needs of the lame and the lazy among men. Rather, he
beUeves that, like the wisest human pedagogy, the di-vine
teaching comes to us most forcibly and most permanently
when it appeals to the highest in us and leaves the low
est to correct itseff. He remembers the word of the great
Teacher that it is a wicked and adulterous generation that
seeks after signs. He feels that if there was anything in
the teaching of Jesus clearer than all else, it was this con
stant appeal to the highest and the refusal to rely upon
the sense of the marvellous to impress his hearers. That
Jesus believed, as every one in his day and from his
day untU recent times beUeved, in the possibiUty of

42 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
miracle there can be no doubt. He probably beUeved,
if he thought of it at all, that the earth was flat and
that the sun moved about it; but we do not on that
accoimt accept these discarded notions of natural phe
nomena. He beUeved in miracle; but in this matter
as in others he rose above the vulgar conceptions of
his day and of many succeeding days. He did not base
his appeal to men upon the performance of miraculous
works. It is altogether probable that he beUeved him
self gifted -with supernatural powers. Like aU great
leaders of men, he had his contradictory sides. He
utUized the material he foimd to his hand and sought
to impress his spiritual mission upon his community in
ways that would be acceptable to it. The Unitarian
can no more accept the so-caUed miracles of Jesus than
he can those of other aUeged wonder-workers ; but he
is quite ready to beUeve that Jesus was gifted with the
power of making a credulous people believe that he was
in a highly specific sense the direct agent of God. It
requires, alas ! but Uttle real spiritual endo-wment to
do that, as the history of human credulity abundantly
proves, and that is one of the strongest reasons why the
Unitarian, devoted foUower of Jesus that he is, declines
to lay any emphasis upon this side of his acti-vity. It
seems to him not a ser-vice of honor but rather of dis
honor to claim authority for the word of Jesus on the

MIRACLE 43
basis of so cheap and -vulgar an appeal as this. What
rational connection of ideas is there, he asks himself,
between the sublime spiritual conceptions of the Sermon
on the Moimt and the multiplication of a loaf of bread
by one hundred ? — or between the imperative social
doctrine of the sanctity of marriage and the turning of
a jar of water into a jar of -wine ? — or between the su
preme declaration "God is spirit" and the power to
discern that the woman by the well had had five hus
bands? "There is no connection," the Unitarian an
swers. The truth of these great spiritual and moral
proclamations is attested by the response they meet in
the hearts of men who are capable of receiving them
and of interpreting them to their fellows. It makes not
the sUghtest difference whether they are accompanied
by dramatic appeals to the lower instinct of wonder or
not. If they are true in themselves they are true — if
not, no marvels can make them so.
To the Unitarian it seems a degradation of aU that
is highest and best in Christianity to confuse it with
this other world of occult manffestation. Indeed, the
Church itself has always felt this danger and has tried
from time to time to set Umits to the working of the
miraculous, as it has tried in every way to Umit the
operation of forces dangerous to its control. It has
sought to define the conditions of miracle, whUe utiliz-

44 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
ing the principle of it to the fuUest extent. For example,
the Church has combated from the start what it de
scribes as "magic," i.e. the summoning of occult forces
to aid human action in imworthy ways. The Unitarian
sees, however, in magic only another side of miracle —
or, to put it the other way, he sees in miracle only
magic appUed by worthy people to seemingly worthy
ends. There is a very good analogy here in the com
parison one is compeUed to make in these days between
the alleged "absent treatment" of disease by specially
gifted persons and the manifestations of witchcraft. In
the one case a person is affected by another person to
his advantage ; in the other case to his injury. It re
quires Uttle thought to see that the delusions of the
one process are in no essential respect different from
those of the other. In each case there is a certain
slight foimdation of psychological fact, just enough
upon which to bujld up a fictitious system of beUefs
and usages harmful aUke to those who practise them
and those who are practised upon. So, and not other-
-wise, is it with the distinction between miracle and
magic. In the one case there is an aUeged compact of
humanity -with powers of darkness to do the works of
darkness, to bring diseases upon people, to rouse the
passions of love or of revenge, to influence the course of
justice, to bring success in business at another's cost.

MIRACLE 45
In the other case there is an alleged special relation
between certain men and God, whereby they are made
mediums of the divine -will to accompUsh good results,
to certify to the truth of doctrines, to carry con-viction
of sin, to reconcile enemies, to heal disease. In both
cases there is a certain sUght psychological basis. The
belief in the magical and in the miraculous does produce
some results, just as undoubtedly the belief in the in
fluence of the changing moon upon the state of the
weather produces, in the minds of those who have it,
results absolutely independent of the truth or falsehood
of the belief itself. The beUef of the ignorant hospital
patient in the immediate efficacy of the cUnical ther
mometer is as certainly an influence for good as the
therapeutic value of the process itself is certainly nil.
We have constantly to distinguish between the beUef
in a thing and the reaUty of the thing itself.
The Church has done well to restrict as far as possible
the formal Umits -within which this beUef in special inter
positions of the di-vine wiU in human affairs might safely
move. It was worth whUe to diminish to the utmost
the abuse of human credulity which was the stock in
trade of aU the professors of magic. But what the Uni
tarian insists upon is that the Church has always been
actuated by the desire to control a monopoly in supply
ing an alleged demand of fraU humanity rather than by

46 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
a single purpose to know and to teach what is true.
Men demand some form of satisfaction for the craving
after the marveUous, and the Church will undertake
to meet this -with a supply suited to the best interests
of mankind. What a world this would be, if we were
to believe nothing we cannot see, love nothing we can
not touch, fear nothing we cannot feel ! Since there is
so much we cannot understand, why not accept the
pleasant tales the Church has preserved for us, in the
spirit of chUdren Ustening to fairy tales by the eerie
Ught of the evening fire — half belie-ving, half doubting,
knowing they are venturing into a world of uncanny
dreads and fictions, yet feeUng the subtle relation of
these to everyday experience?
The Unitarian feels the charm of all this. If he did
not he would not be able to understand so clearly
why he must guard himself against it. If it were true
that the Church has regarded the miraculous element
merely as the poetic decoration of religious faith, — a
something akin to fairy tale or natural legend, — it would
not be worth his whUe to trouble himself about the matter
at aU. The Church, from the beginning untU now, bases
its claim to the allegiance of men upon the sanction of
miracles. Reduce the volume of the miraculous as it
may, define and redefine as it -wUl the Umits within
which it may work, the fact remains that no important

MIRACLE 47
member of the Christian Church to-day could venture to
banish the miraculous from its creeds. The Church be
gins the history of its founder -with the miracle of a -vir
gin birth and ends it -with the miracle of a physical
resurrection from the dead. Some of its members would
keep these and reject all others ; but the immense majority
cUng to the miracles of the New Testament and stop there
— as if divine power were, so to speak, exhausted by the
effort of starting a new reUgion ! Others again, with
more consistency, hold fast to the immense volume
of mediaeval and modern miracle — ¦ fitting it in some
how with cheerful ingenuity into the requirements of the
modem "scientific" world and undismayed by all revela
tions of fraud or error.
With these last the Unitarian feels a certain sympathy.
If he aims to be consistent in essentials, so do they. He
tries to be true to the principle of authority which he
finds within himself — to that "enUghtened conscience"
we have sought elsewhere to define. They are true to
the principle of authority which they find in an institu
tion guaranteed by its o-wn assertions of a divine com
mission as a bank might guarantee its deposits by its
own notes of hand. If he were not a Unitarian he
would certainly join -with those of his feUow-Christians
who know best what they beUeve and are best able to
give account of it. He is a Unitarian largely because

48 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
he cannot enter at all into that world of occultism in
which they, more than any other Christians, Uve and
have their inteUectual being. It would aU seem to him
grotesque were it not inwrought -with ideas so infinitely
serious. The teaching of the Church is that unless these
miracles are true, the world of mankind is lost. With
out the miracle of the virgin birth there could be no
reconciUation between God and man such as is needed
to save man from perpetual opposition to the -wiU of
God. Without the miracle of the resurrection of the
man Jesus we could have no assurance as to the con
tinuance of our indi-vidual existence beyond this earthly
Ufe. Without the constantly repeated miracle of the
Mass the soul of man could not be kept in its right
relation to the infinite source of all spiritual certainty.
The Roman CathoUc declares these tilings -with clear
ness and consistency. The orthodox Protestant coquets
with them in every conceivable variation of confusion
and half-meaning. The Unitarian clears himself of the
whole entanglement by the one single, confident dec
laration: "There is no miracle, because the God in
whom I beUeve needs no such de-vices as this to make
himself a place in the heart of man." It is inconceiv
able to him that any such dramatic demonstrations
should add one particle to the force of that inner con
sciousness which is to him the sole and sufficient -wit-

MIRACLE

49

ness to the di-vine governance of the universe in which
he is a part.
The Unitarian does not trouble himself to examine
into the credibiUty of the e-vidence for aUeged miracu
lous events. To him the very notion of human evi
dence for a di-vine manifestation is preposterous. How
can I, a mere human being, judge whether a given
phenomenon is reaUy miraculous or not? Certainly
the witness of other human beings, all as incapable as
myself, can be worth nothing to me. Though a thou
sand persons should declare that they had seen a miracle,
this would mean nothing, except that they had seen
something they could not account for. That is an ex
perience we aU have, but we do not on that account
caU such experiences miraculous. We accept human
testimony on matters about which human e-vidence is
possible, and on these only. When we pass beyond
these we enter into a region where we have no sanction
except faith alone. Now the Unitarian beUeves that
faith concerns itself -with spiritual matters, whereas
miracle has to do with physical phenomena, and physical
phenomena can be proved only by physical means.
Take, for example, the chief miracles of the Church
tradition, the -virgin birth and the resurrection of the
body. These are physical facts or they are nothing.
We may spiritualize them as we Uke, but the value of

50 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
aU this spiritualizing process rests upon the physical
fact. If there was no -virgin birth in fact, then all the
superstructure of theology and philosophy built upon it
falls to pieces. It would be idle to evolve an abstract
theory of the necessity of an individual incarnation of
deity through a -virgin birth unless there were an actual
historical fact to correspond to this. To that physical
fact, therefore, we need human testimony, and such
testimony is entirely lacking. To the fact of a virgin
birth there can be but one credible -witness, and, so far
as we know, that witness was sUent. But, supposing
we were con-vinced in the only possible way that the
laws of nature had been so far -violated that new life
had appeared upon the earth without the mediation of
a Ufe germ, what then ? There would stand the fact,
but what of it? Its very exceptional character would
alone deprive it of all meaning, for phenomena have
meaning to us only as they are related to other phe
nomena. The being so produced would have no claim
upon our attention except as a curiosity of nature.
The Church has seen fit to ascribe to this alleged virgin
birth the character of "sinlessness," but here again is a
confusion of the physical and the spiritual. "Sin" is a
spiritual thing; a human birth is a physical thing. What
have they to do with each other? "Because this man
came into the world by means of a -virgin birth, there-

MIRACLE 51
fore he was -without sin, " says the Church. The ortho
dox Protestant sects have done their best to make this
declaration mean something different from what it was
intended to mean. The Unitarian rejects it absolutely,
because, using words in their natural meanings, he finds
himseff led into a tissue of absurdities whenever he
appUes rational tests to it. The Church has found a
use for this miracle in emphasizing its doctrine of the
essentiaUy sinful nature of man as a being partly ma
terial. Unitarians, beUe-ving that the idea of sin has no
connection whatever -with the fact of man's material
nature, but only with the use he makes of it in the
moral and spiritual struggle of life, find no sense at aU
in the notion of a human being produced, as the Church
puts it, "without sin."
SimUar reflections, only in a somewhat reversed order,
apply to the thought of Unitarians about the alleged
miracle of the resurrection of Jesus. Singular that
Christian theology, which showed such contempt for
the material side of man, could not get away from the
idea of the preciousness of the body, after all. One
might have supposed that when the martyr-death of
the Master had been accomplished nothing could have
been more welcome to the feeUng of his followers than
the thought that now he was freed from the trammels
of the impeding flesh and become pure spirit, free for-

52 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
ever to enter into communion ¦with the spirits of those
who loved him and mourned for him. But no ! one
more demonstration of his reaUy human nature was
needed. The body that had been to them the visible
s}rmbol of the radiant soul within must be brought
back in fuU U-ving energy once more. It could not be
that this material sheU should suffer the fate of com
mon clay, returning into the universe of matter from
which it had sprung — for it must be remembered, and
we shaU have occasion to remind ourselves, that the
Church maintains the actuaUty of the human in Christ.
This body must be otherwise removed from the ways
of men; and so it "ascended," that is, it entered into
the world of spirit, where God Uves forever. The Church,
with its easy powers of reconciling the obviously ir-
reconcUable, has kept this tangle of ideas aUve by every
de-vice of doctrine and of ritual. Protestant orthodoxy
has rationalized upon it or refused to think about it at
aU. Unitarianism faces the matter frankly. It denies
the physical fact of the resurrection because it is a fact
as to which no human e-vidence is possible. It would
be possible to demonstrate by human e-vidence — evi
dence, however, needing rather careful corroboration —
that a human organism had ceased to Uve. It would
be possible also to demonstrate by easier e-vidence that
it was aUve. But to prove that Ufe had entered into

MIRACLE

53

lifeless material is as impossible as it is for human
powers to grasp the principle of Ufe itself. The Uni
tarian could beUeve anything more easily than he could
that the detaU of e-vidence in any case was sufficiently
accurate to estabUsh this -violation of aU human ex
perience. But again supposing the impossible — that di-vine
power should so far have violated its own law as to bring
this dead man back into Ufe, — what then ? WeU,
— a dead man would have come to Ufe, a thing that
had never happened before and has never happened
since ; what of it ? Again we have to say that the very
exceptional character of the phenomenon deprives it of
aU value. It has no relation to anything that concerns
us. We are not going to be brought back from physical
death into physical Ufe. Theology in its -wildest mo
ments has never reached a definition of bodily resurrec
tion that need greatly alarm us. It cherishes the
phrase, but the alleged fact has never, except in the ex
travagant -visions of " millenianism," played any im
portant part. The most that has been done is to make
the physical resurrection of Jesus the promise of an ulti
mate spiritual awakening in some undefined stage of be
ing towards which our present Ufe, properly conducted
under the guidance of an authorized Church, is directing
us. We touch here upon the baffling doctrine of a future

54 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
Ufe, a subject we must reserve for another chapter. Our
purpose here is only to show the attitude of Unitari
ans toward the miraculous, first in itself and then as a
means of certffying to reUgious truth. So far as the
story of the resurrection of Jesus is concerned. Uni
tarians may feel the charm of the narrative, its touch
ing appeal to the sentiment of personal affection, its
altogether human clinging to the Ufe that now is. They
reject the story, however, not only on the grounds we
have been enumerating, but also because they feel it
an obstacle in the way of the highest comprehension of
the message of Jesus. The spiritual Ufe he taught was
not a thing of another world. It was the Ufe of the
spirit shared by every man that cometh into the world
— not every man that goes out of the world. The
Kingdom of God he sought to estabUsh was the reign
of righteousness in the Uves of men here and now. The
resurrection he cared about was the deUverance of the
soul of man from the slavery of sin into the freedom of
the law of righteousness. The ascension that he prom
ised was no stage-exit into an impossible heaven, but
the rising of the indi-vidual soul into harmony with the
ine-vitable order that is the soiU of the universe of God-
The -wicked and adulterous generations stUl go on seek
ing after signs and wonders ; but the mind that can see
clearly, the heart that can feel warmly, the soul that

MIRACLE 55
responds promptly to aU the influences of the Spirit,
needs no appeal to the wonder-seeking impulse. Rather
it feels itself dragged down to a lower level of appre
hension, cheapened and degraded by the confusions and
evasions of those who profess to be the spiritual guides
of men.
Let it not, however, be supposed that Unitarians are
blind and deaf to the value of the sense of wonder in
stimulating reUgious emotion. They only insist that
this feeUng shaU be raised by things worthy and not by
things unworthy. It seems to them pitiable that people
should be asked to spend their wonder upon the ab
normal when the normal and regular is so vastly worthier
of their regard. They cannot be impressed by the
monstrous fiction of a virgin birth whUe the sacred
mystery of motherhood surrounds every new Ufe that
comes here on earth to bear witness to the perpetuaUy
renewed union of human love -with human duty. It
seems to them far nobler to take these common things
and set them in the Ught of a continuous revelation of
God to man than to thrust them out of sight and put
in their place some imaginary marvel that wUl not
bear a moment's rational thought and stands in no -vital
relation to any experience of humanity.
Why should they be impressed -with the tale of a
resurrection of the body? Unitarians, Uke all other

56 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
men, feel the strain and stress of earthly Ufe. They wiU
not rebel against it. They accept the struggle of the
body and the spirit as a part of that law of conflict
whereby this Ufe moves on; but they accept also with
stUl greater readiness the thought of death as the normal
and happy end of Ufe on earth. They see in the ex
perience of men how death works its marvels in human
hearts equaUy with birth. They see how it has in
spired the highest poetry, has stimulated the noblest
ambition to take up bravely the work our dear ones
have laid do-wn, how it softens and idealizes the figures
that Ufe made stern, how it caUs up tender images of
rest and peace, and they ask: What wonder of violated
law could be haff so wonderful as this sUent working
of the law we welcome as divine ?
That is the Unitarian attitude towards the two most
imposing among the miraculous traditions of Chris
tianity. These two stand apart from the general record
of miracle as the chief Ulustrations of wonders brought
about -without the intervention of human agency. In
these di-vine power is conceived of as acting directly
upon the order of the physical world, commanding it
to change for the moment its normal processes in order
that mankind might receive the more -wUUngly some
great and imperative benefit. If there were any form

MIRACLE 57
of the miraculous that could command a respectful
attention, it would certainly be found here. If, then.
Unitarians cannot accept these, it is obvious that they
can find stiU less to attract them in the vast volume of
miraculous record in which the wonder is brought
about through the intervention of some human agent.
It wiU be said perhaps that in our scientific age it is
merely fighting -with -windmiUs to insist upon this matter ;
but it must be remembered that an important branch
of the Christian Church declares that its priests have
power to perform and reaUy do perform, daUy and
hourly, as complete a miracle as was ever imagined in
the wUdest extravagance of credulity, and that failure
to accept and take part in this miracle involves spiritual
death in this world and the next. We cannot forget
that this historic Church, in conferring its highest dis
tinctions, makes these dependent upon a certain num
ber of "weU-attested" miracles and claims for itself the
power of determining by adequate tests the vaUdity of
aU aUeged miraculous mamfestations. Nor can we
overlook the latent readiness of the majority of man
kind, unaffected by aU the scientific method of our
time, to grasp at every straw of occult appeal that can
seem to offer any help in meeting the mystery of Ufe.
The credulous state of mind exists to-day as it has al
ways existed. The only defence against it is in draw-

58 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
ing clear and firm the line that separates e-vidence from
delusion, and that is what the Unitarian tries to do.
In definitely denying the miraculous he opens the way
for a clearer -vision of spiritual things than any com
fortable acquiescence could ever supply. He does not
think of it as a loss, but every way as a gain.

CHAPTER III
THE NATURE OF MAN
Le christianisme, en brisant I'homme en ext^rieur et interieur,
Ie monde en terre et del, en enfer et paradis a decompose I'unitd
humaine. . . . — Henri-Frederic Amiel.
Systems of reUgion are wont to begin with the largest.
possible abstractions about the nature of God, the uni
verse and God's dealing with it, good and evil in their
abstract meaning, their conflict -with each other, and
their final reconciUation in some satisfactory adjust
ment. Then, when these large foundations have been
laid, we are introduced to man as an element in the
vast scheme of things. He is brought before us as an
incident in the working of a system that might conceiv
ably have existed without him. We are shown his
relation to God as the result of a divine plan. He is
of himself essentially antagonistic to God, and hence
needs reconciUation through mediations of various
kinds,- — ^ through sacrifices of propitiation and sacrffices
of expiation, through intermediate gods and demigods,
through incarnations of deity and deifications of hu-
S9

6o UNITARIAN THOUGHT
manity, through priesthoods and churches claiming pos
session of the means of reconcilement. In one way or
another man is represented as involved in a religious
compact he has had no share in making. He is some
how, as it were, the -victim of powers that may work
their wUl upon him, and aU he can do is to find ways
of so dealing -with these powers as to save himself from
wrong or injury.
Christianity has not escaped from the entanglements
of such a method. It too has had its "scheme" of
reUgion, its phUosophies of God, the universe, good and
e-vU, sin (i.e. opposition) and reconciUation, and it too
has had to find a place for man in the midst of these
greater abstractions. In Christianity as elsewhere man
has been made to appear a victim to a world of
powers foreign to his own nature, and he has been driven
into inventing means of escape. Harder still, these
ways of escape, the means of reconcilement, the sacra
ments, the priesthoods, the church institutions, have in
turn been represented to him as di-vine in their origin
and their sanctions. Man himseff has almost disap
peared under the weight of systems and institutions
gradually pUed upon him, aU claiming a right over him
in -virtue of some essentially di-vine commission. If at
any point he dared to assert the inherent right of his
own manhood, he has been driven back by the re-

THE NATURE OF MAN 6l
minder of his o-wn nothingness and the aU-sufficing con
trol of the divine "system."
Now the thought of Unitarians about reUgion follows
an entirely different method. It does not deny that
there may be a sound phUosophy of the universe in
volving in itseff a doctrine of God, of Ufe^ of ..good and
e-vU, and of man in his manifold relations to all these.
Only, the Unitarian feels that ultimate certainty on
these matters cannot be attained by finite man, and
that, therefore, speculation about them belongs rather
in the region of phUosophy than of religion. His re
Ugious thinking begins with and centres about the idea
of man bJaaself- as an independent, self -determining
being. His reUgion is a reUgion of humanity, starting
from human impulses, Umited by hum^n capacities,
working by human methods, and expressing itself in
human ways.
For the convenience of his thought the Unitarian has
certain definitions of man which serve him with an
approach to accuracy. First of all : man appears to
him as a unit. EarUer theologies laid weight upon the
distinctions ob-vious in man's nature. It is, indeed,
impossible to think at aU on the subject -without per-
cei-ving the complexity of the human being. He has a
physical body, made up of the same elements that
enter into other forms of material Ufe. Man's body is

62 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
subject to the same laws of procreation, of growth,
decay, and re-formation that govern the world of matter
as a whole. Further, there is, in addition to the ma
terial, also a psychic or -vital element, common to man
with aU organic Ufe, — the principle by which his ma
terial existence is kept going and is carried out to its
finest expressions. Again, there is in man what we in
our despair of language call the "soul" or 'spirit," the
element in his nature which most clearly differentiates
him from aU other living organisms. By this he thinks,
-with conscious reference to an end ; he feels, in conscious
obedience to emotions of love or hate, bringing himself
thus into vital relations with other human beings.
By this also he wiUs, and is thus led to actions, through
which his whole personaUty reaches out and affects the
world about him; and, finaUy, by this also he aspires,
hopes, prays, worships, touches at a thousand points
the greater Ufe whereby his own lesser personality is
surroimded. This threefold aspect of man's nature is ob-vious. It
might be even further refined upon, even more minutely
subdivided, but for our present purpose this is enough.
It appears imder this form in most early Christian
writings. It is used there to describe, not only the
various elements in the nature of the individual man,
but also various classes of mankind. In both the Gnos-

THE NATURE OF MAN 63
tic and the Montanistic systems there appear material
{hylic) men, animal {psychic) men and spiritual {pneu
matic) men. This distinction merges easily into the
other and more familiar one of body, mind and soul
which we shall employ here generally as simpler and
as sufficiently exact. In fact Christian theology never
succeeded in drawing a very clear Une between the psy
chic and the pneumatic, the anima and the spiritus in
man. What it was clear about was, that these two ele
ments stood together over against the merely material.
That antagonism it emphasized and developed in every
way. Its greatest teacher, Augustine, made the conflict
between the material and the spiritual the central feature
of his thought, and in the great awakening of Protestant
ism it was this idea again that ralUed the forces of oppo
sition in the most effective way. The Unitarian can
not be blind to the fraction of truth that is contained in
this cherished tradition of the Church. He is perfectly
able to see that historically it has done a great work
in the world, but for himself he would keep it as far as
possible out of sight. What interests him in man is
not this very ob-vious diversity of aspect, but the essen
tial unity of nature. He did not need the researches of
modern science to teach him the acute interdependence
of body, mind, and soul for the sound and effective work
ing of each. He was perfectly prepared to learn how

64 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
hard it is to draw the lines that separate body from
mind and mind from soul. It was no shock to him to
hear that physical pain is partly subject to mental
control and that mental processes, emotions, passions,
may partly be reduced to physical terms, tested and
measured by physical devices. These things have come
to him only as confirmations of what he had thought
out in less formal ways before — • that man is essentiaUy
a unit and cannot, therefore, be treated theologically as
a being divided against himself and so doomed to ruin.
It is in this spirit and having in mind this dominant
sense of unity that the Unitarian approaches the ques
tions of man's origin, his obligations, and his destiny.
The charming fables of the Hebrews, as weU as those
of other races, in regard to the origin of man interest
him as so many naive attempts to account for the
obvious facts of man's common experience. As man
appears here on earth, in daUy struggle, each one -with
himself and aU with their surroundings, it is plain that he
is Umited by certain controlling conditions. Men should
be good, wise, just, generous, and they are none of
these things. They should love peace and they are at
war ; they should be content with Uttle, and they are
stri-ving ever after more at the cost of others; above
aU, they are slaves to a pitiless law of labor that com
pels them to pass in a soul-destroying routine lives

THE NATURE OF MAN 65
that might be spent in a calm repose with only such
acti-vities as should elevate and beautify. A horrid
dualism seems to exist between the actual human life
on earth and the Paradise the world ought to be.
So long as men clung to the idea of a sudden act of
creation by a being who could claim the reverence of
his conscious creatures, they could not imagine such a
creative act as anything but benevolent. The state of
the first creation must have been such as was to be
expected of a work "fresh from the hand of God."
Hence man, as a part — the most important part — of
this beneficent creation, must have begun in a state of
perfection, and therefore, in order to reach the state
of imperfection in which aU tradition and observation
shows him to be, he must have degenerated. This
degeneration must have been either gradual or sudden.
A gradual degeneration, which if accepted at all must
be thought of as going on forever, so that man would
appear as continually gro-wing worse through aU time,
past, present, and future, was an unthinkable solution.
Hence men came to the notion of a sudden change of
nature, a "faU" from an original high estate into a
condition of depravity.
The people most concerned, for our purpose the
Hebrew people, were not seriously affected by this
calamity. They saved themselves by the agreeable

66 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
doctrine of a special covenant with their God, whereby
they became his chosen people, guaranteed in their
future so long as they should keep themselves pure and
faithful in his ser-vice. That covenant they maintained,
often with serious shortcomings, but always caUed back
to fidelity by some prophetic voice, reminding them of
their obUgation and pointing them to their destiny.
The Hebrew believed in an indefinite future of reunion
with God under the leadership of a final prophet, whose
promised coining was of value precisely as it remained
a promise, beckoning the people toward an ever unful-
fiUed perfection of power and loyalty. They never set
a definite point at which the fallen race was to be sud
denly arrested in its doom and given a new impulse
toward certain recovery of its original unity -with God.
It was reserved for Christianity to take this step.
Christian theology, elaborated through long conflict
and under many influences that lay outside the range
of Hebrew thought, drew the logical conclusion from
the doctrine of a degenerate world and declared that by
a specific act of divine compassion this fallen world
was restored to its original harmony with its creator.
The process of restoration was, to be sure, conditioned
by certain demands upon the individual, but the crisis
in human affairs was none the less marked and universal.
The cycle of creation, faU, and recovery was complete.

THE NATURE OF MAN 67
With this accepted. Christian speculation went on to
inquire into the cause. How should it account for the
fact of a "fall"? Several possibUities were offered by
the several theologies in the midst of which this specu
lation went on. It might have been dismissed briefly
as a mere act of the arbitrary wUl of God, dictating to
his creatures what they must do and suffer without
reference to nearer causes. That way out, however, did
not commend itself to the higher refinements of Graeco-
Egyptian-Roman subtiety as it played with the simple
teaching of Jesus in a determined effort to bring it into
harmony at once with Hebrew fable and with the laws
of its own dialectic. On the basis of a single and uni
form divine wiU it would have been impossible to work
out a system of spasmodic creation, fall, and recovery
that could command the intelligence and the conscience
of the thinking and struggling Christian world.
A second device was to seek the cause of human de
pravity in the hostile acti-vity of an independent Power,
working in eternal antagonism to the great and benefi
cent design of God. Precedents for such an explana
tion were easUy found in the existing systems of thought.
The "De-vil" was a familiar figure even in the late
Hebrew speculation, and it is plain how great the temp
tation was to take him into the Christian scheme and
give him a decisive part to play. He needed only to

68 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
be invested with powers sufficiently independent to
make him a formidable rival to the creator God, and
the thing was done. From this dualistic solution, how
ever, the Christian consciousness shrank with instinc
tive dread. The Hebrew inheritance of unity saved it
from so fatal a step. Dualism was formally rejected as
the final solution of the human problem, and remained
only in a multitude of secondary ideas that from point
to point arose to plague the imagination of every age
of discussion. The DevU, dethroned as the effective
cause of man's defeat, lingered as the eager agent of his
misery and his disharmony with the divine.
A third device to explain the working of the theologi
cal cycle brings us to our immediate problem of the
unity of human nature. If the cause of man's "ruin"
was to be found neither in the sole activity of God,
because that seemed to imply some malevolent quality
in the di-vine nature, nor in the action of a rival Power,
because such rivalry seemed an infringement upon the
dignity of God, it remained only to seek an explanation
in some inherent quaUty of man's nature itself. That
quaUty was found in the distinctions we have already
noted between the several elements composing Lhat
nature. The " fall of man " was represented as a triumph
of his material over his spiritual element. The story of
the Book of Genesis was accepted as the di-vine con-

THE NATURE OF MAN 69
firmation of this duality of nature. The dualistic
tendencies of thought, repudiated in their reference to
the nature of God, found their expression in the doc
trine of the nature of man. The thing which distin
guished man from Deity on the one hand and from the
brutes on the other, the possession of a highly developed,
complex nature was declared by this theology to be the
cause of his ruin. Man was the cause of his own de
struction by -virtue of being man. The very nature that
was given him without his own desire was made the
reason for his eternal incapacity to do right. Still more,
this incapacity to do right was then charged against
him as a fault. He was held responsible for a sin which
he was forced to commit in consequence of the posses
sion of a nature that was in itself " sinful." The definition
of sin was stretched to cover not merely actions, but a
state of being, an attitude, a tendency, -without which
man would not have been man, but something either
infinitely higher or infinitely lower. The thought of
the Church on this subject from the days of Augustine
imtil now has been determined by the assumption of
that fatal duaUsm in man which could be solved only
by the intervention of some mysterious force not vitiated
by the reaUties of human frailty.
The Unitarian thought of man goes at once to the
root of this whole matter -with its positive assertion of

70 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
the unity of human nature. It takes away from the
idea of man all those duaUsms which have puzzled and
dismayed the theologians of all ages. It recognizes
clearly the complexity of man's being, but it sees in this
complexity only a community of powers, not an an
tagonism. The body is, from this point of view, not a
thing to be ashamed of because it is not soul. Neither
is the soul degraded because it is bound up with the
marvellous mechanism of the body. The mind, acutely
dependent as it is upon the body's well-being, cannot
look -with contempt upon its indispensable ally. Neither
can the body, if it will attain its best development,
afford to neglect the help it can constantly gain from
the labor of the mind. Our day is conscious, as no
other has been, of the part played by mental soundness
in maintaining that physical health which in turn is
the condition of active mental work. So greatly is our
community inspired -with these ideas of reciprocity
between the several parts of human nature that many
have elevated them into a religion, and indeed all re
Ugions are feeling profoundly the reaction of them upon
their most cherished doctrines. The soul, in its striv
ing after a right relation to God, is finding its chief
aids in weU-trained, well-nourished, and well-disciplined
bodies and in equally weU-informed, well-balanced, and
disciplined minds. These tendencies of our day are

THE NATURE OF MAN 71
only the expression in other forms of ideas famiUar to
every Unitarian mind. They have come to the Uni
tarian consciousness as so many echoes of itself. They
do not alarm it. Their crudenesses, their excesses, their
foUies even, cannot bUnd it to the essential comradeship
of many of their fundamental ideas with its own. It
sees, through their shabby decorations of prophets and
prophetesses, revelations, inspirations, gospels, apostles,
and aU the famUiar stage properties of fanaticism, the
one great common possession of a faith in human nature.
Like them in their sounder parts, Unitarianism believes
in man's capacity to serve himself through the har
monious working together of those elements which theo
logians have thought of as warring against each other.
There is no more curious phenomenon of our time
than these movements of masses of plain thinking people
toward forms of reUgious expression in which the welfare
of the body, in its relation to the Ufe of the spirit, plays
so important a part. They have been accompanied
by ine-vitable excesses. Their pure motives have been
mingled -with others less able to bear the Ught of day.
Their "science" has often been mere folly, and their
social moraUty more than questionable. Yet they have
served their generation and may serve it yet more by
reminding men in these dramatic ways of that essential
unity we are here considering. They have been bitterly

72 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
and rightly condemned for many of their practices and
for not a few of their ideas. Even the best of them
have been regarded as a danger to society, and legisla
tion has been demanded to check their progress. In
this attitude it wiU probably be foimd that Unitarians
have taken little share. Probably, too, it would appear
that they were not whoUy conscious of the deeper
reasons for their feeling on the subject. Yet, whUe the
more strictly organized sects of Christians have viewed
these modem movements with mingled horror and con
tempt. Unitarians have been wUling to wait and see
whither they might lead. Others have said : These out
breaks of human foUy are only the successors of many
others that have been since the Church began ; as those
earUer fanaticisms melted away or made their peace
with the Church, so these are bound to do, and mean-
whUe the right thing is to point out their dangers and
warn all sound-minded persons against them. But the
natural Unitarian attitude is : These are, indeed, move
ments simUar in many ways to scores of others that
have preceded them; but for one thing, that alone
would be e-vidence of a certain value; for we may be
sure that nothing persists in this world unless it has
some valuable content for humanity. And then again :
it is not enough to say that those earlier movements
merely vanished into thin air at the dictation of the

THE NATURE OF MAN 73
powers that were. On the contrary, it is precisely
through these periodical outbreaks of the spirit of un
rest, that the best Ufe of the Church has been sustained
and rein-vigorated. To quench that spirit would be to
reduce the thought of reUgion to a dead level of dull
formality. Let it rather go on until its unworthy parts
shaU have been sloughed off and its worthy parts made
to appear in their true value.
If this seems to be a digression from the main purpose
of the present chapter, it is so only in so far as it con
cerns the outward aspect of the Unitarian attitude
toward new presentations of possible truth. The inner
kernel of the matter is the essential unity of man's
nature as the key to his reUgious expression. On that
point it may now be sufficiently clear that Unitarianism
is ready to join in feUowship -with every endeavor to
found reUgion and moraUty on a harmony rather than
on a dissonance among the elements of human nature.
If Unitarianism is disposed to be thus -widely hos
pitable towards ideas and movements it does not ap
prove, and from which it is boimd to keep itself free,
it is easUy to be seen what would be its attitude toward
others which more nearly approach its own essential
spirit. If even pseudo science, so long as it is honest,
seems worthy of a certain respect, how much more the
labors and results of men working in a true scientific

74 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
spirit. When, a generation and more ago, aU that vast
clearing up of the mind took place to which we give,
rather crudely, the name of the development theory, it
was received by the world of dogmatic theology, pro
fessional and lay aUke, -with the utmost hesitation and
dread. An immense fraction, perhaps a majority, of
Christian men even to-day reject it with a certain horror.
Somehow the notion that mankind came into existence
graduaUy instead of suddenly seems to imply a reproach
against the very idea of God ; as if a God working by
rational causes were less worthy of respect than one
working by spasmodic effort. The mere application of
a scientific method to reUgious questions had and has of
itseff a certain suggestion of blasphemy. " Can man by
searching find out God?" If it was said that the
origin of man is not a reUgious but a scientific problem,
the reply was that the two could not here be separated,
and therefore the only safety lay in checking at once so
dangerous a process.
Now, in this feeling of alarm at the advance of physi
cal science Unitarianism from the first did not greatly
share. It perceived instinctively that the ideas involved
in the notion of development were fundamentally akin
to its o-wn. Its reception of this new key to the prob
lem of Ufe was prompt and hearty. Even long before
the general consciousness of the modem world had come

THE NATURE OF MAN 75
by various processes to adjust itself to this new way of
thinking about the origins of human Ufe, many Uni
tarians had accepted it and taken the consequences.
Here again they were not alarmed by extremes. There
were indeed, for the moment, voices raised in the an
cient cry that now at last God was banished from the
world, and Ufe, human as weU as the rest, was reduced
to a thing of tissues and cells, generation and decay.
The answer of the theologians in general was to pro
claim once more, and more emphaticaUy, their doctrine
of the divided nature. The soul must stUl be thought
of as something separate, put into the body from the
outside at some moment of its production, and there
fore, of course, exempt from the working of "natural"
law. Unitarians caught at once the clue to the whole matter.
The principle of imity must work here as everywhere
else. The harmony of soiU and body must be as true
under one theory of origin as another. So far as the
ultimate question of the beginning of Ufe was concerned
it could not matter. No human theory could touch
that ; for by its very definition the Ufe principle eludes
and always -wiU elude the last analysis of science. No
sane scientist expects or even desires to find it. He sees
that its discovery would from the first moment result
in the destruction of the system of things -with wljich

76 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
he has to deal. His ambition is bounded within the
circle of phenomena offered to him by the world as it is,
and he makes no claims to occult wisdoin of any sort.
The Unitarian is content to follow the modesty of the
true scientist. He rejoices in every revelation of the
working of natural law, because, as a reUgious being, he
feels in every increase of knowledge also an increase of
faith in the things that mean most to him. The limita
tions of science no more disturb him than they do the
scientist himseff. An impatient scientist would go mad,
and it is a sign of sanity in thought when men fairly
and frankly recognize the Umits of their vision and
refuse to invent explanations of unexplainable things.
It is true that science has not solved the riddle of exist
ence. It never will; it makes no claim to do so; but
it has given to serious, independent, and rational thought
about the conditions of existence a hundred new sup
ports. Above aU it has wonderfully helped to make
clear the unity of human nature as a part of the unity
of aU life. If we are alarmed lest by the scientific
process the soul be reduced to a matter of quickened
heart-beats, or irregular nerve-stimulation, or a succes
sion of unconscious habits, we are at Uberty at any
moment to translate aU these fine things back again
into the language of the spiritual Ufe, and there we
have it once more, after aU, — the "soul," as mysterious

THE NATURE OF MAN 77
as ever, as independent of conscious control, yet linked
inseparably, as we knew it was before, to the material
body it at once serves and is served by. The feeUng of
Unitarians in regard to the whole question of the rela
tion of faith and knowledge, to which we must often
refer, has no better Ulustration than in this matter of
the nature of man as a unit. It is inconceivable that
any honest fact of science should contradict any worthy
motion of the spiritual Ufe. Science may modify faith,
may give it new forms of expression, wiU certainly supply
it -with many new iUustrations, but it can never make
untrue what was once true.
Historically the Unitarian view of human nature
has its foundations far back in the early ages of
Christian controversy. In fact, what proved to be the
dominant beUef of formal Christianity, the Augustinian
doctrine of a faUen nature in , antagonism -with God and
hence needing a "scheme" of reconciUation, this "ortho
doxy " of the creeds was brought into form largely through
its resistance to another conception known generally as
the "Pelagian." Without going into the refinements of
that ancient, yet stiU fresh and U-ving, controversy, we
may restate the essential point of it as follows. Man,
according to the Pelagian -view, was conceived of as a
being brought into the world -with a nature which of
itself was in harmony with che di-vine order. True, the

78 .UNITARIAN THOUGHT
first man suffered a "fall," but this was in consequence
of a wrong decision of his -wiU and did not produce in
his offspring the loss of wiU-power toward right action
— that is, action in harmony with the -wiU of God. The
soul of every new-born man is, Uke that of the first
man, a tabula rasa on which he and he alone is to write
the record of success and failure which makes up the
story of every human Ufe. Some men go right and
some go wrong, but none goes wholly right or wholly
wrong. Whether a man becomes a good man or a bad
man depends upon the balance of his choices. The
habit of good U-ving helps toward further good and
equally the habit of evil begets further ill-doing. So,
without doubt, the habit of choice is inherited, and the
son of the good man has an advantage in the struggle
for good. In this sense it is possible to say that good
and e-vU are hereditary, but only in this sense. Non
possum non habere possibiliiatem boni — nothing can
deprive me of the power of right action. The possi
biUty of doing right, freedom of the will and hence
moral responsibiUty and hence praise- or blame-worthi
ness, this is the series of quahties on which the Pelagian
definition of man is based. Of course the terminol
ogy of this ancient discussion was absolutely deter
mined by the habit of the time. It involved the whole
Hebrew assumption of sudden creation, of first parents,

THE NATURE OF MAN 79
of good and evU as entities, of fall and subsequent
restoration. It needs translating into the scientific
language of our time, but so translated it gives fairly
well the most important elements of Unitarian thought.
Man, complex but normally harmonious in his nature,
is what he is by reason of a rational and normal develop
ment from the simple, primal impulses of self-preserva
tion to the most compUcated, but not on that account
the less natural, processes of a highly organized indi
vidual and social existence.
The Unitarian is aware that in thus simplifying and
unif}ang the definition of man, he is leaving open still
the chasm that di-vides man from aU other rational
beings. He realizes that the instinct of the highest
brutes is different from the conscious reason of man.
He perceives in man a moral ideaUsm of which so far
no such positive e-vidence has been found in the brute
as to command general acceptance by careful observ
ers. The conscious social purpose that directs so large
a part of man's activity finds only apparent counter
parts in the aggregations of animal Ufe.
But, in the first place, the chasm has been narrow
ing perceptibly as we have learned more and more of
the mental processes both of men and of animals. We
have learned to think far more respectfully of our
humble companions as we have studied more carefully

8o UNITARIAN THOUGHT
and -with more open minds the working of their powers
most nearly akin to our own. The range of iUustration
of actions on their part obviously directed towards a
desired end — even towards ends that must be new to
their race experience — has been greatly increased :
the horse freeing himself from a halter-strap fastened
in a novel way, or unt3Tng knots -with his teeth, or
worr)dng the lock of a grain bin until he can Uft the
lid, or drawing his bedding within reach by unusual
movements of his foot; the dog ob-viously planning in
advance some action to make himself comfortable or to
gratify some pet whim; not to mention those marveUous
performances of memory which might perhaps more
easUy be disposed of as merely instinctive — the squirrel
recovering food buried months before over a widely
extended field, the dog or the cat finding its way
over hundreds of mUes of road it had traveUed but once
before, — aU these and many that might be added
must give us pause in any absolute conclusion as to
lack of conscious mental power in the brute. In fact
so credulous has our time become in these matters that
many highly ciUtivated minds have been wUUng to
accept utterly impossible tales about "mathematical
horses," "psychological dogs," and other marvels of
human training. It is even a Uttle humiUatuig to a
mere human being to consider his inferiority in so

THE NATURE OF MAN 8 1
many respects to his "inferior" cousins — the wonderful
foot and taU of the ape, the scent of the hound, the eye
of the eagle; above all, that amazing sixth sense of
direction, which we have entirely lost, but which seems
to guide so many movements of animal Ufe.
It might be possible to go even further and to dis
cover in many animals at least a rudimentary con
science. The weU-trained dog resists temptation under
trying circumstances in a way to shame the conscience
of average humanity. If we say this is mere fear of
punishment inspired by the memory of past experi
ences, how large a part of the sensitiveness of most
human consciences is made up of the same degrading
but highly educative emotion ? Is the difference, after
aU, one of degree rather than of kind ? If we compare
the lowest man with the highest brute, the process of
transition seems not only possible but ine-vitable.
Even the social instinct which binds men together in
so many varieties of activity seems not whoUy lacking
in animals. Sometimes it appears in common efforts
apparently directed to some weU-considered end, some
times in what seems Uke the voluntary subjection of
many to the guidance of one. The brute family has often
startling resemblances to that famUy Ufe which is the
germ of the human state. It is easy to believe, as
many have done, that some animals are reaUy organized

82 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
sociaUy into an actual poUtical body -with its officials,
its laws, and its punishments.
Thus the chasm that divides man from the lower,
or let us rather say from the other, forms of or
ganized Ufe has been narrowing. The marvels of com
parative anatomy, especiaUy the studies of embryonic
life, have shown us how the several functions of the
individual, man or beast or plant, are differentiated out
of primordial ceUs so similar that they cannot be dis
tinguished. So also what is true of the individual is
true of the race. The varieties of man, no less than
the varieties of other animals and plants, are shown as
the result of processes that can largely be traced as
"natural" and inevitable. The chasm has been greatly
narrowed, but it still remains; for so far as we can see
there is nothing in any being except man even remotely
corresponding to the reUgious sense as we have defined
it — that is, as a positive and conscious reaching out of
the human soiU towards invisible powers outside itself,
that influence its action and to which it owes some
kind of responsibiUty.
It is the certainty that, no matter how far science
may go, it can never touch this supreme distinction of
man that makes the Unitarian so naturally and so
completely free from any dread whatever as to the
effect of further knowledge upon man's reUgious nature.

THE NATURE OF MAN 83
That nature he regards as so absolutely a part of man
that even when men take the greatest pains to deny it,
he; the Unitarian, sees in such denial only those tem
porary and local aberrations to which all ideas are
subject. Denial of the religious nature touches only
some of the imperfect forms and expressions under
which reUgion has disguised itself. The forms change,
the expressions are modified, but the great current of
reUgious Ufe moves on in spite of aU checks and diver
sions. It foUows quite naturally from this -view of the in
di-vidual as a being capable of good action, i.e. action
in harmony -with the -wUl of God, that all mankind is
equaUy included in the divine order. The Unitarian
sees no possible distinction in essence or in possibility
of the highest spiritual attainment between the "highest"
and the "lowest" famiUes of men upon the earth.
Whatever may be the "di-vine plan" for man's exist
ence here or heareaf ter — and as to this plan the Uni
tarian professes a modest uncertainty — it must in
clude all men. There can be no inside and outside to
the great estate wherein the chUdren of men are invited
to dweU. No matter how vast the distance that seems
to separate the "higher" from the "lower" stages of
human development, the road travelled by each branch
of the human family on its upward way is essentially

84 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
the same. AU march by the same stations of increasing
economic demand and supply. AU are subject to the
law of social moraUty, no matter in how diverse forms
it may manifest itself. In all the same religious im
pulse reaches out into the unknown and seeks to estab
Ush relations -with it. The same law which makes the
Unitarian feel in the individual an essential harmony
working itself out through continuous struggle, makes
him also feel in mankind as a whole an essential unity
expressing itself under infinitely diverse forms. The
"plan of salvation," given as generous a definition as is
humanly thinkable, must be for all men. Nor is it, in
the thought of Unitarians, essential that the process of
"salvation" be similar in detail for all men or for men
in all ages. If there must be an historic word to ex
press the thing they understand by "salvation," they
prefer the word "justification." Not that either of
these words plays any considerable part in their ordi
nary vocabulary; but "justification" carries an idea
that appeals naturally to their imagination. We shaU
have to return to this idea in its proper place ; enough
here to say that from the Unitarian thought about the
unity of mankind, there follows naturally the notion of
justification, i.e. the "right" relation of the human
soul to God as something progressive in time and some
thing varied in form. The Unitarian is able to con-

THE NATURE OF MAN 85
ceive of the "lowest" type of the human worshipper as
being quite as really justified in view of his stage of
development as is the most orthodox of civilized church
members judged by the possibiUties of the society in
which he Uves. Nay, he is not sure but that the honest
PoljTiesian goes do-wn to his house justified rather than
that other.
The statement of the historic, "Pelagian," Unitarian
view of human nature includes the idea of the freedom
of the human -wiU. It cannot be supposed that the
Unitarian should have reached the ultimate solution of
a phUosophic problem that has puzzled the -wisest of the
world's thinkers from the beginning until now. If he
were even to imdertake such a solution he would be
ranging himself with the phUosophers, not -with the
seekers after reUgious satisfaction; and he confesses
himself in the class of these, not of those. He does not
seek to solve the problem; he aims only to take an
attitude towards it. He faces it -with a due sense of its
difficulty, but -without dread; for his notion of a God
is free from any taint of the awful cruelty of a law im
posed upon man so hard that his o-wn essential nature
makes it impossible for him to obey it.
Like every other thinker upon the problem of the
human will, the Unitarian finds himself between two
extremes: the liberum arbitrium of the Pelagians and the

86 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
arbitrium servum of Augustine, of Luther, and of Cal-vin.
If he were caUed upon to choose absolutely between
these extremes, there is no doubt whatever as to his
choice. He would accept the Pelagian horn of the
dilemma and take the consequences. That is the side
toward which all his natural instincts and the whole
logic of his presuppositions inevitably lead him. His
first impulse would be to declare: "My will is free. I
know it because I am myself, and every part of me
proclaims that without this supreme endowment I
should be only the echo, the instrument, the shadow of
something other than myself. It is this gift of freedom
that creates my sense of right and wrong; for without
Uberty I should have no responsibiUty ; without respon
sibiUty I should lose everything that makes my actions
worthy of being described as right or wrong; and if I
may not be rewarded in any sense for my good action,
what conceivable motive is there for me to be good?
I am conscious of a moral law laid upon me. That is a
fact from which I cannot escape. But now, a God who
would impose upon me a moral law which He had made
me essentiaUy incapable of obeying would be to me an
unthinkable monster."
And yet, no sooner has he thus clearly formulated his
absolute demand for the freedom of his -wiU, than Uke
aU his predecessors he becomes conscious of a certain

THE NATURE OF MAN 87
weakness in it. Quite as imperative as the claim of
Uberty is that other consciousness of a will greater than
his o-wn. He knows that he is free to act ; he cannot
conceive of Ufe without such freedom. But at the
same moment he knows equally that his own individual
Ufe is but a part in a greater whole. The law of his^
being is a fragment of the greater law by which the '
whole creation moves. If he cannot conceive of a man
except as master of his wiU, no more can he conceive of
a universe except as governed in aU its parts by one all-
directing principle. In that universe man is a part.
He must therefore be subject to that other power not
himself that guides the universe and him with it.
The older theologies in reaching this point helped
themselves out by various devices. Sometimes they
said : "Yes, man's wUl is free indeed, but it is free only
to do e-vil ! If a man beUeve himself to be doing right,
to be acting, that is, in harmony with the di-vine will,
he is deceiving himself. His actions, so far as they
proceed from his o-wn natural impulses, are evil, i.e.
they are in opposition to the divine will, and they can
be brought into harmony -with it only through some
process foreign to their o-wn real nature."
Sometimes the theologies of the past said: "Yes,
the -wiU of man is free, but only in such things as per
tain to the ordinary deaUngs of daUy Ufe {justitia civilis).

88 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
In aU that deals with the Ufe of the spirit, man's wiU
can do naturaUy only evil. To do good, it must be
specificaUy assisted, even 'prevented,' by an act of
di-vine power from -without." Or, again, they tried to
bring these two agencies, the natural will of man and
the effective grace of God, into co5peration, like part
ners in business, as it were, in a purely external and
unreconcUed combination. When this was done the
share of the human was reduced to its lowest terms,
so that the preponderance of the divine control might
be saved to its utmost Umit.
No one of these devices is satisfactory to the Uni
tarian. To say that man's will is free only to do evil
seems to him to be the same thing as saying that it is
not free at aU. To make a distinction between the
righteousness sho-wn in one's deaUngs with one's feUow-
men in everyday affairs and that which governs man
in his relations to God, seems to him to be dra-wing a
fictitious line of separation between things that essen
tiaUy belong together. Justitia civilis is to him only
another manifestation of the justitia divina, which is at
once its standard and its source. So, again, the attempt
to fix by any rational process the proportion between
the human element and the divine in man's action
seems to him an idle waste of energy. He can conceive
of no point at which the human wUl could either begin

THE NATURE OF MAN 89
or cease to be free or to be controUed by the divine
-will. What, then, is the Unitarian thought on this most
intricate of all problems? It is not a philosophical
solution; it is a religious and a moral conclusion. It
accepts the freedom of the human will, because other
wise it cannot conceive of human nature at all. At
the same time it tries so to define the human will that
it shall appear as itself a part of that divine plan to
which it has so often been represented as in opposition.
The part cannot be in essential opposition to the whole,
any more than a wheel in a great mechanism can be
hostUe to the whole. It may be an imperfect wheel;
it may be injured ; it may be badly fitted to the rest ;
it may need oiling, but essentially it must work with
aU the other parts in harmony towards the desired end.
It cannot be so geared that it shall work backward in
stead of forward. The Unitarian finds his satisfaction
in the thought that his -wUl is given him by the same
Power that directs the universe and that it must there
fore be essentiaUy good. He regrets its weakness; he
confesses and deplores its shortcomings. It has some
times gone -wrong in the past, and he is sure that it
will sometimes go wrong in the future. Yet he knows
that all the real satisfactions of his life have come
through this same despised will, — his victories over

90 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
the temptations of ease and power and lust; his sac
rifices of immediate gratification for remote satisfaction ;
his sUent endurance of scorn and pain and misunder
standing — aU these he traces to the acti-vity of this
-will, that at every point has determined his choice and
so helped to fix his character for good. These victories
of his -wiU he does not think of as wholly victories over
seff; for when he tries to define his self, he finds his
will as essentiaUy a part of it, and the best part at that.
As he reads the pathetic parable of the spendthrift
youth, he finds its kernel in the words, "He came to
himself." It was the discovery of the real self in him
that led to his recovery, and it was his o-wn will that
lifted him up and set him on his feet and led him back
into his father's house.
No, the Unitarian cannot set his wUl over against
himself as a separate thing, which may upon occasion
go into opposition to him. If his -wiU is strong, he is
strong ; if his -wUl is weak, he is weak. With it he him
self turns toward good or towards evil, and it is only
through his wiU that these words "good" and "e-vil"
have any meaning for him. In any case his -will is his
o-wn, and what he does by it cannot be reckoned to the
account of any one else. To charge his weakness upon
any other being or series of beings is a base evasion.
To ascribe his strength whoUy to any power outside

THE NATURE OF MAN

91

himseff is equaUy an uncalled-for reflection upon the
human nature he bears. It is impossible to put the
Unitarian point of view into any better words than these :
"Our wills are oars — -we kno-w not ho-w.
Our -wills are ours, to make them thine." /
My will is my own, though I do not care to go into
the question how I came by it. It is my very own;
and yet it is not a treasure which I am at Uberty to
throw away or to diminish. It is my own only imder
the condition that I make it also a part of that greater
Will by which aU the harmonies of the world are main
tained and by which the perpetual struggle that is the
law of Ufe is gmded towards a final harmony. That is
the reUgious and moral conclusion to which the Uni
tarian is led by every instinct of his nature and by the
rational working of his mind. The vexed problem of
the human wiU is solved for him, as far as it ever can be
solved, by maintaining the integrity of the will in both
its aspects. His will is free, because its freedom is
essential to that independence which is the mark of
manhood. Yet at the same time it is bound by a law
which is also essential to his definition of a man; for
there is not, and by this definition never has been, a
race of men without a higher law than that of mere self-
preservation. Below that Une we place by common

92 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
consent the world of animals. When that line is passed,
and not tiU then, we may properly use the name "man."
With the passing of that line also man came into his
right as the possessor of a •will leading him to acts for
which he owns his responsibility.
It has been necessary for us to use repeatedly the
words " good " and " evil " without trying to give them
any precise definition. Yet the conception which must
underlie any such definition is one of the most im
portant elements in all Unitarian thought. Here again
one is forced by the facts of the case into a negative
way of putting it. Throughout the earlier theologies
there runs the notion of good and evil as entities in them
selves. Especially was this the case with the idea of
evil. If, as always predicated, God was essentially good,
then in order to account for the presence of e'vil in the
world there must be over against him a something else,
antagonistic to him and working throughout nature and
life in continual opposition to him. Christian theology
was profoundly influenced by the fundamental dualism
prevaiUng in many forms in reUgions with which it came
into contact. It was, perhaps, more keenly aUve to
the dangers arising from this source than to any others.
It did its best to get rid of every trace of duaUsm in its
confessions of faith. It rejected with horror the notion
of an eternal principle of evil aU but equal •with God,

THE NATURE OF MAN

93

which continually threatened its own doctrine of the
di-vine unity. The word "Manichean," which, under
its many forms, stood for duaUstic ideas whenever and
wherever they appeared, was one of its favorite words
of reproach. Its greatest teacher, Augustine the Afri
can, who from being a follower of the Graeco-Roman
divinities had found his way into orthodox Christianity
through the gateway of Manicheism, spent a Ufetime
in fighting that duaUsm which had, after all, been to
him a training school for Christian phUosophy. He and
his successors through the centuries did their best ; but
when aU was done the fact remained that a dualistic
shading had been given to Christian thought from
which it never quite recovered. AU its protestations
could not do away with the notion of a real principle
of e-vil, generaUy embodied in a personal figure, but in
any case a reaUty. The CathoUc Church retained the
idea, in spite of its broadly human interpretations of it,
and in the great Protestant revivals of every age these
figures of an evU one as the author and maintainer of
sin became popular in the extreme.
Throughout these discussions on this most interest
ing because most personaUy vital of all reUgious ques
tions, we can trace a continuous protest against the
reality of e-vU; but an idea which requires so much
protesting is sure to be an idea with a pretty vigorous

94 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
Ufe in it. In spite of the protests of theologians the
personal devU as the embodiment of the reaUty of evil
held his own. Whether he were an object of dread or
of derision or of the two together, the consciousness of
the Christian world was impressed with the reality of
the thing he represented as -with hardly any other idea.
Unitarianism begins its thought on this subject by
squarely denying the reaUty of evil — not, be it weU
imderstood, the fact of evil ; for to deny that is simply
playing with words. By reaUty is meant here, so far
as plain language can express it, what the philosophers
mean in their distinction between the "real" and the
"ideal," — the real being that which has an inde
pendent existence of its o-wn, not merely an existence as
related to something else. In that sense of the word
the Unitarian asserts positively the relative nature of
e-vU. E-vil is itself a negation, and a negation cannot
have real existence. "E-vil" is only the opposite of
"good." It exists in the world only as shadows exist
where the sunUght fails to reach. As the Ught moves,
the shadows vanish into the nothingness they really are.
Moreover, as shadows are Ughter or heavier according
as the sun's rays approach them, so that there is in
Nature no such thing as a perfect shadow, so it is also
with the e-vU of the world. It lurks in every corner
because around that comer the sun of goodness is

THE NATURE OF MAN 95
shining clear; were there no good there would be no
evU. The depth of e-vil depends, Uke the depth of
shadows, upon the remoteness of the goodly sun and
upon the angle at which it enters the recesses of human
experience. Some souls appear to be all great luminous
fields, like the landscapes of a modern painter, filled
through and through with an almost imearthly Ught.
Some are Uke a forest scene of Ruysdael, where shadows
Ue hea-vy in among rocks and trees and even in the
sombre play of dashing water. The painter works
somewhat like the theologian. To produce his effects
he deals more with his shadows than -with his lights.
If he can get the shadows right, the Ughts will take
care of themselves. So it has been with theology. It
has emphasized the dark places, because these were
what it could deal -with most readily and most tangibly.
The good that was in the world and in men could do
without emphasis or definition.
It is precisely at this point that Unitarianism ap
proaches the problem of good and e-vil. It recognizes
frankly the fact of evil, but it changes the emphasis
from the dark side to the bright. In so far as it needs
a definition of evil it seeks it through a definition of
good ; for the negative can be defined only through the
positive. Now Unitarian thought finds its idea of good
in that same principle of harmony we have already dis-

96 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
covered to be one of its chief foundations. It frankly
gives up from the start all attempt to define an absolute
Good. Such attempts, useful enough to the philosopher,
have no place in the practical search after religious
satisfaction. It desires rather a definition of good that
can be expressed in terms intelUgible to us plain strug-
gUng mortals who demand clearness in our thinking and
an upUft in our efforts towards a higher Ufe.
"Good" means to the Unitarian mind that which is
in harmony with the will of God. The form of expres
sion does not greatly matter. Some would prefer to
say, "in harmony -with the law by which the universe
is governed," because they are afraid of using words
that might be misunderstood. The intention is the
same. In any case the definition needs some further
elaboration and especially as to the question how we
are to know the good; for obviously it is idle to lay
do-wn an abstract conception if we cannot recognize it
in the concrete case.
"Good," then, is certainly not that which happens
to please us. Probably no definition of good has ever
been more natural or more popular than this. If my
crops succeed, if my ambitions are realized, my friends
are true, my loves returned, and my hatreds avenged,
then, says the voice of common humanity, this is a good
world. I Uve in a smug contentment -with myself, and

THE NATURE OF MAN 97
the universe takes its natural and proper place in my
thought as the duly appointed minister to my happiness.
If the opposite of all these things happens, if my strength
fails, if my enemies prosper, and my friends grow luke
warm, — then the world is e-vil and I am the victim of
a subtle fate which I am and have been powerless to
control. Such a -view as this springs naturally from a
notion of man which places him at the centre of the
universe and the indi-vidual man at the centre of hu
manity, so that everything stands related to him and
is to be defined and interpreted only in this relation.
It is Uke the ancient notion that our planet the earth,
simply because we do it the honor to Uve upon it,
must be the center and all-sufficient end of creation. It
took many generations of men to get far enough away
from this notion so that their priesthoods would refrain
from burning those who dared to beUeve that our own
particular planet was only one member of a system, aU
of whose members were equally dependent upon one
central sun.
And so it has been and still is -with the notion of
good as that which pleases the individual. It has
been derided by philosophers, condemned by theologians,
combated by moralists. Yet there it is to-day one of
the most natural instincts of the human heart. The
reason for this is that the elder theologies spoUed their

98 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
own efforts to get rid of it by faiUng to supply a rational
background for their teaching, and it is here that Uni
tarians beUeve themselves to be in a better position.
The notion of an individual standard of good vanishes
into thin air the moment it is brought into contact
¦with a ¦view of Ufe as governed by a universal law, just
as the notion of a central earth, long suspected by
thinking men, vanished when it met the theory of a
planetary system governed by a universal law of gravi
tation. This background of universal law is the very founda
tion of Unitarian thought. It supplies at once what is
needed to show the weakness and the folly of imagining
that our own personal standard of good as advantage
to ourselves is a sound guide. It gives us a measure of
its pettiness, its unsteadiness, and its insufficiency. It
enables us to grasp the higher loyalty that holds us to
great things and sets us free from the tyranny of little
things. It compels us, once for all, to drop the
struggle for small satisfactions, — the keeping of our
bodies warm and cool, fed and rested, the saving of our
minds from grave responsibihties, the evasion of high
demands upon our sacrffice and our charity. It shows
us that all these forms of self-satisfaction are good only
in so far as they fit us better for the greater stress of
Ufe. The question as to what is pleasing to us is

THE NATURE OF MAN 99
lost in the larger question whether we ourselves are
pleasing in the sight of Him who is our law, of that
Law which is our highest standard, the rule and meas
ure of our experience.
But if we may not measure goodness by the standard
of our o^wn personal consciousness, our next impulse as
social beings would be to seek a standard in the society
to which we belong. May there not be some criterion
of good in its experience as a whole? Certainly we
should be mo^ving here upon a road that would lead to
nobler ideas. Something of personal pettiness would be
gone, and we should be breathing a higher air. We
may well say that in the law of the state, for example,
we have a collective expression of the things most
desirable for the community as a whole. Whatever
conforms to this pubhc law must then be "good," so
far at least as that commimity is concerned. So in the
decrees of the Church we have a record of the common
agreement of men on what it is best to do and think
within the range of faith and morals. May we not say
here also that whatever the Church decrees for its
members must represent to them the highest good?
So, also, apart from these organisations, human society
cries out to us -with varied voices of appeal or of reproof.
It begs us to reUeve its poverty, to break its oppres
sions, to enUghten its ignorance, to comfort its distress.

lOO UNITARIAN THOUGHT
to widen the bounds of its Uberty. Are not these the
measures of the highest good?
There is much in aU these forms of collective demand
to make men content with the ideals of good which they
suggest. If we faithfuUy obey the laws of the state,
respect the teaching of the Church, and lend a ready
ear to the calls of human need, why are we not con
forming to the highest standards of goodness ? The
answer Ues, as in the case of the individual, in the shift
ing motive of the standards here presented. They may
be right in the given case or they may be wrong. The
law of the state has as often served the cause of bru-
taUty and oppression as it has maintained justice and
furthered Uberty. The social teachings of religion have
as often helped to keep men in darkness as they have
opened to them the ways of Ught. The inarticulate
cries of the multitude have led into fantastic excesses as
often as they have pointed the way to real and permanent
service. "Good" is neither that which seems most agreeable
to the individual nor is it that which conforms to the
standards of social demand. Where then shaU we find
its definition? We have already declared our inabiUty
to grasp the idea of the Absolute Good. If we knew
that, we should be gods, not men. Indeed, wherever in
these reflections we come to the notion of the Absolute,

THE NATURE OF MAN loi
we shaU frankly confess our Umitation and withdraw
into the region of the humanly possible. The Unitarian
can go no farther than the definition ¦with which we
began: "That is good which is in harmony ¦with the imi
versal law." But how is this definition to be appUed?
Certainly we do not know the universal law, and how
then are we to know whether the given thought, feeling,
action, is in harmony ¦with it.
The Unitarian answer to this is: we know in the
given case whether the thing that seems good is really
so through the certain witness of the enUghtened indi
vidual conscience, and in no other way. At first this

may seem to contradict what we have said as to the
insufficiency of the indi-vidual standard of goodness;
but the contradiction is only apparent. In what was
said before we were speaking only of what appealed to
our sense of personal comfort, convenience, pleasure, or
even, in some lower sense of that great word, to our
"happiness." Now we are not referring to that kind
of satisfaction ^t aU. We are in another region of
spiritual experience. On that lower stage the individual
appears as isolated from all other forms of being. He
is his o-wn sufficient end and aim. He is in a kind of
antagonism or rivalry with every one and everything.
If he is warm, it matters not to him that others are
cold. If he have power, it is a smaU thing that hun-

I02 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
dreds are compeUed to serve him in slavery or in soul-
destro3dng labor. If his desire is sated, it cannot
matter that women's hearts are broken and children
brought into misery. His "good" is others' pain.
That kind of individual standard is mere egoism, and
we are all united in condemning it.
But there is a higher individualism, free throughout
from this reproach. The individual can discern real
good only as he brings himself into right relation with
everything else, and the medium through which he sees
this relation is what we have called his enUghtened
conscience. As to a definition of conscience there would
not, probably, be any very great difference among
reasonable men. Conscience is that inner witness
which testifies to the rightness or the wrongness of our
thoughts and our actions. It may or it may not be
possible to verify its conclusions by a rational process.
These conclusions may or may not agree with the
formal rules of our social order. They may or they
may not be in accord -with the teachings of our Bibles
and our priesthoods. Fortunate, indeed, the man ap
pears to be whose conscience runs in pleasant harmony
-with these easUy understood guides of life. He has
only to work his syllogisms, to consult his neighbor, and
to read his Bible judiciously, to keep himself and his
conscience always on excellent terms.

THE NATURE OF MAN

103

But if these outward witnesses fail, if reason wiU
not furnish a satisfactory conclusion, if society frowns,
if Scripture -will not let itself be twisted into conformity
— still conscience stands unshaken. The individual
may suffer; he may cry out in his pain, "If only I
might see a way out of my distress ! if only others
would support me ! ff only the recorded wisdom of the
Past would come to my aid !" but so long as that does
not happen, conscience must still remain supreme lord
of his being. He can only say: "I cannot do other
wise. God help me!" and take the consequences.
That is conscience as, probably, most fair-minded
men would define it. But no sooner have we reached
this definition than we begin to feel how much it needs
examination. After aU, is this imperious master of our
destiny so utterly to be trusted? Is its standard an,
absolute one, so that whatever it tells us at any mo
ment, we may be sure that is "good" and its opposite
is "evU"? Or, on the other hand, if conscience may
change, what may properly be the influences that may
produce such change? The answer to this inevitable
puzzle is found in the phrase, "the enlightened con
science." Some might prefer to say the "educated"
or the "disciplined" conscience; but these words seem
to imply some conscious training of the conscience in a
specffic direction, and that is an impUcation we ought

I04 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
especially to avoid. By the "enlightened" conscience
we mean one that, whUe it yields nothing of its lordship
over the individual life, is yet open to every worthy
suggestion from without. Each such influence it must
try before the tribunal of its o-wn best judgment,
whether it be of good or of evil. Then, if it be approved,
it will enter into the very substance of conscience itself,
modifying its standards, but making them no less im
perative. The enlightened conscience seeks light every
where and responds to it as aU brightness reflects the
Ught. The enUghtenment of the conscience defends it, in
the first place, from itself. Every one knows the t)^e
of person we caU "too conscientious." Properly speak
ing, that is a false term. No one can be too conscien
tious in the sense of following conscience too strictly.
The fault in these cases is not in the following but in
the conscience itseff. It has become warped or it has
been terrorized or deceived. The conscience may prey
upon itseff, shutting itself away from every influence
and driving its victim aroimd in a vicious circle of ideas
from which he would, but cannot, extricate himself.
Such a conscience may well be called rather puzzled
than enUghtened. It is keen, but it cuts in wrong direc
tions. A man under its influence imagines himself to
be "consistent" and prides himself upon this. He has

THE NATURE OF MAN

105

long since laid do-wn some rule of action, which at the
moment he believed right, and from this rule he wUl
not depart — he wUl not touch alcohol, he will sleep
only so many hours in the day, he wUl set apart so
much of his income for charity, he wUl not accept a
gift from a friend, lest he incur an obligation he cannot
pay. These things once seemed to him supremely im
portant and so he will still observe them. He over
looked the certainty of growth in himself, and of change
in all his surroundings, and now, when he has grown
and things about him have changed, and he sees with
the best part of him that these obligations are fictitious,
stUl he wUl not shake them off. He shuts out the light
of experience and reason and keeps on in the shadows
of what he and others call his conscience, doing weak
and fooUsh things and all the whUe growing less capable
of making useful distinctions of motive. The enlighten
ment of the conscience defends it thus from itself.
Without it the conscience may prey upon itself and so
become reaUy ineffective.
Again, as enUghtenment protects a man against what
seems a too keen sense of conscience, so, on the other
hand, it defends him against its fatal dulness. Every
honest man must confess to moments when, having long
striven to uphold the standard of right Uving, he feels
a doubt whether, after aU, it is worth whUe. The doubt

Io6 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
admitted grows into a habit; conscience, that had
guided him safely so far, ceases to admonish him, and
he moves towards a catastrophe. Such wreck of cofi-
science could be averted if the man were able to see in
time that conscience was only another expression of the
highest reasonableness. He has let it go because it
seemed to him to contradict those other teachings of
experience and of reason which have come to mean
more to him. If he had been able to set his conscience
in the light of all that seemed to him best worth whUe
in Iffe, so that it would have been brought into har
mony with all this instead of remaining in opposition
to it, then he might have saved himself.
It wUl be objected to these suggestions that they
point toward an evident obscuring of the special func
tion of conscience, that they tend to efface all distinc
tion between conscience and reason. Following this
line of thought, it will be said, a man might reason him
self into anything, so that enUghtenment of the con
science ought rather to be called perversion of the con
science. There is ob-vious force in these objections.
The tribimal of conscience • does not act by, ;precise
codes and statistics, for which page and number may
be quoted. It gives its decisions according to a larger
equity, which does not admit of precise definition in
advance, and the work of equity is obviously more diffi-

THE NATURE OF MAN 107
cult than that of formal law. It is true that the en
lightenment of the conscience is often dangerous, but
so is every other struggle of human nature that is worth
while. It is because of the Unitarian's faith in the capacities
of human nature that he is -willing to take the risk of
committing himself to the guidance of the enlightened
conscience in his effort to distinguish the highest good.
He knows that in the process there are likely to be
moments when the conscience wUl be puzzled into con
fusion and other moments when it wUl be in danger of
perversion, but he beUeves that on the whole the honest
struggle for a true enlightenment -wiU be successful.
He does not think of this struggle as a misfortune. He
sees in it the ine-vitable law of all being, the condition
of progress and the discipline of all a man's powers.
To state it once more, the Unitarian believes that to be
good which is in harmony -with the eternal law of the
universe, and he beUeves that this harmony can be
discerned by the safe witness of the enUghtened con
science and in no other way. He does not imagine that
by this process a system of rules could be evolved which
the untrained -wiU could follow. Rather, he believes
that from moment to moment the disciplined conscience
discovers its way, and this often the most surely when
it can give least accurate account of its o-wn processes.

Io8 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
The ultimate verdict of the soul so guided must always
be, "I know this to be good because, being the thing I
am, I cannot see it otherwise. It is good to me because
I am myseff."
Man remains thus, to the Unitarian, a being, aU of
whose manifold capacities are normally planned to
work together in harmony -with each other and with the
universe of law in which he is a part. We may not
without peril try to separpte between body, mind, heart,
and soiU in making our image of man as a reUgious
being. This conception of man enables the Unitarian
to face with entire calmness and certainty of ultimate
satisfaction aU the efforts of a true science to point out
the place of man in the scheme of things. Whatever
^proves to be true, that we need not fear, and the only
way to reach truth is to try. Man is, furthermore, a
creature with a wUl of his very o-wn, — none the less
his ovm because it is Umited by the greater law about
him. In adjusting his wUl to the higher -wiU of God
he finds the supreme chaUenge of his moral nature to
that action which is the chief glory of his manhood.
Finally, to guide his -wiU in action, he reUes upon the
ultimate authority of that enUghtened conscience in
which he finds the highest certificate of his value as a
co-worker in the business of the universe. The Uni
tarian beUeves that a being so constructed must neces-

THE NATURE OF MAN 109
sarily become a reUgious being, and his concern is to
define as weU as he can the reUgion that best conforms
to this idea of human nature. ReUgion thus seems to
him not something imposed upon man from the out
side, but something developed from within, the natural
and ine-vitable expression of man's nature. Only so
can it have for him either interest or value.

CHAPTER IV
the bible
One accent of the Holy Ghost
The heedless world hath never lost.
— R. W. Emerson.
It would be hard to describe the thought of Uni
tarians about the Bible in language essentially different
from that which would be employed to-day by the
more inteUigent members of other Christian bodies.
What were, a generation ago, rather startling proposi
tions as to the nature and origin of the writings con
tained in the two canons have now become the com
monplaces of aU freely thinking men. In stating,
therefore, the Unitarian position on this subject one
must include much that is not by any means pecuUar
to it. So far as these matters are concerned. Uni
tarians rejoice to find so -wide agreement -with their
-views, and can claim for themselves only a more fearless
and consistent apphcation of them. Beyond the range
of this common -view, however, they think they see and
feel certain wider horizons which it is the object of the
present chapter to suggest.
The Unitarian sees in the Bible two collections of

THE BIBLE III
writings having -with each other mainly this connection :
that the -writers of the second, being Hebrews, referred
back naturally and frequently to the first. In that
first collection was contained the Uterary expression of
the national and reUgious Ufe of the Hebrew people.
It gave them their history, their poetry, and their law.
The -writings it comprised were the survival, by a law
of the fittest, from centuries of Uterary activity. They
had inspired the patriotism, the unity, the persistence,
the genius, of the. race. They had entered into its con
sciousness as, probably, the Uterature of no other race
has done — unless it be, perhaps, that of the related
Semitic Arabs. In the absence of the plastic arts they
had satisfied their esthetic sense upon its splendid
imagery and nourished their energy of the day by con
tinual draughts from its store of great examples in their
national past. It was impossible for the Hebrew, when
he desired to express himself on the great questions of
religion or of racial hope, not to draw his language
from this inexhaustible storehouse of material famiUar to
every Ustener.
That is reason enough for the countless references in
the New Testament to the great classic collection of
the Old. That and the common racial temperament
are sufficient also to account for the obvious simUarity
in tone between the two collections. But when this

112 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
has been said, pretty much all has been said that can
be brought forward for the unity of the two. Our
editions of the Bible have so accustomed us to the im
pression of unity that it costs us a considerable effort
to shake it off. We know with our intelUgence that
Moses cannot have written the accoimt of his o-wn
death, and yet we can never quite escape the deadening
effect of those fatal editorial headlines to our translation,
in which the Old Testament writers are made to refer to
the events and persons of the New. It is as if a spell
had been cast upon us from which we were even yet
unable to awake. Jesus, the Apostles, the Church, are
made, in this vague, uncertain Ught, to appear as char
acters in the drama of Hebrew race development, rather
than as factors in a new and upward movement of
humanity. When Isaiah, in a moment of prophetic exal
tation, breaks out into the language of confident predic
tion of a great personal leadership for Israel, we imagine
him to have seen a vision of the cradle at Bethlehem.
In the Ught of later events every available word and
phrase of the ancient literature has been tortured out
of its proper meaning and made to appear as a definite
prediction. It has been almost in vain that scholars of every
creed and of no creed have sho-wn the futility of such
imaginings. The common consciousness of Christendom

THE BIBLE

113

still suffers from this unhistorical way of approaching
historical fact. It is stiU necessary to remove this first
fimdamental obstacle before we can go on to any rational
consideration of the Bible as a whole. One is tempted
sometimes to regret that this body of literature was
ever presented to the world as a unit, and certainly all
praise is to be given to those who in their several ways
have contributed to a juster method of approach to it.
The abolition of artfficial and arbitrary paragraphs and
chapters, the separation of the Old from the New
Testament, the pubUcation of the various books in
separate volumes, the endless critical examinations into
the probable age of every -writing and the probable
process of its composition, — aU these are welcome, and
they have had their effect. Yet one has only to Usten
to the conversation of the plain man on this subject to
learn how smaU on the whole the result has been. It is
true that in some minds the old faith in the authority
of the Bible has been utterly destroyed, while in others
it has remained practically unchanged. Either way the
old impression of unity has remained. One set of persons
has said: "If parts of the Bible are wrong, then the
whole is gone." Another set have said: " AU this babble
of the critics is an idle waste of energy ; the Bible stands
where it always stood, as the guide and the Ught of men."
In both cases men are stiU thinking of it as one thing,

114 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
and this cannot be forgotten in any inteUigent discus
sion of the subject. The Bible is stiU here as a factor
in the thought and practice of Christians. It is not
going to be resolved into its elements and disappear in
the maze of critical controversy. Indeed the fimction
of all criticism is to make Uterature more inteUigible,
and the criticism of the Bible is no exception.
Unitarians are and have generaUy been in fifllest
sympathy -with aU these modern attempts to place the
bibUcal writings before the world as they were meant
to be placed, each in its own proper order of time and
of composition and each translated so as to give the
meaning which its author, ignorant as we aU are of the
future, intended to give it. So presented, they find in
them a principle of unity far higher and more impres
sive than any artificial principle could be. They think
of the Old Testament as the record of the Ufe of a people
inspired, as no other people -within the range of our
vision has been, by the genius of reUgion. They value
this record because, coming out of the reUgious con
sciousness of one race, it may serve the highest purpose
in rousing and maintaining the same reUgious conscious
ness in other races. As the Hebrew, fighting his way
to national recognition in the midst of warring peoples,
found his raUying point in the worship of Jehovah, so
our own nation in its struggles for national unity and its

THE BIBLE

"S

highest expression in righteousness of Ufe, may draw
hope and courage from loyalty to a divine ideal.
It is not a question of accepting or rejecting every
detaU of Hebrew theology or Hebrew moraUty. We
may use and reverence the Old Testament without ac
cepting the ancient notion of a God"made in the like
ness of an earthly ruler. We may admire heroism and
devotion, justice and mercy, -without accepting the pro-
-visions of the Le-vitical Law. We may share the rapture
of the Psalmist and yet not admire David as an example
of decent U-ving. StiU less are we concerned with ques
tions of historical accuracy. We may know for certain
that this fact or series of facts is presented whoUy out
of historical sequence. This is nothing more than what
happens constantiy with the material of any other
record. We do not, on this account, reject the record
as unhistorical ; we only try to straighten it out and to
understand it in its proper shape. Then, when this is
done, and not until then, the record becomes valuable
for the education of humanity. So it is -with that won
derful collection of history, poetry, and law we are here
deaUng -with.
Unitarians have no fear of the critical process, because
they try to distinguish between the essential and the
non-essential. "Criticism," which is nothing more
than careful and inteUigent examination, deals with the

Il6 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
detail of language, history, usages, beUefs of the people
whose record it studies. When its work is done, — if it
ever could be done, — there remains the really im
portant thing, the picture of the people's acti-vity and
of its highest thought. Criticism is useful only as it
helps to make the picture more accurate, to explain
and justify the process of the thought.
So far Unitarians go alongside of aU others who in
these days of science have been trying to make the
Bible more useful to the world in which we Uve. They
accept the results of scholarship with cheerful confidence,
because they beUeve scholars to be on the whole serious
and right-minded persons who are seeking for truth by
methods of their o-wn and because they are quite sure
that truth is one and must prevail. Again, we must
emphasize the Unitarian principle, that no truth can
reaUy contradict another truth, and that therefore the
only safe attitude towards all serious pursuit of truth
is the attitude of encouragement and hopefulness. We
are not concerned here -with hasty or iU-considered or
partisan or flippant judgments masquerading under the
mask of scholarship. Like aU other shams, these -wiU
meet their natural fate in the long account. We can
deal here only -with honest work by honest men, and in
valuing honesty Unitarians can hardly flatter them
selves that they differ greatly, at least in intention, from

THE BIBLE

117

Other men. Wherein, then, is the Unitarian position
in regard to the Bible pecuUar ? What advantage have
Unitarians over others in their approach to this ques
tion? The first advantage they can properly claim is that
to them the books of the Bible, no matter what their
character, prophecy, legend, law, poetry, history, or
what not, are the work of human beings. Their faith
on this point is part of their general con-viction as to
human nature. They beUeve men to be capable of
producing the best there is in this body of Uterature,
and they are sure that none but men could have pro
duced the worst. To put it in more conventional
language, their views about Revelation and Inspiration
differ radicaUy from those which have been traditional
in the Church. Unitarians like these words. They
would be glad to keep them; but they would a thou
sand times rather give them up altogether than let it
be supposed for a moment that they accept them in
their conventional meanings. Here again Unitarians
find themselves in line with certain recognizable ten
dencies from the earUest ages of the Church. The
definitions of revelation and inspiration have always
varied -widely with times and -with individuals. On the
one hand there have been those who have thought of
revelation as a process by which truth, so far as it con-

Il8 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
cemed the highest things, came to men quite apart from
their ordinary ways of reaching it. Ordinarily we study
and experiment; we think and draw conclusions, and
when we come to a stopping place we say we have dis
covered some fragment of a truth. It is a laborious
method, not dramatic or picturesque. It seems to be a
part of our "fallen" nature that we should have to
struggle and stumble along in this painful fashion only
at last to know that we have attained only to an im
perfect insight, have grasped only half truths, have
caught only passing glimpses of the fuU -vision that
seems somehow to belong to us by right. It is no
wonder that men have been impatient of such slow
progress and have tumed -with reUef to the thought of
another and more flattering method. The plodding
must indeed go on; that is a part of our human dis
cipline, but that is not aU. From time to time God,
in his mercy, intervenes and conveys to men directly,
without the mediation of their own powers, such por
tions of truth as it seems best to Him to give. The men
through whom this truth comes are "mediums" of the
Holy Spirit. They do not discover truth by any effort
of their own. It comes to them without their seeking.
It is independent of their preparation, spiritual or
mental. They are not the product of their time ; they
are picked out from among the ranks of men by a direct

THE BIBLE

119

choice of God, and their utterances are not their own,
but are in very truth the voice of God himself. Revela
tion thus differs from every other means by which the
highest truth is conveyed to men in being a direct message
carrying an authority above aU human sanction.
That is one -view of revelation. Parallel -with it lias
been mo-ving, however, another, equally well-defined,
but requiring a somewhat more ample consideration.
According to this other view, religious truth, like all
other truth, comes to men through the natural develop
ment of their own powers. Like everything else worth
ha-ving, it must be bought and paid for. The struggle
for truth, like the struggle for virtue, is a part of our
human inheritance. It is not a penalty for anything,
except for being men. It is the struggle that makes
the truth valuable. It would be as mean to ask for
truth -without work, as it is to ask for "salvation" as
the free gift of any one. Nor is the struggle to be
thought of as merely painful, discouraging, depressing.
On the contrary, it has the joy that always comes -with
the conffict of good against e-vil. Sometimes it brings
the fierce joy of battle, when the forces of Ught are
clearly arrayed against those of darkness, and blows ring
on the armor of superstition and formaUsm. Sometimes
it is the gentler joy of patient labor, when the mind,
groping for a while in uncertainty, works its way out

I20 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
through dimly Ughted ways into the full vision of new
heavens and a new earth. But whatever may be its
nature, the conflict is worth aU it costs. It is only
through struggle that men's powers are quickened. If
they are not used they fail and die, and men sink back
into a duU acceptance of whatever some authority,
clothed in the respectable garments of tradition, may
offer them. But if they are used, every man for him
self trying to gain the measure of truth of which he is
capable, then these powers grow more acute. Men
come to see more and more clearly into the reaUties of
thought and Ufe. Truth won in this way at the cost
of serious indi-vidual effort has a value that no merely
accepted ideas can ever have. It enters, vitally and
productively, into the Uves of men. It moves ever
forward and not back. It leads men on to new adjust
ments of their former thought. It helps them to under
stand and to value the discoveries of other men and to
judge them, whether they be really new fragments of
the universal truth or no.
Not only, therefore, are Unitarians not dismayed by
the struggle after truth: they welcome it and rejoice
in it as the only means they can understand by which
the highest truth is effectively carried to the minds and
hearts of men. It is in this process and only thus that
they come to a definition of Revelation. They see the

THE BIBLE I2i
struggle after tmth going on from age to age, one gener
ation handing on to the next the results and the ma
terials of its o-wn conffict, and then from point to point
they find some people or some indi-vidual showing, as it
were, the ripened accumulation of aU this effort. In the
utterances of this people or of these indi-viduals they
read the gradual unfolding of the -wiU of God, and they
caU that Revelation. They know weU that the process
is not continuous. It moves, not like some vast river
sweeping on in one resistiess course from the mountains
to the sea, but rather Uke some desert stream, welUng
up among rocky gorges, making its way through burning
shaUows, now lost for a space in the enguffing sands,
now rising again in blessed oases where the people find
their rest and refreshment; again disappearing, but
never lost and never reaching an end discernible to man.
There is no thought more abhorrent to the Unitarian
than that revelation should have been made once for
aU, to one people, at one time, through one channel,
never needing to be renewed or re-interpreted. Such an
idea of revelation seems to him to contradict every
true conception of deity and manhood aUke. In this
matter he has the deepest sympathy with those enthu
siasts of the second and third centuries who proclaimed
a "New Prophecy" and justified themselves on the
ground that all revelation needed to be supplemented

122 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
and completed by new revelation. Mankind, they said,
was able at any given time to receive only a certain
measure of di-vine truth and therefore must be given
ever new declarations suited to its new condition.
One sees that the really deepest truth in the "New
Prophecy" was this clear indication of an ever advan
cing education of humanity. The Unitarian takes this
truth and puts it into other language. He says: Man
kind, endowed with power of insight into the deepest
things of the spirit, may, nay must, cultivate that
power. It is his most precious gift, and he would
be recreant to every trust if he failed to make the
most of it. As he uses it, spiritual truths become
clearer and clearer to him. He does not expect to attain
to the perfect vision. If he did, he would cease to be
man, and he is content to remain what he was made
to be, with all its possibiUties for higher development.
Nor, again, does he expect new truth in any absolute
sense. Rather he strives to find out for himself, as a
man of to-day, Uving in the iriidst of all to-day's struggle
and aU to-day's resources, the permanent principles of
the divine order and then, so far as he finds them, to
Uve by them.
These principles, wherever he can find them, in book
or in Ufe, are the revelation of God. The movement of
mankind is a process of education. Man understands

THE BIBLE

123

to-day what he could not understand some years ago,
because his -vision of the world has become enlarged.
In other words he is open now to wider revelations, and
he -wiU get them if -with aU his heart he truly seeks
them — not otherwise. No di-vine messenger comes to
the unprepared or the unseeking mind. We must ask
to receive ; we must seek to find ; we must knock —
hard — if we expect to find the doors of apprehension
opening to us. Revelation means, then, to the Uni
tarian, only spiritual comprehension seen from the other
side. Its essence is in the ineradicable human demand
for more and ever more clearness in understanding the
relations of man to the world in which he forms a part
and to the divine source from which he traces alike his
and its descent. In answer to that demand the knowl
edge, the certainty he craves, comes. It comes always
and everywhere — only, it requires also on the part of
man a judgment as to whether it be indeed the revela
tion of God. He is not bound to accept every pretended
declaration of the highest truth as ff it carried with it
a supreme authority — rather, he is bound to test it by
some standard, and in this testing process we find our
selves before one of the most searching questions of all
reUgions. By what standard is an alleged revelation to be
judged? Surely, again, by no absolute test. We are

124 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
not in possession of absolute measures of spiritual
values. Whatever the standard may be, it must have
its basis in some human subject, individual or collective.
There have been many answers to this question within
the Umits of Christianity, but they aU reduce them
selves finally to two. Revelation is to be judged and
measured either by a recognized human authority or by
the imdefinable, but none the less clear and emphatic,
witness of the spirit of aU truth in the hearts of indi
vidual men. The former solution has, of course, been
that which has chiefly commended itself to men. It
has appealed to them through the eternal child that is in
man, — the -wUUngness, nay, the eagerness, to be led;
the dread of uncertainty; the fear of error; the bUnd
reUance upon the older and greater power near us, as
the yoimger child looks up to the elder one as the em
bodiment of aU goodness and aU -wisdom. That is one
side of it. Then, on the other side, has been the natural
human impulse to exploit these childUke motives for
ends good and bad. Men have joined themselves
together into a great association claiming for itself a
divine commission to receive and hold and interpret
for aU men the ultimate sources of reUgious truth.
Revelation left free would, so it has been said, destroy
itself in every kind of unruly and violent expression.
One revelation would contradict another; there would

THE BIBLE 1 25
be controversies without end; Christians would be
hopelessly divided upon the most important questions.
The only safety lay in acquiescence -with the dictation
of the organized authority. That acquiescence being,
then, desirable, it followed that it might be enforced by
every kno-wn method of compelling obedience.
That has been the solution, historicaUy, of the prob
lem of testing revelation. The historic Church assumed
the function, appUed the tests, and declared the revela
tion closed. Henceforth, every effort of the indi-vidual
mind or conscience to interpret for itself the "Word of
God" was rebelUon, revolt against the divinely con
stituted arbiter of all truth. Every other association of
men, in no matter how honest an effort to understand
and interpret and maintain the same body of declared
revelation, was not a branch of the Christian Church,
but a mere conventicle of misguided men, afloat on a
sea of vague imaginings, -without rudder or compass.
The great release of the Protestant Reformation did
not, so far as its immediate claims were concemed,
greatly change the situation. It did indeed destroy,
once and for aU, the idea of a single permanent human
authority to which aU men were bound to look for the
last word in faith and conduct; but it substituted, or
declared that it substituted, for this personal authority,
another no less binding and even more permanent, the

126 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
authority of the written book. This substitution of one
authority for another has often been made a cause of
reproach against the Reformation, as if men ought to
have seen farther ahead than the needs and possibiUties
of their own day. Some men there were, even in the
sixteenth century, who felt the Umitation of the domi
nant view; but they proved to be the radicals, even
the fanatics, of the reform movement. The responsible
leaders saw, wisely, that to ensure any rational measure
of success for the cause they had most at heart they
must not move too fast or too far. It would never have
done to cast away the principle of papal authority and
shake off the control of the Roman ecclesiastical law
without offering in their place some single and tangible
substitute. A direct appeal to the higher law of the
spirit would have fallen upon deaf ears, or if heard at
aU would have been wildly misunderstood.
And yet from the first moment when the principle of
the authority of the Bible was proclaimed as the one
sufficient guide of Christian faith and practice, the
emancipation of men's minds from any external control
was also declared. For from that moment it was
clear that this one aU-sufficient "Word of God" must
be -widely interpreted. Until then there had been but
the one official interpreter, claiming as of right to be
the sole medium through which the meaning of the

THE BIBLE 127
written book could be brought home to the conscious
ness of men. But now that one interpreter had been
rejected, and men found themselves face to face with
two alternatives: either they must agree upon a verbal
and literal meaning, or else they must give room for
individual learning and critical inquiry. Both of these
methods were tried; but with the increasing enUghten
ment of the new age there could be no doubt which
would prevaU. The method of Uteralness was, and
always must be, a method of despair. It is the nega
tion of everything that can permanently command the
respect of thinking men. To insist upon it is equivalent
to asking that men should cease to use their minds ;
and that they -wUl not long consent to do. It was
tried and met its inevitable fate. In its place came,
slowly, with hesitation and apology, but ever with
steadier step and more assured con-viction, the method
of learned and reverent inquiry and examination.
When Luther declared, -with characteristic vehemence,
that the Epistle of James was nothing but an "epistle
of straw," because "there was no Christ in it," he was
laying down a principle of criticism that has been work
ing from that day to this. If he, Luther, had the
right to a personal judgment as to the value of a canoni
cal book, he could never deny to any other learned
and serious minded man the same right. Other-wise he

128 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
would only have been proclaiming himself in place of
the Pope he had renounced. Without intending it, he
had opened up the' way for that free and fearless study
of the written word which is the chief glory of modern
scientific theology. Combated by "the Church," it
has commended itself to the churches, and its victory,
so long as it holds itself within the same bounds that
are set for all science, is secure. It need hardly be
added that with aU this process of bringing this portion
of the di-vine revelation to the understanding of men.
Unitarians have as a body been in perfect sympathy.
If they have not been the leaders in it, this has been
partly because they have never laid that emphasis upon
the Bible as the sole source of Christian truth which
other bodies of Christians have given to it and partly
also because many of what seem to others startUng
results of learned research have been from the begin
ning among the commonplaces of their thought. Their
acceptance of these results has been prompt and hearty.
The spirit which has moved men to such inqmries, the
spirit of free and independent thought, the right of the
human mind to give itself satisfaction on these as well
as on aU other rational questions, is the very spirit of
Unitarianism. From what we have just said about Revelation fol-

THE BIBLE 129
lows, as its necessary sequence, the Unitarian thought
about Inspiration. This, too, is a word Unitarians Uke
and would be sorry to part -with. It means a great deal
to them pro-vided they may give it their o-wn meanings.
Otherwise they must, to be honest, let it go and seek
to express their thought in other ways. Revelation we
have understood as the unfolding to men, through their
own powers, of the divine plan. Inspiration may be
defined as the agency through which revelation acts.
The two terms are correlative. Revelation is made
kno-wn through "inspired" men. Inspiration is the
means of revelation. An inspired man is one who has
a revelation to make. There is a history to the word
inspiration as there is to the word revelation, and this
history has foUowed in general the same course. From
a very early moment in the life of Christianity, the
minds of thinking men were turned to the question of
the personaUties through whom the alleged revelations
had taken place. Beginning -with Jesus himself the in
quiry could not help being made : How were these men
selected from the mass of mankind to do this specific
work ? It was e-vident that, -with the exception of Paul,
the aUeged authors of the New Testament writings were
not men of such formal education that they could be
described as reUgious phUosophers working out a scheme
of reUgion on the basis of scholarly inquiry or of pro-

130 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
found indi-vidual reflection. In general, the same pre
sumption would hold also for the writers of the Old
Testament. Their varied production could not be de
scribed as a distinctively learned "output." In both
cases the source of the spiritual strength that gave to
the Bible its claim upon the attention of mankind was
felt to be in something not reducible to the ordinary
processes of human education.
The word for that something was "inspiration." Its
formal definition was simple enough. It meant what its
derivation indicated — the "inbreathing" of a message
or of a personal quality from some source outside
the man himself. The inspired man was one upon
whom the divine breath had blo-wn and given him a
certainty and an authority not derivable from any other
source. So far men were agreed, but from this point
on divergent views began to appear. As in the case of
revelation so here there were marked extremes. On
the one hand it was held that the inspiration by which
a revelation was made possible must be absolute and
direct. It could make no difference what kind of per
son was its vehicle — not even personal saintUness was
a condition, and stiU less a trained inteUect. "The
Spirit bloweth where it Usteth" was a sufficient answer
to aU objections. The -writers of the old and the
new canons alike were calami dei, amanuenses spiritus

THE BIBLE

131

sancti, mere mouthpieces for the Spirit. They were
not even personally affected by the work they were set
to do ; they hardly knew they were doing it. They did
not imderstand the message they delivered. When they
were not immediately engaged in the work of writing,
they became at once the plain, commonplace persons
they seemed to be. Such a view as this excluded every
idea of inspiration as convejdng personal quaUty. At
most it could give only aptitudes, which ceased when
they were not caUed into immediate action.
This extreme -view had the merit of simpUcity and
consistency. It avoided aU subtlety of reflection, and
it seemed to carry -with it the more authority as it ex
cluded human agencies from the work of revelation.
Yet it was never formally accepted by the Church.
Like the extreme impersonal view of revelation, it is a
doctrine of despair. It should be said to the eternal
honor of the CathoUc Church that it has never been
willing to eliminate the human element from its thought
of the di-vine process in deaUng -with the souls of men.
It accepted the idea of "inspiration" as of something
essentiaUy superior to the ordinary processes of human
activity ; but it recognized also that aU results of in
spiration required to be interpreted. It certified certain
leaders of Christian thought, certain "Fathers," as pre
eminently quaUfied to give such interpretation, but it

132 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
was not bound even by these. It reserved to its own
administration, through its principle of a government
at once human and divine, the continuing right to give
final judgment upon the actual meaning of disputed
texts of Scripture. It had scant patience with any doc
trines of UteraUsm. It treated such extravagances as
in the earUer stages it had dealt with all that body of
puritanic rigorism kno-wn under the general term of
Montanism. It thrust them out into a Umbo in which
belonged whatever aberrations from the strictly sound
could be regarded as dangerous outgrowths rather than
as positive errors. It was reserved for the more thorough
going "evangehcal" parties of the Reformation to force
this issue to its ultimate conclusion and, in so forcing it,
to develop the germs of ruin it carries within itself.
AUowed to have its way, it went to pieces by its o-wn
weight and can no longer command a patient hearing
among thinking men.
In its place there comes a variety of attempts to set
the Umits of the inspiration of men whom all were -wiU
ing to caU "inspired." Sometimes it was said that they
were technicaUy inspired along certain lines and not in
others. Distinctions were drawn between their function
in spiritual matters and in things purely material.
When they wrote history, it was said they were just
ordinary men; when they wrote poetry they were

THE BIBLE

133

something a Uttle different from men ; when they rose
to the heights of prophecy they were hardly men at all,
but beings almost divine. The value of what they wrote
came, not from its own intrinsic merit, but from the fact
of inspiration. Whatever was said by an "inspired"
man, no matter if it were the veriest nonsense when
measured by human standards, was to be read with
respect and somehow made to square with his really
worthy utterances. This kind of circular reasoning can
hardly seem to us anything but a rather pitiful waste of
energy and yet it carried -with it great promise of Ught
and help. Behind it all lay the one hopeful sign that,
after aU, men were setting themselves free from the
trammels of UteraUsm and were coming to recognize
the truly human side in the production of reUgious
Uterature. As soon as this note was touched, men came to see
that there was going to be a way out of their hesitations
and fears. It became clear that human standards must
be appUed if human beings were to be satisfied in their
demands for an intelUgent and an intelUgible faith. It
was seen that really men had always been using their
minds, even when they were protesting that in these
matters they had no minds to use. Even in the estab-
Ushment of a canon of the Old and of the New Testa
ment, m the selection of certain writings and the rejec-

134 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
tion of others, men had used judgments, had appUed
standards, had acted for themselves. Unless we were
to go back to the vicious circle again and say that the
men who made these selections were themselves "in
spired," in the rigid sense of that word, so that their
action was dictated by a power outside themselves, it
was evident that here, at the very beginning, the prin
ciple of "criticism" had been laid down and acted upon.
So it had been -with the later, mediaeval treatments of
the Bible. Human ingenuity practised upon it -with
cruel thoroughness. It was t-wisted and tortured out of
aU semblance of reason. Its plainest statements were
exhibited to a deUghted world in their "allegorical,"
their "tropological," and their "anagogical" meanings
until the words of Scripture came to be hardly more
than so many counters in a game, the rules of which
were likely to be changed whenever it became tiresome
to the players. As one wades through the tangle of
this half insane juggUng with the original documents of
Christianity, one is almost incUned to think that the
boldest UteraUsm might be less dangerous. And yet,
through it all, there is the one hopeful, forward pointing
sign : that the minds of men were working on the prob
lem of getting at the meaning of a di-vine message in
human ways. In their o-wn fashion these hair-spUtting
theologians of the Middle Ages were engaged upon a

THE BIBLE 135
psychology of inspiration, sifting it to its depths and
trying it by every conceivable test of human ingenuity.
They beUeved themselves to be the most absolutely
unquestioning recipients of a di-vine message from with
out. In reaUty they were asserting the right of their
manhood to reduce this message to forms suited to their
own powers of apprehension.
The men of the Reformation seemed to have taken a
backward step toward UteraUsm and the extremest forms
of objecti've inspiration. With their intense emphasis
upon Scripture as the sole ultimate authority for Chris
tian faith, they could hardly have done otherwise than
seek to remove it as far as possible from aU danger of
subjective opinion. They did what they could, but it
was not for men who had themselves rejected the prin
ciple of a single authoritative interpretation of Christian
truth to set bounds to the spirit of inquiry they had
evoked. The work of interpreting Scripture must needs
go on, and it went on along the lines of natural, human
progress. The discussions -within the Reform camp,
notably during the seventeenth century, on the question
of inspiration, show how hard the struggle was between
UteraUsm and UberaUsm. Even as late as this it seemed
to many worthy souls that all the gains of the century
just passed were at stake if the element of human per
sonaUty in the -writers of Scripture were to be given

136 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
more than a merely formal recognition. After the
Reformation as before, men were afraid of man. In
deed, the emphasis of the Reformation upon the Augus
tinian doctrine of sin carried with it a renewed distrust
of human nature. Sinful beings Uke ourselves could
not be conceived of as the real authors of the great
message of the old and the new dispensations. And
this distrust has continued. "I don't beUeve the He
brews ever wrote the books of the Old Testament,"
said a university professor, not a theologian, to the
writer not long since. "But why not ?" "Because men
of so low a grade as the ancient Hebrews showed them
selves to be could never have risen to such heights of
spiritual utterance." "Who, then, do you think -wrote
them?" "No one but God himself." Blanker mind-
lessness than this can hardly be imagined, but it cer
tainly represents a widely extended opinion — or senti
ment taking the place of opinion — at the present day.
We have already given it the credit of simpUcity and
consistency. It reUeves the mind at once from any
strain and luUs the conscience into a grateful repose.
It is precisely against this attitude of distrust toward
human nature that Unitarians have reacted in their
thought about Inspiration. They do not beUeve the
ancient Hebrews or any other people to have been
chiefly wicked or fooUsh or imspiritual. They beUeve

THE BIBLE 13 7
every people, Uke every indi-vidual, to be made up of
capacities for activity of many and different kinds.
What the race may become or may do in the world,
depends upon the development of these capacities, just
as the character and the achievement of a man depend
upon the direction and the employment of the capacities
with which he is naturaUy endowed. The ancient Greek
and the mediaeval ItaUan were gifted with the sense of
beauty and -with the capacity for abstract speculation.
The ancient Romans and the modern EngUsh have been
the great examples of widely directed power in the
organization of human society under law. Other nations
have had these same capacities, only in lesser degree,
so that we may fairly speak of these as the flowering out
into perfection of quahties belonging to the human race
as a whole.
So it was -with the especial endowment of the Hebrew
people. Every branch of the human family has had
its reUgious instinct and has worked it out into some
form of expression pecuUar to itself — in conformity,
as we say, to its o-wn genius. But, in the case of the
Hebrew race, this reUgious instinct may be thought
of as its chief directing motive. It is certainly nothing
pecuUar that its history and its aspirations were iden
tified -with its di-vine ideals. That was the case with
most peoples. The gods were their gods, and what

138 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
they did, the gods did -with them. That is not the
remarkable thing about the Hebrew contribution to the
world's store of experience. What gave to the Hebrew
people its special claim to the attention of the world
was its capacity for stripping away from the concep
tion of deity aU merely decorative and external elements
and rising to the thought of Deity pure and simple as
the sole guide and Ught of men. In its highest mo
ments, Hebrew "prophecy" touched a level no other
ever reached, and even its lower expressions reveal a
striving after spiritual clearness such as no other reUgious
Uterature can furnish. What then ? Shall we say that
the men who brought to utterance all this accumulation
of the people's spiritual endowment were anything but
men, gifted above their feUows with the power of in
sight which all shared in a greater or less degree ?
The Unitarian answers that question -with a distinct
and imquaUfied "no." He beUeves the great voices of
the Hebrew past to have been the voices of human
beings, speciaUy gifted in this way as others have been
gffted in other ways. He sees, for example, a perfect
analogy in the varied endowment of men -with the
subtle gift of music. We find whole races of men where
musical susceptibihty is almost universal, and others
where it is altogether exceptional. Among the more
gifted peoples arise with great frequency individuals in

THE BIBLE

139

whom the universal endowment reaches an acute degree.
What others attain -with infinite pains comes to them as
easily as the breath of Ufe. Sometimes such rare en
dowment is a mere snare to the soul, — a -wild, passionate
impulse, leading no whither and breaking itself to pieces
against the limitations of circumstance. But when it is
combined -with -vital gifts of character, then it blossoms
out into the full flower of genius to captivate the world.
We might multiply iUustrations from poetry, from paint
ing, phUosophy, language, mathematics, from every field
in which the mind of man can exercise itself. Every
where we meet the same thing, — a broad foundation of
capacity; and rising upon this here and there the tower
ing structure of what we call, in our lack of suitable
words, — "genius." Capacity, the inaUenable gift of
mankind, is the background against which the perfect
creations of genius stand out in such marvellous reUef
that we are tempted to think of them as something
altogether different in nature. It is part of our human
Umitation that we are caught by the striking and ex
ceptional and easily forget the process by which it was
attained. We wander through the great collections of
ancient and mediaeval art and Unger long before the
masterpieces of Phidias and Praxiteles, of Michael An-
gelo and Titian and the rest of the great ones who have
made their names and their day immortal; but after

I40 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
aU, when one comes to think about it, the really im
pressive thing is not the perfection attained by these
few, but the extraordinary endowment of talent in the
age they represent. The hundreds of lesser achieve
ments of lesser men bear witness to the soUdity of the
foundation on which these masterpieces of genius were
built up. Or, rather — for the figure of a building is
too mechanical in its suggestion — we see in the vast
production of lesser works the roots, the stem, the Ufe
currents from which the flower of genius was to be
developed. Given aU this endowment of a race, and
great, striking individual expressions of it are as sure
to follow as the flower foUows from the bud and the
fruit from the flower. Then men stand agape at the
marvellous individual, and overlook the process that
made him. We haU as "inspired," men who are the
natural expression of what is in a race, a nation, an
age, — who are what they are because thousands of
others have Uved, and worked, and sacrificed to make
them so.
How this comes about, we are not here attempting to
inquire. The problem of genius, the whole question of
the relation of the indi-vidual to the mass, is, and -wiU
remain, one of the most perplexing, as it is also one of
the most fascinatmg, to the speculative philosopher.
What concerns us here is that reUgious genius is to be

THE BIBLE

141

studied and understood, so far as it can be imderstood
at aU, on precisely the same lines as any other form of
genius. If we may speak of literary, or musical, or
artistic genius as the result of "inspiration," then we
are ready to accept this word also for reUgious genius —
not otherwise. The process is as mysterious in the one
case as in the other. We know Uttle about it, and yet
there are probably few of us who have not at times
caught gUmpses into the unseen region of consciousness
whose borders touch at so many points our everyday
world of classified experience. Certainly every produc
tive worker whose heart is in his work has seen moments
when he seemed to be seized upon by some power out
side himself and carried on to results he had not himself
foreseen. The poet, i.e. the man of "creative" force, no
matter in what material he works, never can know quite
the form his product wUl take. He feels the impulse to
create, and he sets himself to his work, and as he works,
the crude material at his hand takes on shapes he had
not anticipated. Only the touch of genius in him teUs
him when these shapes are right, and helps him to cor
rect them when they are -wrong. He could not have
said beforehand at what points in his progress he would
rise above his own level and seem to be for the moment
an instrument in the hand of some greater power. Yet
such moments come, perhaps not perceived by him, but

142 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
e-vident to us, who see his finished work. Then we say,
because we do not know how other-wise to express it,
these are reaUy "inspirations." The man does it; we
know he does it, just as we know we have written a
very good letter to a friend, though when we took our
pen we had only the vaguest idea of what we meant to
say. We do not imagine ourselves to have been "in
spired" in writing our letter in any sense excepting
that we have done our best. Nothing has come out of
us that was not in us. We had not thought it out in
precisely this form, but in the act of writing we have
discovered the form suited to our need. We could not
have -written just this letter if we had not long been in
possession of the material, if the thoughts had not been
famiUar to us, and if we had not by experience gained
the power of deciding whether the form of it as it came
to us was suited to our purpose.
Now the Unitarian sees no essential difference be
tween these lower forms of "inspiration" and the higher
expressions of reUgious prophecy. He claims the right
to apply to the higher forms as to the lower the supreme
test of their power to appeal to him. If they are worthy
of being caUed "inspired," they are so because they
inspire him. If not, then for him they have no com
pelling value. In other words, he dares to apply here
as everywhere the subjective test. There is for him no

THE BIBLE

143

compulsion to accept what others have declared to be
inspired Scripture except as it appeals to that in him
which ought to respond to any such imperative demand.
He sees that in fact, in the very act of setting up this
body of writings as authoritative, the men who did this
were reaUy doing the same thing he claims the right to
do. They had their standards as to what a truly "in
spired" writing ought to be, and why may he not have
the same.pri-vilege ?
It -wUl be said that on this point as upon others the
Unitarian view is negative, destructive, and depressing.
To the Unitarian mind, on the contrary, it appears to
be quite the opposite of aU these. It is a positive view
because it rests upon a great positive declaration;
namely, upon faith in the capacity of human nature to
do the greatest things that human Ufe requires of it.
As the world goes on its way, the thousand acti-vities of
men moving along, now side by side, now in conflict,
there come times when the thoughts, the aspirations, the
promise of a people must find their expression through
the voices most capable of giving them adequate form.
Hundreds may try it, but they are silenced by the
clamor of petty interests ; till at last, no one can predict
when or how, the man comes. He, too, will have his
sorrows. The prophet -wiU be persecuted; but he will
be heard. What he says -wiU remain, and men will

144 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
say, "Here was a man inspired of God." So he was,
but so also was the activity, the struggle, the faUure,
and the triumphs on which the work of the prophet
rested. He was the flower of it all, — not a something
apart from human Ufe, but essentially and vitally of it.
His word was not his alone, but also the voice of the
people at its best, and that is why the people heard
him. These are not negations; they are the declara
tion ot principles as positive as any that ever deter
mined the thought of any group of serious men.
This means also that besides being positive, the
Unitarian thought about Inspiration is distinctly not
destructive, but constructive. It is not destructive,
because it is in harmony with the best and clearest
thought of aU time about the method of the divine
dealing with man. In spite of the prevalence of the
idea of spasmodic interference, there has never been
wanting a protest against it. The dignity of human
nature as the chief handiwork of God has never lacked
vindication. Unitarianism only claims for itself a freer
and more complete application of this principle to the
problems of speculative thought. If men can reaUy and
heartily believe, as Unitarians do, that "inspiration"
must be taken to include every expression of the highest
there is in man, then upon this foundation they may
build up a complete structure of rational faith and a

THE BIBLE

I4S

complete programme of rational living. That is what
they mean by a constructive idea ; that it has in it the
germs of a fruitful development, and this can be only
if the idea is itself in harmony with the working laws
at once of our own thought and of the world upon
which our thought is exercised.
So, again, the Unitarian finds in his view of inspira
tion, not a cause for depression, but for every sugges
tion of hope and courage. It would depress him if he
were compeUed to beUeve that men were mere instru
ments to be played upon by the breath of an unrelated
spirit, as air is forced into the pipes of an organ. That
would make him incUned to sink back into a dull re
ceptivity, waiting for an "inspiration" that might never
come. But now, beUe-ving as he does that inspiration
is to be had only at the price of labor, he is ready to
put his hand to the work that Ues near him, in a cheerful
confidence that he is making his contribution to some
great and truly inspired utterance, whereby mankind
shall be Ufted up and carried on to renewed labor and
to new and ever new prophetic deUverance.
For the Unitarian, strongly as he may emphasize the
dependence of inspiration upon the soUd movement of
humanity in general, is by no means indifferent to the
reaction of the prophet upon this world. If it is true
that there could be no prophets without the previous

146 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
experience of the people from which they draw their
inspiration, it is equally true that the people's hfe would
be a barren thing indeed if it were not steadily illumined
and quickened and encouraged by the prophetic word.
"Where there is no vision, the people perish." The
true relation of these two things, the "inspired" man
and the people for whom he stands, is a reciprocal rela
tion. Neither can do without the other. The prophet
cannot be heard except by a people with whose inner
Ufe he is in natural sympathy. The people cannot
have a prophet imless somehow it keep aUve, though in
obscurity and almost ecUpse, the spark of a genuine and
creative national hope. Woe to the prophet if he does
not share his vision with the people ! Woe to the
people if it faU to Usten to the true interpreter of its
highest caUing ! The prophet has a right to demand a
hearing, but — and here is the gist of the Unitarian
position — the people have equally the right to make
sure by every test at their command that he is a true
prophet. The Unitarian approaches the Bible -with reverent
attention. He accepts it as the highest revelation of
the past to the present; the clearest expression of that
spiritual endowment which is to him an essential part
of the very idea of mankind. It appeals to him be
cause, being the work of the human spirit, it carries

THE BIBLE I47
with it the promise and the guarantee that that spirit
shaU go on doing great things and thinking great thoughts
and, whenever the people need, shall utter itself forth
again in prophecy that wiU be heard.

CHAPTER V
JESUS
O thou great Friend to all the sons of men,
Who once appeared in humblest guise below,
Sin to rebuke, to break the captive's chain,
To call thy brethren forth from want and woe, —
Thee would I sing: thy truth is still the Ught
Which guides the nations groping on their way,
Stumbling and falling in disastrous night,
Yet hoping ever for the perfect day. — Theodore Parker.
The thought of Unitarians about the person of Jesus
foUows naturally the two Unes of reflection we have
been noting. The indivisibility of the divine and the
essential worthiness of the human are to them the two
indispensable foundations for an adequate notion of
Jesus and his place in reUgious thought. Frorn the first
foUows the inevitable conclusion that Jesus could not
have been divine; from the second follows equaUy
that to call .him human is not to take away anything
from his dignity or his value.
Let it be clearly set do-wn at the outset that Unita
rians believe Jesus of Nazareth to have been a man lUse
the rest of us. He was born of a man and a woman as
148

JESUS 149
we are, in obedience to that law of life which maintains
the race and which cannot be violated. They beUeve
this because they see no reason whatever not to beUeve
it, and because in the absence of such reason they
would always accept the natural and the normal rather
than the abnormal and the mysterious. Unitarians find
nothing in the simpler narratives of the Ufe of Jesus to
contradict their view of his completely human nature.
On the contrary, they read in these meagre accounts
the story of a human Ufe beginning, gro-wing, develop
ing along perfectly inteUigible lines; intelUgible because
they have been followed by so many others of the sons
of men.
Of course. Unitarians perceive from an early point,
mingled -with the simple record, a parallel stream of
mythical decoration. It is this mysterious element
which has chiefly caught the attention of men and
diverted them from the simpler side of the subject.
And this, too, is natural. Men have always been prone
to dwell upon the unusual, as if unusualness were in
itself a claim to our interest and reverence. It would
have been most strange if, the moment the person of
Jesus became important as a rallying point for certain
reUgious ideas, it had not been seized upon by the myth-
building instinct of mankind and invested with an
ample equipment of marveUous tales that should excite

15°

UNITARIAN THOUGHT

the imagination of the faithful, rouse the interest of
the inquiring, and give to the figure of Jesus himself a
standing among the competing leaders of reUgious
thought. AU this was as natural as it was that the
vi-vid play of Greek imagination should have peopled
the world of Nature -with a thousand Uving forms deal
ing -with each other and -with men as so many actual
personaUties. It was as natural as it was that Indian
reverence should have clothed the Buddha -with a vast
decoration of marveUous quaUties and achievements, or
that Arabian fancy should have played about the per
son of Mohammed, even while Mohammedan theology
insisted upon his unmodified humanity. The Unitarian
does not spend energy in analyzing these outward de
taUs of Christian tradition, in determining how they
originated, what part of them may be true and what
part false, or in weighing evidence as to their effect in
bringing men to the following of Jesus. Such labor
seems to him rather to divert the mind from the real
point at issue. The really important thing for him is
to understand the relation of the Ufe and teaching of
Jesus to the world's reUgious thought, and he can do
this only as he holds firmly to the one unwavering
truth of his complete and unchanging humanity.
HistoricaUy, the Unitarian beUeves himself to be
justified in his anxiety on this point by the experience

JESUS 151
of the Church. He fears to let his fancy play ever so
Ughtly about the idea of a double personality, lest he
be tempted into the far-reaching illusions of the past.
He sees in the whole history of the beUefs as to the
nature of the Christ a confusion of ideas, slight at first,
but growing denser with every effort to explain it, untU
it resulted in the mystical declarations of the earUer
and the later creeds and fixed upon the Church that
spirit of dogmatic speculation which has held it captive
imtil now and is stiU working from point to point to
maintain the card-palace of its institutions and its
doctrine. The Unitarian view on this question wUl
become clearer if we examine for a moment what really
happened. Within the narrow world of Jewish Ufe and
thought appeared quite suddenly a youthful preacher of
righteousness, similar to many a one who had gone
before him. He was a Hebrew appeaUng to Hebrews,
but in his appeal rising continuaUy above the lower
levels of national tradition and conventionaUty into
higher regions of universal human experience. With
every respect for the law, he proclaimed a higher law,
whose sanction was to be found, not in a special covenant
between a nation and its God, but in a deeper, more
permanent relation of aU men everywhere to a God
who was the God of all things.)
What the preparation of this teacher for his work

152 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
had been, we do not know. The simplest stories of
his origin make him a man of the people, retaining to
the last his connections -with his immediate family and
making no pretension whatever to any authority be
yond that which came from a profound spiritual kin
ship with the source of all truth. He was, in the old
true sense of the word, a "prophet," — one, that is, who
uttered forth the ways of righteousness. His teach
ing was a moraUty founded upon a reUgion. It is not
true that the Unitarian regards Jesus simply as a
teacher of moraUty. The principles he laid down as to
the right dealing of man with man were not all new in
the world's thought. They were of the kind which
over and over again in the ever renewed conflict of jus
tice against oppression, of charity against seffishness, of
purity against infamy, have come from the Ups of
reformers or been embodied in the codes of law-makers.
What gave to the moral teaching of Jesus its pecuUar
significance was that its sanction was to be found in a
new conception of the relation of morals to the govern
ment of the universe as a whole. Right was right,
not because the law said so, nor because in some
distant past a compact had been made between a
race and a God who belonged to it, nor because the
state, standing for the race, had laid down this or that
rule -with its safeguards and its penalties. Rather,

JESUS IS3
right was right because of an essential harmony between
God and man as creator and created, as father and
chUd. That was to be henceforth the test and standard
of moraUty. If a man's actions were attuned to this
greater harmony, then and then only were they, in the
Christian sense, "right." The "spirit of truth," which
was to abide among men forever, was to be its o-wn
interpreter, making plain to struggUng man the ever
new law of righteousness.
That was the mission of Jesus, and that, the Uni
tarian beUeves, was his whole mission — as if there
could be anything greater than that — to show to aU
mankind the way of adjustment to the will of God !
But the world has never been satisfied -with the
simple and the ob-vious. The work and the personaUty
of Jesus made so sUght a ripple on the surface of con
temporary Ufe that scarce any record of them is to be
found outside the immediate circle of his obscure and
baffled foUowing. Even there the tradition of a fairly
early day is represented only by a singularly meagre
and fragmentary account. Yet, even in the earliest
records, there begins at once the ine-vitable activity of
speculative thought struggling to make clearer what
was already clear enough. The subtleties of the Greek
training were brought in to obscure and mystify under
the guise of explaining and harmonizing. It was not

154 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
enough that these phUosophical exponents of Chris
tianity should try to accoimt for a human phenomenon
so apparently inexplicable on ordinary grounds. They
went on to confuse the personaUty of Jesus in a
hopeless entanglement -with an entirely different group
of ideas, and in that confusion the theology of the
Church has remained entangled to this day.
This other group of ideas takes us into a world of
speculation in which for centuries before the time of
Jesus and in many different countries human ingemuty
had busied itself -with persistent energy. It is the
world of effort on the part of men to make manifest to
themselves the working of divine power among them.
There are two forms of Deity which, no matter how
they may be disguised by words, are always sure to
occupy the thought of whoever enters into this world
of speculation. Sooner or later the mind comes to see
that Deity is to be thought of either as absolute or as
relative. Absolute Deity is a conception of the trained
mind of the philosopher, — a conception so simple that
it requires profoimd insight to reach it. It can be
gained only by stripping away, one after the other, aU
those secondary ideas about Deity to which the average
thinking mind is so accustomed that it seems almost
bom to them. Absolute Deity is as hard to compre
hend and as useless for actual Uving purposes as is the

JESUS 155
Absolute in any other human affair. Practically, the
mind refuses to dweU long upon absolute ideas. It can
reach them, if at all, only through ideas of relativity.
In plain language, it demands of Deity, as of every
thing else, that it shaU be expressed in terms of some
thing outside itself. It finds reUef from the struggle
after the Absolute in employing terms which suggest
the relation of Deity to that which is not Deity. For
example, the "word "creator" is such a term. The
moment we speak it, we feel that we have brought the
idea of God more nearly within the range of our own
limited powers. He is no longer a mere abstraction,
living in remote and incomprehensible repose. He is
at once brought into the region of activities, and these
we can at least somewhat more readily comprehend.
"Father" is another such word. While "creator"
suggests one kind of acti-vities, such as we associate
with the idea of the artisan who makes things unUke
himself, the word "father" suggests an altogether
different Une of activity. It hints to us of the famiUar
processes of Nature, the silent working of the forces by
which Uke produces like and, producing, is bound to
its like by every tender tie of duty and affection. The
word "friend" suggests still another aspect of the
di-vine relation. It adds to the notions of creation and
reproduction the idea of beneficence. The divine artifi-

156 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
cer and parent is also divinely beneficent, and in this
new relation aU the other forms of the divine expression
find their meaning and their value.
One might go on thus iUustrating this inevitable
tendency of humanity to satisfy its imperative need of
expressions of the divine. Our only purpose here is to
make clear that in the early years of Christianity a
struggle was everywhere going on, with a kind of fever
ish eagerness, to give new form to this demand. God,
reduced to an abstraction in the wreck of the traditional
polytheisms, must again be made manifest in some
satisfactory expression. Great Pan was dead. The
poetic, creative activity of the ancient mind that had
kept the world suppUed with ever multiplying images
of the divine had ceased to work. The philosophies of
the day were twisting and turning the vast problem in
every conceivable Ught without ever coming quite to
the solution that would commend itself to the con
sciousness of plain thinking men. Then, not suddenly,
but with a marveUous clarifying power, the possible
solution came. Out of the tangle of Hellenic subtlety
playing upon the too bold simpUcity of the Jewish
tradition there emerged the — not new, but novel —
conception of the Ao'70?, the Divine Expression, the
outward manifestation of that infolded pure Being, the
utterance of that eternal SUence, the rapturous pro-

JESUS 157
creation of that subUme Self-sufficiency we have been
calUng Absolute Deity. It was a wonderful discovery.
As compared -with the compUcated polytheisms of the
past, it was a vast simplification. Instead of a thou
sand forms of the divine expression, it offered but one;
namely, the very idea of the divine expression itselfj.
It was a discovery wholly in harmony with the decla
ration of the great new teacher, that God was spirit
and that his worship must be undertaken in a spir-j
itual way. It bridged the chasm between AbsoluteJ
Deity and the universe of things, including the heart
of man, -with a highway, narrow indeed as compared
¦with the vastness of the ancient polytheistic road, but
ha-ving deep and strong foundations and broad enough,
if only men should be able to rise to the level of
the Master and waUi there with him in spirit and in
truth. But now see what happened. This plain and spiritual
solution was precisely what men could not rise to.
Here were two entirely separate things: first, the
person of a great teacher, about whom were already
gathering those mythical embellishments without which
men were unable to account for his radiant personality.
Then, second, there was already in existence the set of
ideas about an expression of Deity which we have just
considered. The notion of a Logos, a word of God,

158 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
whereby he brought himseff into closest relation with
man, was the key to a solution also of the vexed ques
tion as to the person of Jesus. Precisely how the two
problems ran into one we do not know. That has been
a question for the scholars of, more than one genera
tion. It has had many answers, but they do not con
cern us. We are interested only in the fact that the
two things did run together and that each helped the
other by giving to it something of its o-wn pecuUar
character. Men were perplexed to account for the
transcendent genius and the aUeged wonder-working
power of their prophet. They felt him to be more than
man, but neither in his own teaching nor in the faith
of his immediate foUowers was a formvila to be found
which precisely answered their question. The anxious
curiosity of his disciples as to who he had been and
what he really was, had been baffled by the lofty spiritual
answers of the Master, and it had fared no better with
the foUowing generation in its attempt to find a satis
factory solution. On the other hand, the phUosophers
— of whom the vyexandrian Jew, Philo, may be taken
as a type — had reached a brUUant abstraction in their
Logos, but had not given to it such precision as could
make it effective in mo-ving the hearts of men. The
"Word of God" might be given an infinite variety of
interpretations, but no one of these could meet the cry

JESUS 159
tor a specific, definite object about which the awakened
zeal for a new divine ideal might gather.
It was, therefore, a revelation of possibiUties for both
sides, for phUosophy and for Christianity aUke, when
the decisive word was spoken: "The Logos is Jesus!"
At once the human phenomenon was accoimted for and
the speculation of the phUosophers was given a form
which took it out of the world of abstractions and
placed it in the very centre of men's practical, reUgious
need. "The Word was made flesh and dwelt among
us" became henceforth the central declaration of specu
lative Christianity. What had been at first a spiritual
exaltation and a quickened moral impulse was now
identified with a dogmatic formula. It was, as we have
developed it nere, simple enough in its origin, but with
ample room also for further elaboration. Jesus the
man, the prophet, was also Christ the God, the expres
sion of Deity, which was at the same time Deity itseff.
God and his utterance, the same and yet different,
were now the doctrinal nucleus about which was to
grow the vast structure of Christian dogmatism. From
that day to this the two things, the man Jesus and the
speculative Christ, have been, as we set out by sapng,
hopelessly entangled in a confusion which has gro-wn
worse as time has gone on. The simple figure of the
greatest of human prophets has been obscured beyond

l6o UNITARIAN THOUGHT
recognition in a determined effort to make it something
other than it was. The creation of an exuberant specu
lative philosophy, useful as a formula for purely theo
logical purposes, completely overgrew the human and
rational aspects of the Christian problem. The myth
of the divine paternity of the man Jesus was now ex
plained in terms of the phUosophic dogma. The divine
which entered into him through the mystic process of an
immaculate conception was God himself, only under the
aspect of Deity in expression instead of Deity absolute.
Now here is the point at which the Unitarian thought
of Jesus becomes clear. This long historical introduc
tion has been necessary to give us the background
against which this simpler view may be made to stand
out. The Unitarian understands perfectly the two ele
ments out of which the historical doctrine of the per
son of Christ has grown. He agrees with the later
Church that Jesus was complete man. He accepts fully
'the notion of a Logos as a philosophic device for giving
a name to a useful idea, the idea of Deity in expression
-^ the di-vine Word — God in relation instead of God
apart from all relations. He has his o-wn way of under
standing tb's formulation and wiU use it as it serves
his purpose. But, and here is the pecuUarity of his
position, he will not let these two things, the humanity
of Jesus and the philosophic proposition, run together.

JESUS l6i
To his mind they have no organic connection. One is
a pure statement of an historic fact. The other is a
piece of pure speculation. The value of each consists
in its being kept clearly apart from the other. So, the
Unitarian beUeves, were they apart in the beginning.
He thinks himself, therefore, on surer ground, even from
the point of view of history, when he refuses to let him
self be carried away by the temptation to put together
things that belong apart.
The Unitarian thinks he can make better use of the
two elements of historic dogma by carrying each out to
its natural conclusions than by trying to make an im-
natural union between them. We shaU have to return
to the idea of the Logos in its proper place as an aspect
of the doctrine of the nature of God. Enough to say
here that to the Unitarian mind this idea of Deity in
expression is too vast and too fuU of suggestions towards
an adequate comprehension of the divine nature to be
restricted in its meaning to any one single manifesta
tion. The "Word of God" means too much to be Umited
to any one vehicle. It includes aU those forms of the
divine deaUng -with man by which man is Ufted up from
the material and the common into the higher reaches
of the spiritual and the ideal. This word of God comes
to every man in proportion to his capacity to take it.
It came to Jesus of Nazareth in fuUest measure because

1 62 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
he was preeminently quaUfied to receive it and make
it inteUigible to others. It passed through the clarify
ing medium of his extraordinary spiritual endowment
and went on from him to elevate and enUghten aU who
should have ears to hear and minds to understand.
That is what the Unitarian does with the speculative
idea of the Logos. He uses it to make clearer to him
seff the thought of God. He is grateful for it to those
early thinkers who have helped him to it. But he
could not make it do him this service if he were to bind
it organicaUy to one single human figure, and it interests
him to find, as he reads the writings of the great Chris
tian theologians, how hard they struggled to free them
selves from the same bondage. The best of them in
their highest moments stiU clung to the larger spiritual
-view of the Logos which he, the Unitarian, maintains as
essential. Their efforts were lost in the aU-absorbing
purpose of reaching formulas to which all the confficting
parties in the Church could be brought to consent.
The Unitarian, utterly unconcerned as he is -with this
problem of a universal agreement, sees no reason why
he should not hold fast to that which seems good to
him, and it helps him to feel himself in feUowship -with
much of the noblest and most independent thought of
the past.
On the other side of the question, — the side of the

JESUS 163
pure humanity of Jesus, — the Unitarian rejoices espe
ciaUy in the Uberty which comes when the person of
the Master is set free from the entanglements of specu
lative theology. If, in the process of this disentangle
ment, he is forced into a use of language that seems to
imply a certain disparagement, no sooner is the cause of
offence removed than he is free to declare his unswerv
ing aUegiance to the example and the teaching of Jesus.
Precisely because he beUeves Jesus to be a man Uke
himself he finds in him an example. It means nothing
to him to be told that a being of specific divine origin,
even God himself, Uved on this earth a Ufe of singular
purity, elevation, courage, sanity, and devotion. These
are things that are taken for granted in divinity. Such
words are, after aU, only the symboUc phrases by which
we seek faintly to express our ideas of the divine. We
know, alas ! only too well, that we are not — in any
such sense — of di-vine origin. No heavenly splendors
surrounded our nativity. Only the happy smiles of
pure motherhood and the manly pride of confident
fatherhood welcomed us into the struggle of human
Ufe. How shall we draw lessons of courage from a being
who by his very definition must be brave, when all the
time we know that as men we are made, not brave but
only with the desire and the possibiUty of being brave ?
Why should a God, whose very nature is purity, sum-

164 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
mon me, in whose nature one-haff is turned toward im
pulses of selfish desire, to be perfect as he is ?
) No, it is beUef in the perfect humanity of Jesus that
alone commends him to us as an attainable example.
Without that he remains a mere abstraction, a shado-wy
image of humanity, a divine apparition clothed with
the semblance, but utterly lacking in the reaUty, of a
man. And what is true of Jesus as an example is equaUy
true of him as a teacher. The Unitarian finds the chief
sanction of Christian teaching in the perfect community
of nature between the teacher and the great human
world he tried to teach. This moraUty, that we, in our
weakness and blindness, try to make the guide of our
struggUng Uves — what could it mean to us if it were
laid down by a divine being to whom the real struggle
of human Ufe could not be kno-wn ? It would be for us
as barren of real instruction as if it came from the in
habitants of another world, who had never learned the
conditions that govem our Uves here on the earth. It
is only when we think of Jesus as a man, -without figures
of speech and -without mental reservations, that his
example and his teaching' alUce can be borne in upon
us with that kind of conviction which can make them
fruitful in our own actions.
It -wiU be objected that foUowing this view of Jesus
we are led mevitably to the conclusion that he was a

JESUS 165
man of "sin" as we know ourselves to be. "Tempted
at aU points as we are and not without sin" would
seem to be the logical result from the doctrine of the
complete humanity of Jesus. From this conclusion the
Unitarian does not shrink. He is ready to admit with
the utmost frankness that in aU probabUity Jesus had
his moments of opposition to the di-vine wUl which con
stitute the attitude of "sin." Even our meagre and
laudatory accounts of him give abundant support for
this -view. NaturaUy such reports would not dwell
upon this side of a prophet's experience, but no one
can read the Gospels with open mind and not feel that
they show us a man indeed. Jesus was a man in whom
the impulses of a supreme charity were made to domi
nate over aU others; but his -victory was won, as all
human -victories must be won, after bitter struggle with
his o-wn lesser seff. He was tempted by the devUs of
ambition, of power, of ease, of safety, and he overcame
them, not in -virtue of any specific divine quaUty which !
we do not share, but because in him the balance of
power incUned to the side of good, as, by the fact of our
common humanity, it may be made to do also in us.
The radiance of this moral -victory is not dimmed by
the thought of defeats he may have suffered before his
character had attained to that mastery shown in the
brief record of his ministry. On the contrary, just as

1 66 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
in ordinary hfe we value the triumphs of the disciplined
will in proportion to what they have cost, so our rever
ence for the person of Jesus ought rather to rise, as we
admit the idea of failure and of wrong into our picture
of his earthly career. More than ever, through this
admission, we become his yoimger brothers, born of
the same Uneage, heirs of the same promise, sharers in
the same covenant, moved by the same impulses and
capable of the same triumphs — if only we will submit
ourselves to the same discipline and draw our strength
from the same eternal source.
The Unitarian finds himself strengthened in his in
sistence upon the pure humanity of Jesus when he sees
how hard the Church of all ages has worked to main
tain the same point. No error -within Christianity has
ever been fought with greater energy than the error of
Doketism. That was a logical deduction from the doc
trine of the divinity of Christ, which led men by various
roads to the conclusion we have already hinted at, that
the physical Jesus can have been only a delusion of
the senses, — that he was not bom, did not really Uve
and suffer, especiaUy did not really die. He only
seemed to do all these things. It was reaUy God who
thus went through the forms of human experience in
order that he might the better bring men into harmony
¦with himself. To combat this one-sided logic the Church,

JESUS 167
from an early day, insisted by every means in its
power upon the real humanity of Jesus. It dwelt in
its ritual, in its poetry, and in its art ¦with special em
phasis upon the figure of the suffering man. It de
veloped as the central object of its regular devotion the
mystic, sacrificial meal whereby the actual physical
body of Jesus was made to Uve again — to be handled
by the priest and taken into physical union with the
bodies of the faithful. In this mystical fashion the
physical death of the God-man was, and is, regularly
brought home to the mind of the beUever ¦with the
force of a physical demonstration.
Where then is the difference? It is here. The
Church, while it has thus insisted upon the pure hu
manity of Jesus, has insisted equally upon the pure
divinity of Christ and has confused the two ideas by
maintaining a mystical union between them. Through
its doctrine of a specific incarnation by means of a vir
gin birth, it has given to this confusion of ideas a dra
matic form that has appealed powerfully to the imagi
nation of centuries. So strong is this appeal even in our
"scientffic" day that within a generation one branch
of the Church has been able to let the logic of the situa
tion work backward by one degree and to proclaim the
"immaculate" conception of the virgin mother of Jesus !
Even so-caUed "Protestant" churches whUe rejecting

1 68 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
the worst extravagances of this Christian polytheism
have retained the doctrine that makes them possible.
They, too, insist upon confusing ideas which do not
essentiaUy belong together. They continue to repeat
in their creeds and to defend through their theologies
a tangle of contradictions dignffied only by the seri
ousness with which it is maintained. They seem to
be at that stage of development when men cling to
forms for the forms' sake and defend untenable ideas
for fear of some vague calamity that might attend their
loss. The Unitarian is freed from aU such mysterious dread
by his positive, clear distinction between the actual and
the ideal. He welcomes in the happiest confidence the
humanity of Jesus as common with his o-wn and as
therefore opening up to him ever fresh sources of in
spiration and of courage. He accepts the leadership of
Jesus in his o-wn efforts to be a better member of the
race which has found its highest expression so far in
that inspiring personaUty. There is no relation of Ufe
as citizen, as parent, as laborer, as ruler, as servant, in
which he cannot find continuous support in the con
sciousness of kinship with an elder brother, who saw aU
these relations in the Ught of a common divine respon
sibiUty and glorified them all forever by sho-wing them
to men under that Uluminating aspect.

JESUS 169
So, on the other hand, the Unitarian is quite able to
understand the value of that theological process by
which Deity is conceived of as projecting itself into the
world of human experience. He beUeves most heartily
that Jesus received in fuUest measure that gift of in
sight into the true harmony of things which we cannot
other-wise describe than by caUing it "divine." That is,
indeed, his definition of the divine, — the central prin
ciple of harmony that holds aU being together in one
unvar)dng law. He beUeves Jesus to have been a true
interpreter of that law because it had so entered into
him as to be a part of him — to make him, in some
sense "divine." But the Unitarian believes also, with
equal intensity, -that this same divine quaUty that was
in Jesus is also in every man that is born, in to the world.
Less developed, rudimentary it may be still, but it is
there and waiting only for the touch that shall make it
spring into fruitfiU activity. Unitarianism ranges itself
in this matter with what it feels to be the world's best
and clearest thought at aU times. It sees in the so-
called Christian doctrine of an individual incarnation
only one of many attempts to make tangible what
many races at many times have tried to bring home to
themselves — the sense of the divine, working in and
through the very nature of man. . In this effort he finds
the explanation of aU the world's polytheisms. These

170 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
seem to him only picturesque de-vices for bringing God
nearer to man. Sometimes they picture Deity as tak
ing on human forms, according to the functions it is
called upon to perform ; sometimes they elevate human
personaUties to divine levels as the only fitting expres
sion for a distinction that seemed to Uft certain elect
individuals above all possibiUty of human classification.
But in any case these were only devices to make definite
what by its very nature must always remain undefined
to man, — the being of God himself. That impossibiU<^y
of definiteness the Unitarian accepts as final. He does
not feel the necessity of incorporating his thought of
God into any human form. He resents aU polytheistic
devices as an affront to his highest ideal of Deity, and
among these de-vices he includes the so-called Christian
doctrine of an incarnation by a virgin birth. He re
volts against it on every account. He rejects it on the
ground of history because he finds in other reUgions so
close analogies to it that it loses whatever distinction
might attach to it on the basis of a unique claim upon
the faith of mankind. He revolts from it on its own
merits, because it seems to him, not a glorification of
human motherhood, but an insult to it. It quaUfies as
"sin" the purest and hoUest of human relations. It
dismisses the sacred function of fatherhood into a
shado-wy limbo of indifference and neglect. Instead of

JESUS 171
elevating woman to her place as the indispensable and
equal companion of man, it degrades her to be the
vehicle of procreation, the mere channel through which
flowed all that made her offspring higher than the
" psychic man " of the phUosophers, whUe she contrib
uted only that which made him the "son of David," the
material framework for the "sinless" god. It matters
Uttle that men have sought to evade the direct issue
here. It is true that under the Ught of an age at once
more rational and more spiritual, the grosser extrava
gances of this insidious doctrine have been widely re
jected. WhUe a fraction of the Church has tried to
push these extravagances to their utmost Umit, the
rest have on the whole reduced them to an apparent
minimum. Yet in spite of this the offence remains.
The Unitarian alone among Christians takes an at
titude on this point which can in no sense be de
scribed as a hesitating or negative one. It is in the
most distinct sense positive, in that it rests upon the
great assertions of the dignity at once of human nature
and of the di-vine ideal. A God who should have to
resort to so petty a de-vice to set himself in a right rela
tion -with a race of beings he has himseff created, would
be, according to Unitarian thought, unworthy of the
devotion of rational men. And a race of men that
could not otherwise be held in its right relation -with a

172 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
God whose being and attributes it has itself defined
would not be worth the saving.
The Unitarian welcomes the whole conc,eption of the
"salvation" of the race through a human interpretation
of the divine to men. He rejects the idea of a "salva
tion" accomphshed by a violation of natural law, be
cause it seems to him to interfere with this far grander
and ampler conception of a continuous, unbroken, and
never-to-be-ended unfolding of the divine plan through
the thoughts and efforts of successive generations of
mankind. The person of Jesus thus takes its place in
Unitarian thought as one in a long Une of revealers to
men of the law by which they are caUed upon to Uve.
He was not the first ; he will not be the last. He de
clared himself to be, not the destroyer, but the fulfiUer
of what went before. At the close of his earthly work
he declared again that he was leaving with men a some
thing that woifld not fail them, namely, the Spirit of
Truth, which was to stay -with them forever. Thus he
connected himself -with the past and -with the future
alike, demonstrating in this way that he felt himself a
link in an endless chain of prophecy. That is precisely
the Unitarian thought.
Much time has been spent in efforts to prove that
Unitarians have no right to the name of Christians.
On the other hand, much energy has been wasted in

JESUS 173
vigorous protests against the exclusion thus impUed. It
may safely be asserted that the Unitarian is not greatly
concerned about names. It is far more important to
him that a name should be given its right meaning than
it is that it be preserved when the meaning has become
perverted. He would far rather drop the name "Chris
tian" than share it in many of the perverted senses it
has acquired. If, for example, "Christian" means, as
is constantly asserted in every variety of official utter
ance, the same thing as "Holy Catholic and ApostoUc,"
then better a thousand times to drop it once for all and
find a new word, or get along without any rather than
place such a Umit upon that Spirit of Truth which is
forever among us. Or if, to be a Christian, one must
be able to point to a certain variety of religious experi
ence, whereby some specific and mysterious spiritual
transformation can be certffied to, then, indeed, the
Unitarian, with a regret that has a certain touch of
sympathy, must give up the name and do as well as he
can without it. Or if, again, he only is a Christian who
is -wilUng to declare his assent to certain prescribed forms
of theological beliefs, then the Unitarian must stand
firmly upon his conscience and go his way.
The attempted exclusion of Unitarians from the
Christian name has always rested upon one or the other
of these grounds. Either because they have refused to

174 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
accept the discipline of the historic Church, or because
they -wUl not be bound by the dogmatic forms of any
sect, they have been consigned to a Umbo of their own,
wherein, it must be acknowledged, they have not been
as unhappy as perhaps they ought. They have found
some comfort in the reflection, as true in the world of
thought as in that of society, that "the exclusive man
excludes himself." Each of these self-constituted ar
biters of Christianity seems to Unitarians to be shutting
itself out of that larger fellowship which, in the earUest
days, deUghted in sharing the joys and perils of "The
Name." In that fellowship the Unitarian desires to be
counted. He values the name Christian for many
reasons. His o-wn thought has a completely Christian
basis. It is not true that Unitarianism is a result of con
scious study of the religions of the world and a patch
ing together of such fragments from each as suited the
purpose of its founders. It is true that Unitarians gladly
recognize and welcome every kindred thought wherever
they find it. It strengthens them to know that their
way of approach to the hidden things of God has been
trodden by many other feet of men. But in fact their
most cherished ideas came into shape through a rational
process within the lines of orthodox Christianity, and
they have no desire to repudiate the paternity of these

JESUS 175
ideas. They yield to no one in their admiration and
devotion to the person of him to whom all Christians,
no matter with what diversities, turn as to their com
mon Master and Guide. It does not lessen his tran
scendent value to them that they recognize his kinship
-with the great spiritual leaders of all peoples and all
ages. On the contrary, it is to them a far higher claim
upon their aUegiance that he stands within the Unes of
natural development and asks no assent to any pre
scribed forms of faith. They are interested to know aU
they can about other great leaders of reUgious thought
— about Buddha and Zoroaster, Mohammed and the
Greek and Roman religious and moral philosophers, but
they do this not to see whether perchance they may
find some other leader more worthy of their loyalty.
They are satisfied with the leadership of Jesus so long
as they are permitted to interpret this in the Ught of
aU the truth they can find an5rwhere. In that leader
ship they find perfect Uberty, for it is to them of its
very essence that in following it they learn the truth
which makes them free.

CHAPTER VI
REDEMPTION
Under one form or another the idea of redemption
enters into all of the more highly developed reUgions.
It rests upon the two notions, first, of a normal relation
between God and man; and, second, a severance or in
terruption of that relation. Somehow, at some time,
this broken relation must be restored and man be brought
back again into his true dependence upon God. The
Christian problem was not essentially different from
that of other religions. Here, too, there was a separa
tion, a rebelUng, a "fall" from an original high estate,
wherein all men by virtue of their very manhood were
included. Christian philosophy, working upon this
universal basis, evolved a "scheme" — many schemes
in fact, — whereby this loss might be made good, this war
of rebelUon ended, the victims of this "fall" be set up
again on the heights where they really belonged.
It must be admitted that, dramatically considered,
the materials for a scheme of redemption were attrac
tive enough. On the one hand, Deity projected into
the world by means of the Logos idea — Deity set work
ing among men, wcrking in power, in -wisdom, and in
176

REDEMPTION 177
love. On the other hand, man made to be perfect, in
complete harmony with the divine, but separated from
his divine source by a process in which he himself had
at least a part, — in technical language, by a "sin" of
which he was at least partiaUy guUty. And then,
between the two, sharing completely the nature of
both, the figure of a God-man, Deity in humanity,
reconciUng all antagonisms, aboUshing aU oppositions,
restoring aU that had been lost, building up what had
faUen down.
There is something in this presentation that appeals
readily to the imagination. It touches our sense of
justice. It satisfies the craving for a symmetrical ad
justment of our complex manhood to the regularity and
simpUcity of a universal system. It meets also that
longing for the personal which has ever been a potent
factor in determining the forms of reUgious expression.
It is no wonder that in the struggle of opposing parties
to make clear to the understanding the function of
Jesus in the world, this scheme should have commended
itself as on the whole offering the least difficulties.
There were many varieties of Christian philosophy to
choose from. The more carefully trained among the
early thinkers, the so-caUed "Gnostics," the "knowing
ones" in aU their varieties, evolved the most elaborate
devices whereby the lost equihbrium of the race was to

178 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
be restored. Their command of aU the resources of aU
existing reUgions was complete, and none was left im-
employed in these singular attempts at a Christian
philosophy that should once for all settle the vexed
questions of the origin, the nature, and the destiny of
the human soiU. Enough for us here that these attempts,
addressed as they were to the trained and informed in
tellect, found no response in the general consciousness of
Christendom. Hardly better did it fare with those other parallel
attempts which under the general name of Montanism
set "prophecy" against philosophy, the free working
of the Holy Spirit against the formulated processes of a
di-vine mechanism. The idea of the Holy Spirit repre
sented, indeed, a great truth which no one could ques
tion or, even for a moment, afford to neglect : the truth
of a divine presence and power working as it listed in
the hearts of men, defying definitions and formulations,
speaking through no estabUshed organs, but whenever
and wherever it pleased, bringing the truth of God
directly to the spiritual comprehension of the faithful.
But if the elaborations of Gnosticism were too mechani
cal to appeal powerfully to the reUgious desire of a
world in labor with redemptive struggles, the "pro
phetic" dreams of Montanism were too vague to satisfy
the longing for clearer inteUectual formulations. 'What

REDEMPTION 1 79
was demanded was something at once precise and
simple, free from the extravagances aUke of philosophy
and of unregulated enthusiasm.
The solution was found, historically, in the doctrine of
a redemption through the personaUty of Christ. In the
schemes of the Christian philosophies the person of Christ
had entered, as it were, by violence. The schemes them
selves were too complete without him. They presented
a view of the universe of men and things as something
revol-ving by a sufficient law of its own, which in due
time woifld bring about its "redemption" through the
force of its o-wn completeness. The person of Christ
came into these cosmic schemes as a kind of importa
tion from the outside, a foreign element, not substan-
tiaUy wrought into their inner structure. The world,
one feels in reading them, would have redeemed itself
without his aid. His relation to it was dramatic, fic
titious and not causal. So it was once again -with the
idea of redemption under the forms of Montanistic
fervor. The doctrine of a continuous revelation or
"prophecy" which had always been and always would
be to the end of time, pointed indeed to a culmination
of humanity, but it was a culmination in which the
man Christ had no specific share. No matter how his
personaUty might be glorified in words, the fact re
mained that his message was only one intermediate

l8o UNITARIAN THOUGHT
chapter in a long unfolding of the di-vine law that had
gone on before him and would go on after him. It was
splendid, but it was not destmed to be "Christian."
Christianity, under the conditions of the third and
fourth centuries, demanded a place for its central figure
that shoifld be, not in any sense accidental, but strictly
causal. The return of mankind to harmony with the
divine wiU and law must be accompUshed through some
quaUty or some achievement pecuUar and essential to
the personaUty of Christ.
The quaUty needed for this purpose was given in the
doctrine of the deity of Christ. The achievement was
found in the sublime fact of his sacrifice for the race.
Given these two factors, and the notion of a redemption
by the personaUty of the God-man seemed to offer
precisely the elements caUed for by the awakened con
sciousness of the Christian world. It gave in the
clearest manner that aspect of causaUty without which
no philosophic explanation was conceivable and no
theory of continuous revelation could be made impres
sive. It satisfied the dramatic requirements of justice.
It appealed powerfully to the ever present human in
stincts of gratitude and loyalty. Best of all it did not
make upon the faithful any extravagant demands either
of intelUgence or of spiritual insight. Once for all it
rejected the aid of pure philosophy and placed a check

REDEMPTION l8l
upon the unregulated enthusiasms of the "prophets" of
aU time to come.
The element of chief importance in this new scheme
of redemption was the idea of sacrifice. Not that this
idea in itself was new. On the contrary, it was one of
the most ancient conceptions of the process by which
a people tried to put itself into right relations with its
gods. To give the thing most precious to itself, the
firstlings of its herds and its crops, even the dearest of
its sons, was to make the gods more favorable, to pro
pitiate their anger or to conciUate their good-will. In
every such act there was impUed also the idea of a sub
stitution. The -victim was, in one sense or another, set
in place of the people who had deserved the evil thing
averted by his sacrffice. Such a notion of substitution
or representation was far commoner than we of our
day can really imagine. The wonderful reUgious sys
tem of Egypt, for example, was permeated by it through
out. Its symboUsm was not merely an appeal to the
picturesque, it was a presentation of reaUties, more real
even than the things of sense. What we should caU
the world of imagination was to the Eg3^tian, as to the
ancient man in general, the world of reality. The sub
stitution of one being for another was to him as famiUar
a process as was the adoption of a son into the rights
and duties of actual sonship.

l82 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
One has to transport one's self into this strange world
of ancient ideas to make it clear how this notion of sub
stitution came to attach itself to the simple facts of the
death of Jesus. The historical element is meagre and
plain enough. A Hebrew "prophet" in apparent re
volt against the traditions of his own people, fell an
easy and natural victim to popular and official hatred.
The state, represented by a sceptical, world-weary, pro
vincial governor, refused to save him, and he met bravely,
with only that touch of human fraUty which makes
him whoUy our own, the fate he had challenged. That,
so far as we know it, is the whole story. Yet this
simple and heroic human act of devotion has been in
corporated into that vast tissue of confusions we are here
trying to understand. It follows the same process of
distortion and entanglement we have seen in the whole
doctrine as to the Ufe of Jesus. It is at aU events a
fairly consistent process. Just as in the Ufe of the
Master the most simple details became involved in a
maze of philosophic speculation imtU they lost almost
the semblance of human experience, so here the simple,
majestic fact of a noble death as the cro-wn of an heroic
Ufe became obscured with a veil of mystical decoration
imtil it disappeared altogether as an historic fact and
became a part in a vast dogmatic scheme of world-
evolution.

REDEMPTION 183
For, to follow the train of our former study, it was
not only a man who died upon the cross. It was God
himself who thus made the supreme sacrffice, offering,
not only what was most precious to himself, — the son
whom he had begotten, — but really also offering him
seff as an atonement — to himseff — for the sin of the
world. In aU former sacrifices it had been the people
through its representative, king or priest, that had made
the offering, a willing payment for the good to be gained.
But here the people were passive or even hostile. It
was the power which needed to be reconcUed -with his
disobedient people that, himself, out of the great love
he bore them, made himseff even as they were — except
the disobedience — and then, to complete the recon
ciUation, caused himseff to die an infamous death. In
place of the people doomed to spiritual death is placed
the single sacrificial offering, the sinless for the sinful,
and by this act the world is redeemed.
Such, in its bare outline and -without regard to the
variety of detaU in which the ingenuity of theologians
has involved it, is the historic Christian scheme of
redemption. Intended to apply to aU men, it was in
practice Umited to such as should accept it by a half-
inteUectual and half-emotional con-viction of its truth.
A great Uterature and a splendid artistic development
were devoted to its presentation before a beUeving

184 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
world. A priesthood, with aU the characteristics of its
kind, became the mediating agency in applying the
"scheme" to the needs of everyday humanity. A sac
ramental system touching the Ufe of man at all its most
impressible moments riveted the circle in which the
process of redemption was to move. The great revolt
of the sixteenth century which did away at a stroke
-with the worst bondage of the system, left untouched
the theory of sacrfficial redemption and thus kept open
the way for new and more emphatic demonstrations of
its hold upon men's imagination.
In what attitude of mind can the Unitarian approach
this question? His first impulse is unquestionably one
of impatient and indignant denial. He cannot accept
the foundation ideas upon which the historic doctrine of
redemption has been built up. To him there is no
such thing as a God angry with the race of beings he has
created and needing therefore to be reconcUed with them
by some act of propitiation or of expiation. He is
qiute capable of understanding the heroic myths of the
ancient world, where given mortals at given moments
of distress are pictorially represented as devoting them
selves for their race and thus bringing back the natural
relation -with God, the temporary loss of which has
brought misfortune — defeat in war, famine, pestilence,
or what not. In such appealing forms he recognizes the

REDEMPTION 185
expression of a nation's consciousness of wrong as sepa
rating it for the moment from the di-vine sources of its
normal power. It has "sinned" in some unknown way,
and it cannot recover -without in some fashion paying
for its sin. That is intelUgible. The Unitarian under
stands it because he beUeves it himself -with all the best
there is in him. He is thoroughly convinced that noth
ing can come of nothing; that every valuable thing,
most of aU the peace of God, that harmony -with the
law of aU Ufe which is the condition of right Uving,
must be paid for, and paid at a high price. He knows
this to be true of the indi-vidual Ufe and he beUeves it
equaUy for the Ufe of a nation or of a race. There is
coUective "sin" as there is individual "sin," and some
how that sin must be atoned for, or the man, the nation,
the race could not go on. It would be swamped in the
sea of its o-wn lusts and go under to make place for a
new and law-respecting generation. The attitude of the
thoughtful Unitarian toward the general idea of re
demption is therefore not one of scoffing or of mere
denial. He recognizes in it a profound need of human
nature. Nay, he -will go several steps farther. He will
admit that the condition of rebeUion against the divine
law is always threatening and needs to be guarded
against. He beUeves heartily that Jesus of Nazareth
in his teaching has furnished the key to the problem.

l86 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
and suppUed a means whereby the individual and the
race may secure the form of redemption best suited to
their need. Further, he believes, as the Church has
always done, that the process of redemption must be
continuous — renewed from point to point in the growth
of the man as of the community. He sees in the sacra
mental system of the Church a representation — to
him a heathen and mechanical representation — of a
perfectly sound and -widely useful idea.
What he denies is that at any specific time, by any
specffic method, the relation of God to his world was
changed. As he denies the specffically and peculiarly
divine character of Jesus, so he must deny the possi
biUty of any mysterious influence upon the race arising
from that character. The whole argument from the
sacrfficial death of a divine personality seems to him
only so many empty words, signifying nothing unless
they be taken in senses contrary to any rational mean
ing. He understands — no one better — the thought of
Jesus giving up his Ufe gladly for a truth that was more
to him than Ufe. It is a great and inspiring thought;
one that may become fruitful, as it has done, in the
struggle of right with -wrong whenever a brave soul has
faced the alternative and chosen pain and loss and death
rather than dishonor. He sees how this brave death
may have reacted upon the scattered and doubting

REDEMPTION 187
foUowers, confirming them in their aUegiance and kindUng
in them something of the divine fire that had burned in
the heart of their Master. The Unitarian rejoices in
aU this because he sees in it one more demonstration
of the power there is in a human Ufe. If that hfe were
not in every sense human as his own, he can see no
point of contact at which power could pass from it into
his. It would be as far removed from all vital con
nection with him as ever were the gods and demigods
of the Greek mythology. But, beUeving as he does
that what was possible for one inspired human soul is
in substance possible for another, he draws hope and
courage from this great example. BeUeving as he does
that the only effective teaching can come from one who
has himself learned by experience the lessons he tries
to teach, he is able to make his own the lessons of the
greatest of moral teachers.
Again, the Unitarian is not impressed by the emphasis
laid upon the fact of death as such. He repudiates as
childish superstition the notion of physical death as the
punishment of the race for that "sin" of its first parents
whereby they became acquainted -with the fact of their
physical function as progenitors of the race. To call
that "sin" seems to him the profanation of everything
that should be kept holy m the thoughts of men about
their place in the universe of things. He sympathizes

l88 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
heartily with a recent poet who represents the ancient
Eve, worn -with years and sorrow, wandering back
again to the garden of Eden and there, moving in mystic
measures around the fateful tree, telling God how, in
her heart of hearts, she was glad she did it. He had
made her woman, and what she did was done in
obedience to the law he had laid upon her by her
womanhood. It was not beUevable that he could have
-wiUed her to be what he had made her not to be.
Death is to the Unitarian only the natural and in
evitable and therefore the right and happy corollary of
Ufe. If there were no death, there could be no room for
Ufe. He sees, of course, that in this struggling world
death wears many painful shapes; but he sees in this
only the natural consequence of struggle. AU Ufe, from
the simplest to the most complicated forms, is main
tained only at the cost of continual conflict. Even the
blade of grass has to fight for its hfe against drought
and flood and starvation and the crushing tread of men
and animals. If it survives all these and does its ser
vice in feeding the flower that is to give the promise
of new Ufe in the seed, then it dies like the man who
has conquered, full of years and honor, his work done,
his release granted. There is nothing in aU this that
in the least suggests the idea of physical death as a
means of attaining spiritual Ufe. The analogy is false.

REDEMPTION 1 89
It is a mere playing -with words to say that the death
of Jesus restores the balance of humanity and Deity that
was lost by the "fall" of Adam. No matter into what
modern equivalents the language of the ancient Hebrew
cosmic myth may be rendered, there is no room for any
such idea in Unitarian thought. The alternation of
death and Ufe is continuous and natural. It has no
such dramatic moments as are needed to complete the
plot of the so-caUed Christian scheme.
So it is, again, with the notion of a vicarious atone
ment, the sacrffice of one for the sin of aU. Before that
idea, as before hardly any other in the historic Christian
ejitanglement, the Unitarian stands in blank mcompre-
hension. It is perfectly clear to him that the heroism
which inspires a voluntary sacrffice of pleasant things
for a greater good to others is contagious — fruitful in
results of faith and courage, perhaps to generations of
men. In that fact he sees one of the chief glories of
human nature, that it is capable of recognizing such
leadership and of foUowing it to even greater triumphs.
It is the bond that ties together the choice spirits of aU
the generations in one continuous succession of noble
ideals and at least partial realizations. But what gives
to each generation and to each individual its power to
meet the forces of evil is not merely the power of the

I90 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
age or the man that has gone before. From that or
from him it receives inspiration and support, but its
force comes from the enUghtened and disciplined -will,
which is its o-wn. The sacrffices that went before avaU
nothing except as each man, in his own day, wins for
himself his -victories over his own temptation. The
whole conception of the sin of one man being atoned
for by the virtue of another, the Unitarian repudiates
with the same repulsion he feels at the idea that the sin
of one man can be imputed as sinfulness to the whole
race of men foUowing after. The two ends of the circle
of so-caUed Christian theology seem to him to prove
aUke the viciousness of the circle itself. The doctrine
of a "fall" and of a sacrificial redemption alike contra
dict his primary and fimdamental notions of human
nature. On the one hand he asserts as positively as
words can do it the capacity of man to do what is right
in the sight of God. On the other, he asserts -with equal
positiveness man's power to maintain his o-wn at-one-
ment with God. To him the processes both of estrange
ment and of at-one-ment go on m every human Ufe con
tinuously and wUl go on so long as men are men. There
wiU always be shortcoming; but there -wUl always be
effective reparation. If there were no shortcoming,
men would be angels ; if there were no reparation, they
would become de-vUs. That, to the Unitarian is the

REDEMPTION 1 91
very definition of Ufe. It is not to him a degrading
thought that Ufe is a struggle. On the contrary, it is in
the very fact of struggle that he finds the glory of Ufe.
The degrading conception to him is that by the act of
any other being man should be relieved of any fragment
of the responsibffity that is his birthright. To have
been bought off from the consequences of his o-wn wrong
by the sacrffice of some one else appears to him a mean
ness that in common Ufe would be branded with the
scorn of every high-minded man.
We are thus led by perfectly natural steps to the
positive Unitarian doctrine of redemption. Agamst the
traditional notions of a race rebellion, whereby man be
came incapable of acting in harmony -with the divine
wUl, Unitarians place the idea of a continuous develop
ment of the sense of righteousness through the free will
of man — free, that is, to do right as well as wrong.
To the traditional doctrine of a single race-restoration
by means of a sacrifice on the part of a man who was
at the same time God, Unitarians oppose the idea of a
contmuous victory of right over wrong, whereby the
race is held to some attainable standard of harmony
with the divine wiU. For this process of continuous
restoration they have the word "Redemption by Char
acter." They think here primarily of mdividual char
acter and apply that phrase to the race only as it is

192 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
made up of individuals. The older theology thought
on this matter in terms of race and dealt with indi
viduals chiefly as incidents or specimens of race com
pact or race endowment.
Unitarianism, here as elsewhere, proceeds from the in
dividual to the general. It conceives of individual char-
racter as the resultant of aU the forces makmg for a
permanent inclination of the whole being towards a
certain ideal. Character may be good or bad according
as this inclination be chiefly toward harmony with the
divine will or chiefly away from it. Character includes
not merely what theologians are wont to call, a Uttle
contemptuously, "mere moraUty." It covers all that
complex of motives whereby the thoughts, feelings, and
actions of a man are habitually governed. It is the man
himself as he meets the daily and hourly demands of his
inner and his outward Ufe. If we coifld imagine a man
who aUowed himself no thought, no emotion, and no ac
tion that was not in obedience to his own highest concep
tion of the divine law, we should say of such a man that
he had a "perfect" character. Now the older theology
would not accept such a man as coming under the
Christian principle of redemption unless he could show
in addition some mystical influence of the sacrffice of
Christ. Unitarianism declares that this adjustment of
the will to the standard of the divme is precisely what

REDEMPTION 1 93
constitutes the foUowing of Christ in its largest and
truest sense. The character thus gained and proven
and held fast is redemption. There is no other worthy
definition of the word. It is the redemption of a man's
lower self by the domination of his higher self. It is
the spiritual redeeming the material, the divine that is in
every man redeeming the animal. Or, to turn the pro
cess about, character is redemption because it has paid
the price of -victory. It has cost much, and that to the
soul that is redeemed. This soul has paid its o-wn
price, the price of continual watchfulness, of unfailing
hope, of unflinching courage, of a faith that could not
be shaken. The mendicant attitude which society,
when freed from clerical control, has rejected in the
affairs of the world, the Unitarian refuses also to adopt
in matters of the soul. He finds the closest connection
of ideas between the sturdy beggary that still dogs the
traveUer in the streets of Rome and the expiatory per
formances of "Holy Week." He who is promised some
thing for nothmg in reUgion may be pardoned for try
ing the same process in his daUy Ufe.
From the conception of redemption by character in
the individual the Unitarian goes on naturaUy to the
thought of redemption for the race as a whole. The
solution here is pointed out in advance by his notion of

194 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
the race as made up of individuals. The point may
seem at first alike obscure and unimportant. It may
seem quite a matter of indifference to the plain think
ing man whether he approaches the thought of mankind
as made up of individual men or whether he is to think
of the individual as being merely a specimen of the
genus "man." The reader who has learned something
of the terminology of the philosophic schools will recog
nize, however, that we are speaking here of one of the
most profound distinctions in the whole field of human
thought. As a mere matter of history, it has made all
the difference in the world whether men at given times
have been in the habit of starting in their thought from
the individual observed fact, and proceeding from that
to generalize about classes, species, genera, or however
else we may describe aggregations of individuals, or
whether they have been accustomed to start with the
larger general ideas and work do-wn to the individual.
It would lead us too far into the field of philosophy ff
we were to try to make this distinction clear in all its
bearings, but we must remember that philosophy is
only a large word to describe the mental processes we
are all foUo-wing, whether we know it or not, and the
distinction we have come to here is one that determines
the thought of us aU — even though we may be as in
nocent of phUosophy as M. Jourdain was of prose. We

REDEMPTION 195
have already had occasion to remark on the tendency of
Christian theology at all times to proceed from the
general to the particular. It has rested upon a series
of dogmas, the very essence of which was that they
were abstract propositions based upon no experience
whatever, — defying all experience and demanding alle
giance in virtue of their absolute truth, without refer
ence to indi-vidual judgment or individual right at all.
From this point of view the individual man was merely
an incident in a vast world-process that absorbed him
in its greater Ufe. He himself disappeared, submerged
in the many classifications into which the course of
human development had grouped him. Family, clan,
nation, state, guild. Church, — these, especially the last,
were the headings imder which the individual found
himself ranged and outside of which he stood in a hope
less isolation.
It cannot, of course, be denied that such classification
is in the highest degree useful in fixing the function of
the individual as a member of the human family. It is
only in these several relations that a man comes to the
realization of himself as a man. That is not our present
point. What concerns us now is the value of the in
dividual in determining the process of race redemption.
According to the method we have just outlined as that
of the prevaiUng Christian theology, the individual can

196 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
hardly be thought of as having any part at all in this
process. It is aU a matter of race compacts, race sacri
fice, atonement for the race. All that was really de
manded of the individual was that he should accept the
terms. The wildest heathen, whose Ufe had been one
long series of bloody deeds, was adopted into this race
atonement if only he declared his -willingness to accept
membership in a compact that seemed to offer him an
unlimited prospect of further savagery under more
promising auspices. The noblest pagan, pattern of aU
the -virtues most lauded as pecuUarly Christian, was
excluded from the race atonement because he had not
sacrfficed his individuaUty and come under the class
dictation of a priesthood that had assumed to control
the relations of men with God.
Unitarianism proceeds by precisely the opposite
method. It fixes its attention primarily upon the
indi-vidual. It does not conceive of a man merely a? an
incident in the world-mechanism. It knows that he is
that, but it thinks of him as related to the world process
through the working out of his own individuaUty. It
has its o-wn lofty conceptions of the function of the
famUy, the state, the Church, mankind even, in bring
ing about that development which is to it the ultimate
goal of humanity. It feels the force of the reaction of
aU these upon the individual as fixing his aims, setting

REDEMPTION 197
his hmitations, giving him his opportunities; but stUl
more powerfuUy it feels that these larger entities have
meanmg and value only as they are fixed by the char
acter of the individuals who compose them. What is
the family ? It is an aggregate of persons held together
by the tie of blood, that chUdren may know their parents
and be cared for by them; that the aged may be saved
from misery; that the collective property may be held
together and guarded and thus a centre for new human
activities be created and maintained. But what if the
man wiU not work, the woman -will not save, the chil
dren -wiU not learn and, as they come to years, -wUl not
bear their share of the collective burden? Then the
f amUy, instead of being a true unit in the world's economy,
breaks up into a mere group of mdividuals each seeking
his own pleasure in his own way. Its effectiveness as a
social and moral unit depends absolutely upon the
fideUty of each member to the highest standards of in
dividual character. So it is with the state. What is
that but a larger aggregation of persons bound by the
tie of common economic and social interests so that
right may be secured, needed pubUc works undertaken,
peace and Uberty guaranteed by force, and the higher
ideal aims of humanity fostered? But what if the in
di-vidual citizen refuses to play his part; if he -will not
enter into pubUc Ufe; wiU not give voice and vote for

198 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
the best things ? Or what if rulers see in power only a
means to self-aggrandizement, or if subjects refuse to
bear the burdens laid upon them by their rulers, or if
men dehberately seek to corrupt the pubhc conscience
by appealing to the lowest instead of the highest in
stincts of humanity? Then the state means nothing
but a mere mechanical union that will break as soon
as pressure comes on a weak point. It wiU resolve itself
into groups of struggling individuals without order, with
out progress, and without aims.
And it is the same with the Church. That too is a
community of persons held together by the tie of a
common faith. It exists in order that that faith may be
kept aUve and may manifest itseff in works that make
for righteousness. It claims to stand within all other
forms of human organization as their inspiring, uplift
ing, spiritualizing force. It demands, as no other asso
ciation of men does, the absolute surrender of its mem
bers to its ideals and its purposes. But what if the
individual man is lacking m that personal faith that is
the very foundation of a reUgious life; if he just sUps
along easUy in the ready forms of observance, repeating
words and formulas he does not really believe, going
through the motions of reUgion without the inner im
pulse that must give unity and continuity to his ex
periences? Or what if those who, by the accidents of

REDEMPTION 199
history, have come into control of reUgious organization
and who direct the forms of reUgious experience come
to think of themselves as having rights superior to
those of other beUevers; if they impose their ordina
tions, their sacraments, their organized ignorance and
superstition upon their less weU- trained brothers; if
they would harness the Holy Spirit into the service of
their o-wn caste and crush every attempt of unauthorized
desire to come to the sources of spiritual Ufe without
their aid ? Then the Church ceases to be a true and
effective unit in the Ufe of the community. Its mem
bers wUl become mere mechanical, inorganic atoms
without real satisfaction for themselves or usefulness to
others. The Church can have a meaning only as each
indi-vidual member is honest in his beUef, free in his
conscience, steadfast m weU-doing and brave in meeting
the assaults of temptation. If he is aU these, then the
Church is strong. If weakness and seffishness and cor
ruption creep in, then the corrupt Church, like the
corrupt family or state, has no meaning that the world
is bound to respect.
Now that is what we mean when we say that the
Unitarian fixes his attention above all things on the
indi-vidual. He knows weU enough the reactions that
may come to every man from the larger units in which
he is involved. It is a good thing to belong to a family

200 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
that has a good name for doing well the things for
which the family stands in the world's work. It gives
to the man a background for effort and a reason for
hope and courage. It is a help to be born in a city
where high ideals of public Ufe prevaU and a man's
own effort is carried along with the current of popular
approval. It sustains one's faith to know that it is
shared by a great association which speaks to the in
dividual with the weight of precedent and the sanctity
of an honorable past. But the very essence of this
reaction of the institution upon the individual comes in
every case from the same source, namely, from the
accumulated power of earUer individuals who have made
the institution worth having. Let the individual fall
back upon the institution as the real basis of his own
relation to the world; let him once say: "Because I
belong to this family, or to this city, or to this Church,
therefore I can afford to allow myself a relaxation of
diligence which would be unsafe for another," and he is
lost. The value of membership in the community is
realized only when it is paid for by the steady main
tenance of the value of every member.
So it is that the Unitarian reaches his doctrine of a
race redemption. It is to his mind no process of fatal
istic rotation, so that, after passing through certain
mystic "cycles" of advancement, the race shall be re-

REDEMPTION 20I
volved around into the condition of perfection in which
it started. Nor is it a process prescribed at any one
given moment of human progress, set going by any one
event, or completed under the direction of any human
organization, even though that organization claims to be
divine. The redemption of the race comes only through
the redemption of indi-viduals, and that comes only
through the redeeming force of personal character. It
is not a culmination in time, such as we have been
accustomed to imagine. The Unitarian does not look
either backward or forward to an age of general and
universal acquiescence m the -will of God. His golden
age is not to be found in any Garden of Eden where
men were not yet men, nor in any New Jerusalem
where they shaU be no longer men. His golden age of
humanity is found wherever, in the conffict of the
world, right prevaUs over wrong, Ught over darkness,
truth over falsehood, love over hate. Every man at
once contributes to and shares m the race redemption
when he, in his o-wn personal conflict, comes out vic
torious. He is never so far redeemed that he is exempted
from that law of struggle which is the law of all life;
neither is the race ever redeemed beyond the need of
continual defence against temptation to wrong.
This conclusion -will perhaps to many persons have a
painful sound, as implying an incompleteness, a one-

2C2 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
sidedness in the scheme of things which they cannot
associate -with the idea of a well-ordered universe. The
Unitarian does not take that view of it, because to him
there is nothing depressing m the notion of incomplete
ness. He does not accept the law of struggle as a gloomy
misfortune to be taken in a spirit of resignation or de
spair. On the contrary, the law of struggle seems to
him the law of happiness. The depressing thought to
him is the idea of completeness, — of a perfection that
should leave nothing more to be done ; no heights to
climb, no battles to win, no weakness to be overcome,
no distress to be reUeved. It would be to him like the
wretchedness of the very rich, to whom, because all
satisfactions are within reach no true satisfaction is
possible. Redemption by Character, first of the indi
vidual, and then, through the natural groupings of in
di-viduals, of society as a whole; this is the ideal that
to the Unitarian embodies the most elevating, the most
stimulating, and the most rewarding of human concep
tions.

CHAPTER VII
THE CHURCH
One holy Church of God appears
Through every age and race,
Unwasted by the lapse of years,
Unchanged by changing place.
— Samuel Longfellow.
There are three conceptions of the Christian Church,
which at different times have determined its form, have
influenced its doctrines, and greatly affected its value to
mankind. Within these three principal ideas there
have been infinite diversities of detaU; but, for our
present purpose, the definition of Unitarian thought
about the Church, this threefold distmction wiU suffice.
For the sake of simpUcity, we may use the words Eso
teric, CathoUc, and IndividuaUstic to express what is
most characteristic in each. It may be said -with truth
that the ultimate purpose of the Church under aU of
these divergent forms is the same. It is the advance
ment of humanity toward the final consummation of the
Christian ideal as expressed in the supreme vision of a
"kingdom of God." As to this ultimate purpose there
can be no important difference among the many divi
sions into which the Church has always faUen. The
203

204 UNITARUN THOUGHT
divisions have taken place accordmg to that law of all
human things whereby men left to themselves will in
evitably differ as to the best means of attaining a com
mon end. It is a law not to be deplored, but to be
UtUized. In obedience to it is found the hberty of the
sons of God. Defiance of it begets subtly but surely the
twin spirits of servffity and oppression. Honest thought
has always produced divisions. It is by division that
the main organism has been strengthened; as a plant,
whose roots have become so hopelessly entangled as to
force out the Ufe-gi-ving earth, recovers vitaUty by being
divided and thus brought again into contact with the
sources of its Ufe. The Ufe of the Church has not been
exempt from this universal law. From the beginning it
has foUowed certain fairly weU-marked lines of division,
and these have resulted in the threefold distinction we
have laid do-wn.
Let us examine a Uttle more carefuUy the three terms
we have employed to express these divisions. The eso
teric idea of the Church implies the notion of a twofold
membership. In such a Church there is an ordinary
membership for the great bulk of its constituents and a
special membership for an inner circle of elect spirits.
The quaUfication for admission to this inner circle may
be of any imaginable sort. In fact it has usually been
determined on one or the other of two decisive grounds.

THE CHURCH 205
Its basis has been either an inteUectual or a spiritual one.
In either case the elect members were supposed to be
persons of highly superior endowment or training, or
both. They constituted an elite of the inteUect or of
the spirit m such a commanding sense that to them and
to them alone could safely be entrusted the occult some-
thmg, to preserve which was the mam purpose of the
Church itself. Hardly had the Church begun to be
conscious of its own existence when these distinctions
began to make themselves felt. In the long effort to
determine just how the new thought of Christians should
express itself, groups of choice spirits — the "best
minds," as we should say — imagined that they could
work out a phUosophic system superior to all the an
cient phUosophies, that would once for aU replace them
and satisfy the new demand. These were the "know
ing ones," the Gnostics, as they called themselves. They
were soon divided under various forms, but were united
in this one central idea of an occult doctrine to be em
bodied in a special company of the intellectuaUy elect
who constituted the truest part of the true Church.
With their doctrines we are not concemed; only with
their idea as to the outward structure of the visible
Church. It was, further, quite consistent with this manifesta
tion — the same thing has happened over and over

2o6 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
again in the history of human thought — that paraUel
-with this inteUectual esotericism there should grow up
also another esotericism of the emotions. As in the
one case there was an inner circle of experts distinguished
by learning and philosophic skill, so in the other case
there was an inner circle of specially endowed spiritual
persons. Their insight into truth came not from an
inteUectual process, but from that kind of direct reveal
ing which expressed itself by the word "prophecy."
An accident of history caused these -views of the "pro
phetic" Church to be kno-wn as Montanism, and so they
have been called ever since m their many reappearances
from then tUl now. Their essential kmship with the
Gnostic -views, so far as the nature of the Church is
concerned, is evident. If either or both of these tend
encies had prevaUed, we should have had a Church
essentiaUy divided into the two permanent classes of
the initiated and the uninitiated. There would have
been an aristocracy of the intellect or of the spirit and,
over against this, the mass of average Christians, im
perfect in their comprehension, hmited as to their share
in the Christian Ufe on earth and equaUy Umited in its
final rewards.
Against this conception of the Church as a secret
society of perfectionists either in doctrine or in practice
was made the splendid protest of the early and true

THE CHURCH 207
CathoUcism. The CathoUc position was that, in har
mony with the nature of man as an imperfect being,
any such distinction of endo-wment could not be made
the basis of a permanent classffication of Christian be
Uevers. At any given moment, to be sure, there were
obvious differences among men in these respects; but,
since the work of Christ had been for all men alike,
these differences were only accidental, not essential.
The Church consisted of aU men, perfect or imperfect,
— or, rather, there were none perfect either in knowledge
or in Ufe, and the work of the Church was to educate
men up constantly from a lower to a higher grade of
spiritual thinking and U-ving. Every person properly
received into the Christian membership was a full mem
ber entitled to share in aU its privileges and subject to
all its responsibffities. That was the orginal CathoU
cism. It was an idea full of significance for the future.
If it could have been maintained in this early purity,
the history of Christianity would have been different.
That it was not so maintained is one of the common
places of reUgious history. The idea itself was, indeed,
never lost. It remained to restrain and at times to
justffy the action of organized CathoUcism; but, as the
Church came to be identffied with society as a whole,
the principle of universaUty became a principle of
tyranny. Divergence from the doctrine or the practice

208 UNITARL\N THOUGHT
of the Church m ever so sUght a degree became rebelUon
against a divine order. IndividuaUty, either of the in
tellect or of the spirit, became the worst of crimes, pun
ishable by exclusion from privUeges here, which entaUed
exclusion from the rewards of the Ufe to come. WhUe
the Church stiU declared its mission to be the education
of the race to higher spiritual standards, it ignored the
law which makes the education of the whole dependent
upon the free development of the individual. The
Church, from being the schoolmaster, became, as unwise
schoolmasters have too often become, a tyrant, drawing
absolute Unes -within which the human spirit might
move, but beyond which lay disaster.
Happily, however, the human spirit will not be kept
do-wn. The protest against this perversion of the true
function of CathoUcism was never wanting. It re
quired centuries before that - individuality which is of
the essence of the ancient Greco-Roman civUization
could be repressed. Even then, when, in the decUne of
the ancient culture, the control of thought had passed
into the hands of a dominant priesthood, keen, as priest
hoods ever have been, to seize its own advantage and
ally itself with physical force to accomplish its di-vine
mission, — even in the darkest times of the miscalled
"ages of faith," the record of silent, courageous protest
is unbroken. The Reformation, from the fourteenth cen-

THE CHURCH 209
tury on, is but the cry of this protest becoming articulate
once more in the voices of men who were not afraid to
go back to what they conceived to be the pure sources
of Christian thought and practice. The Reformation
was not the proclamation of new doctrines, nor the
foundation of new practices. It was the protest against
the idea of a Church which had come to obscure thought
and make of practice a mere mechanical repetition of
vain things.
In the reconstructions of the Reformation it was in
evitable that the same old antagonisms that had marked
the beginnings of Christianity should declare themselves
again. Once more the threefold alternative of the
esoteric, the universal, and the indi-viduaUstic presented
itself, and each had its foUowing. There were those
who dreamed, as sanguine souls have been dreaming to
this day, of a reformed Catholicism, so that the ancient
-vision of a .single, united Christianity might be reaUzed
at last. Others, legitimate descendants of the early
perfectionist sects, fancied the time had come for a king
dom of God on earth in the hands of a few chosen in
struments, through whose gradual increase the reign of
the carnal man should cease and the reign of the spirit
ual man be estabUshed forever. The former of these
ideals, the reformation of Catholicism from -within,
without disturbing its fundamental principle of univer-

2 ID UNITARIAN THOUGHT
saUty, had been thoroughly tried out. One after an
other, preachers and prophets, from Arnold of Brescia
to Savonarola, had thundered against evils which were
largely due to the very idea of universaUty they pro
fessed themselves still eager to uphold. Again and
again men had banded themselves together into vast
associations, each a new protest against the worldhness
and neglect of a church whose most devoted supporters
they stUl declared themselves to be. One after an
other, men of enUghtenment had sho-wn the way to
liberty, only to protest at the end that nothing they
might say should be taken as in any way reflecting
upon that authority of the Church which their whole
Uves had been given to weakening. It had been
thoroughly tried and men had had enough of it.
Nor, on the other hand, were the men of the sixteenth
century to be stampeded into any wild schemes of per
fectionism. If Romanism was bad, the reign of the
"Free Spirit" promised to be infinitely worse. It was
fortunate for the sanity of the early Reformation that its
more radical elements, -with their noble enthusiasms,
their irresistible logic, and their undaunted courage,
should have had fuU chance to show their most ex
travagant tendencies. It was a warning and an example
at once. It was a warning not to push aU ideas to their
logical extreme; but it was an example also of deter-

THE CHURCH 211
mined insistence upon essential things, even to the sac
rffice of the principle of unity.
So it came about once more in the history of the
Church that the friction of the three fundamental ideas
ended m the prevalence of one of them. Only now it
was not the idea of unity but the idea of individuaUty
that prevaUed over the other two. One of the most
dramatic moments in early Reformation history is
when, in the year 1529, Luther was caUed upon to nego
tiate -with the Swiss reformers -with a view to forming a
Protestant Union. The temptation from every worldly
point of -view was almost overwhelming. Nearly the
whole of Northern Germany, with the Scandina-vian
countries at its back, a great part of Southern Germany
and Eastern Switzerland, had already declared for the
Great Revolt. If they had chosen to stand together,
reachmg out a hand toward France, Italy, Austria, the
Low Countries, wherever men were inclining toward
their ideas, it seemed, humanly speaking, as if they
might make themselves irresistible and dictate terms to
Papacy and Empire alike. A great international Prot
estant League might have pro-vided the principle of
formal unity that seemed necessary to set over against
the still imposmg unity of CathoUcism. In this crisis
Luther saw the danger and faced it with his customary
boldness and more than his usual disregard of logical

212 UNITARI/USr THOUGHT
consistency. "These men" he said of the Swiss, who
were ready to make great concessions for unity, "are of
another spirit." He was wUling to let them go their
way pro-vided he and his were free to go theirs. He
would not persecute; but he would not be bound.
The word was spoken, and now for four hundred
years Protestantism has hved up to it. The Protestant
churches have been the clearest expression of what we
have caUed the sectarian or individualistic theory of the
Christian Church. They have often been accused of
having sacrfficed the principle of Christian unity; but
they have shown their essential kmship by maintaining
the great doctrine of the right to difer, — not always
consistently or with good grace. We are not to forget
the lamentable history of Protestant persecution. But
the fact remains that the world owes its present free
dom from reUgious oppression to the balancing of in
dependent sects which is the direct result of the
Protestant principle. Let any one infallible church of
authority get control of any community and the temper
of persecution, always lurking in the dark corners of
human society, -wUl certainly have its turn again.
This historical introduction has seemed necessary
that we may indicate more clearly the relation of Uni
tarian thought on this subject to that which preceded it.
Unitarians acknowledge their debt to aU three of the

THE CHURCH 213
tendencies we have been describing. They are CathoUc
in that they believe m the conception of the Church
as a great, all-inclusive community of men working,
each in his own way, for the realization of that kmgdom
of God which was the beginning and the end of the
mission of Jesus. They think of the Church as an
educative agency and would therefore admit to it all
who in sincerity desire to share its usefulness in bring
ing men to a fuller sense of their obUgation to the higher
Ufe. They sympathize also -with the movements we
have classified as "esoteric" in their notion of a direct
dealing of God -with the souls of men without the inter
vention of priesthood or sacramental observances. The
idea of the Holy Spirit working where it wUl, uttering
itseff through fitting agencies and mdependent of hu
man devices, attracts them at many points. But most
of aU Unitarians are heart and soul Protestant m their
acceptance of the principle of individuaUsm as the
natural basis of Church organization. They are not
alarmed at all by the obvious criticism that individual
ism is the mere negative of all organization, and that
the result of their attitude would be to make every
man a church by himself. They trust human nature
too much to take alarm at that. Quite as strong as
the tendency to self-assertion in man is the tendency to
associate. Indi-viduaUsm, as Unitarians understand it,

214 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
imphes also free association of Uke thinking men. The
essential thing to their mind is that the thinking should
come first and the associating afterward. The associa
tion should represent the honest, individual, mdependent
thought and experience of its members. It should not
dictate to them how they should think or feel. The
doctrine of the association is the expression of the sin
cere con-viction of its members. Its practice is the sum
of the outward observances which they beUeve to be
helpful in furthering their Ufe as Christian men. Every
such association has the right to caU itself and to be
caUed a church. The aggregate of such churches con
stitutes the Church, and Unitarians wiU accept no other
definition of it. They reject with decision the descrip
tion of the Church as a "reaUstic" entity, into which
every individual form of Christian organization must
somehow be fitted, — as if there were some absolute
standard of what a church ought to be. They conceive
of a church as distingiushed, for example, from a phUan-
thropic organization, by having for its object the further
ance of the Christian rehgious Ufe. It may combine
with this many other things, — works of charity, edu
cational enterprises, social objects, — any good thing
whatever; but these do not make its character as a
church. That comes wholly from its reUgious side, and
failmg this it would be only a social club. Its problem is

THE CHURCH 215
to see to it that these other activities do not come to
stand by themselves as something apart from its relig
ious life. They must flow from this and must find their
support in it. On the other hand, the reUgious side of
the Church may find m these practical appUcations the
most tangible proofs of its o-wn value to the world.
The Unitarian is not bUnd to the dangers of this -view
of the Church. He is aware of the extravagances into
which the sectarian spirit may lead. He knows the
long and unedif}dng history of how seemingly unim
portant differences have been magnffied into dissensions
that have turned men's mmds away from the essential
unities of the reUgious Ufe. He sees aU this and would
gladly do what he can to Umit it. It would be a bless
ing indeed if now minor differences could be ignored
and men could unite upon the larger unities. But, in
the first place, what are mmor differences ? — who is to
determine them? To set up any tribunal outside the
churches themselves would be to destroy that prmciple
of independence as against all authority which is the
corner-stone of the Unitarian's thought on this whole
subject. We used the phrase "seemingly unimportant"
ad-visedly, for men have strangely been moved to re
Ugious and moral, even to inteUectual activity, on
questions which, in what seems the larger light of our
own thought, would appear quite unworthy of serious

2x6 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
attention. No doubt pettinesses of many kinds have
been engendered by these controversies; but the Uni
tarian feels that in any case activity is better than sloth,
and the very narrowness of the discussions has made
them fruitful as a trainmg in rational thought. As
between the dangers of overzealous sectarian contro
versy and those of any single dominant authority,
Unitarians would unhesitatingly choose the former.
They see, as a matter of history, that wherever thought
has been free to move as it would, there men have
generaUy worked themselves out from the hmitations
of a narrow environment. True progress m human
thought has always come in this way and in no other.
If men are free to change the forms of their expression
of faith, that faith is sure to be kept always abreast of
the world's best thought. If a man cannot find room
to expand in one connection, he seeks another and
knows that he is not thus pro-ving himself recreant to
the faith, but is rather gi-ving it a deeper, because a
more sincere, loyalty. On the other hand, if to secure
a formal unity a man is compeUed to sacrffice any
essential con-viction, he finds himseff sinking ever deeper
and deeper into a tangle of compromises, in which, if
he think at aU, he -wiU finally become mgulfed. From
such confusion there is no escape except in general in
difference or inteUectual sloth.

THE CHURCH 217
Still further; if the Unitarian approves division into
groups according to the real differences in state of mind
which actuaUy do exist among men, so, when it comes
to the question of order -within the group, he is equaUy
steadfast in his defence of mdi-viduaUty. Among the
various poUties which have been tried within the Church,
he declares unhesitatingly in support of the principle of
CongregationaUsm. He goes back to the origmal decla
ration : "Where two or three are gathered together in
my name, there am I in the midst of them." That is the
Unitarian ideal of a Church — two or three or a thou
sand, gathered in sincere desire to Uve the Christian hfe as
they can understand it, — not asldng any one else what
that Ufe may be, but having their own working agree
ment as to how they may best bring it to its full expres
sion. In that body rests the law of its own organization.
It may choose its o-wn ministers and may ordain them
by as vaUd a title as any that ever existed. It must
pro-vide for their honorable maintenance, so long as
they devote themselves heartily to its welfare. It may
fix the conditions of its own membership and may apply
to its members such discipUne as may seem good to
itself. It may determine the forms of its o-wn worship,
using such as may seem to it best adapted to kindle
reverence and to stimulate an enlightened moraUty.
There is no hmit to the freedom -with which this sover-

2l8 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
eign congregation may provide for what seem to it the
best religious interests of its members.
But now once more it will be charged that Unitarian
ism must issue in a defiant but sterUe individuaUsm,
each congregation, if not hostile, at least indifferent, to
its neighbor. Such has not been the history of Con
gregationalism. Here again the Unitarian has faith in
the instinct of human nature which leads men to asso
ciate when they may do so freely and without surrender
of their own souls. The sovereign congregation wiU
unite with others of its kind, and the union wiU be aU
the stronger because it comes from below and within,
not from above and without. But, it wUl be said, in
such a union as this there must be continual discussion
as to the best ways of accompUshmg ends, even though
aU are fairly united as to what these ends ought to be.
That is true, and in such discussion the Unitarian finds,
not a defect, but a virtue of the Congregational principle.
In the Church, as m ci-vil society, nothing is perfect.
VitaUty can be maintained only by a continual striving
toward better and more effective methods. Discussion,
experiment, sometimes failure, are the agencies whereby
the world of human things moves. If we try to exclude
them by subjecting the individual man, congregation,
group, to the authority of any one man or any select
body of men, we quench the spirit at its source.

THE CHURCH 219
Such is the Unitarian's Constitution, the only canon-
law to which he -wUl subject himself, the law of a free
association, making its o-wn statutes, but conforming
these always to the great common law of hberty. It
wffi be e-vident from aU that has been said, that the
thmg most repugnant to the Unitarian is ecclesiasticism
in all its forms. This is not to say that he is not sen
sitive to the charm which Ues m a great tradition or that
he cannot appreciate the force that comes from con
centration of power. What repels him from ecclesias
ticism is the feeling that in the things of the spirit there
is no room for such considerations. He goes back in
this, as m every other matter, to the beginning and
seeks there m vam for any suggestion of a Church in
the sense of a later time. There is for him no more
instructive moment in the history of the Church than
that crisis in its affairs when the immediate foUowers
of the Master were brought face to face -with the most
important question that has ever caUed for answer in
Christian terms. The Hebrew pupUs of the Hebrew
prophet were already di-vided as to whether or no the
message they had received might be shared in fuU
measure with men of aUen blood to whom' the Hebrew
traditions of law and of faith meant nothmg or less
than nothing. The discussion was long and bitter. It
had obviously reached out to include not only jealousies

220 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
of race, but jealousies of place and rank as weU. It
was threatening the very hfe of the infant community,
when Paul, Hebrew indeed, but man first, guided it into
the way of friendly conference, not appealing to any
authority except the spirit of the Teaching they all
professed to foUow, but frankly taking the way of com
promise. It was the first great recognition of the right
to differ as the true foundation of that Christian unity
which is not uniformity, but rather the expression of
the innermost spirit of truth-seekmg and truth-telling.
The claim of any group of men to control the fortunes
of all the foUowers of Christ seems to the Unitarian a
monstrous perversion of the teaching of the Master.
He cannot recognize the right of any one authority to
define the Umits of Christian membership, to fix the
forms of Christian worship, to declare articles of belief
and enforce their acceptance, least of aU, to say how
far men may go in using their minds in the study of
truth. AU that is what the word " ecclesiasticism "
represents to him. It expresses the idea of the institu
tion absorbing the man instead of the man making the
mstitution. Even historically he finds that the institu
tion came through the activity of indi-viduals. That
there was a "Church" before there were any Christians,
a di-vine abstraction to be realized only when men came
to be organized in a certain prescribed fashion, — this

THE CHURCH 221
"reaUstic" conception of a Church he repudiates as a
puerUe device, adopted after the fact and in order to
maintain a mechanism that had come to seem a divine
necessity. It would be easy in this connection to en
large upon the baser motives of ecclesiasticism — the
pride of priestly rank, the enjoyment of special pri-vUege,
the lust of power, the arrogance of reUgious conceit
that are the stock in trade of "evangehcal" criticism of
ecclesiasticism, but, as the Umtarian desires to be
judged by his best, so he is wiUmg to judge others by
their best. He wiU give all credit to the honest con
viction of the "Church" that it is a specially divine
institution, complete from the beginning, and free only
in the sense that it may employ continuaUy new de-vices
to keep men's souls from wandering away from this one
appointed path to safety. He tries to respect its honest
beUef that it is the special depositary of certain truths
which it alone may mterpret to the understanding of
successive generations of men. He cannot repress even
a certam admiration for the mgenuity it has displayed
in finding supports for these honest convictions in its
own precedents and in the processes of its own historical
development. The Unitarian is impressed, as every one
must be, by the extraordinary continuity of force in
these traditions ; but, as himseff an honest man, he can
only say that he beUeves these honest people to be

222 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
mistaken, and he -will not run the risks of subjecting
himself to the dangers involved in trying to fit himself
to their methods.
Above aU, the Unitarian is repelled by the notion of
an authority in reUgion conveyed from one generation
to another by a mysterious process of initiation which
rests not upon the character and capacity of the in
dividual, but, in the last resort, upon the perfection of
the process itself. The "apostolic succession," the
most imposing of institutions to the ecclesiastical mind,
is to him as repellent in theory as he beUeves it to be
evU in practice. Givmg all due credit to the desire of
the Church to provide itself with a learned and -virtuous
ministry, he cannot forget that those functions of the
minister which are declared to be the most important,
the due administration of certain prescribed "sacra
mental" rites, do not derive their sanction at all from
his personal quaUfications, but solely from the regularity
of his ordination. It seems to the Unitarian inevitable
that, under these circumstances, the emphasis of im
portance in reUgious things should be misplaced. Men
must come to beUeve that the aU-important thing for
them is regularity and that their o-wn individual char
acter is comparatively of little account. He thinks he
sees in history every evidence that this has been the
case. With aU its pretence of a di-vine commission, the

THE CHURCH 223
apostoUcaUy quaUfied priesthood never succeeded in
keepmg itself clean for any great length of time. Its
history is one long record of decUne and recovery, and
its recovery has invariably been due to a pressure from
some source not claiming any specially divine sanction,
from the outraged common-sense of the community,
from "prophets" who could not be sUenced, or from the
organized governments of Christian states whose rights
had been invaded. If such has been the history of
dominant ecclesiasticism, the Unitarian sees no reason
why similar results should not foUow in the future and
he is not -wilUng to take the risks.
If it were solely a question of the one great organiza
tion which stands or faUs by its apostolic succession,
the case would be simpler. Unitarians could then
simply go their way and let the "Church" go hers.
The issue would be clear and each side woifld know its
friends. Unfortunately the issue is no longer so clear.
The appeal of uniformity as against diversity, of au
thority as against the spirit, — or, rather, of authority
as alone in possession of the spirit, — and of tradition as
against independent judgment, — this appeal has gained
greatly in force. While men have seemed to be ap
proaching the Unitarian position by many ways, ap-
proachmg it so nearly as almost to have reached it, there
has been an equally marked tendency to appropriate

224

UNITARIAN THOUGHT

the results of Unitarian independence and courage m
the service of uniformity. The language and forms and
much of the sentiment of long-abandoned ecclesiasticism
have been re-vived and men have haUed the coming of a
near day when once again CathoUcism — only now a
genuine CathoUcism of aU "good men," -without refer
ence to differences of "opinion" — should unite the Chris
tian world to new triumphs of the faith. It has been a
very tempting prospect. Not a few Unitarians have
been carried away by it. The old war-cries of the
earhest centuries have been heard again. "The Church,"
"uniformity," "authority," "ordination," "sacraments,"
"discipUne" have been combined -with many others bor
rowed from other dominant mterests of our day, —
"cooperation," "combination," "together," — to form a
complex of ideas that may weU have confused many a
steady head. Ecclesiasticism has been at hand to
profit by aU this. "Here," it has said, "is the remedy.
Let us sink aU differences and go on together against the
common foes of our present-day society." That is a
very seductive invitation, but the reply of Unitarian
ism is clear and unmistakable.
It asks first : Who are these foes ? If they are moral
enemies, then Unitarians see no reason why men can
not unite in warfare against them without sacrificing
one particle of their present forms of reUgious associa-

THE CHURCH 225
tion. They are prepared to lend a hand in every good
cause, and they feel that readiness to join in such com
mon endeavor is precisely one of the very best tests of
the value of any reUgious organization. Any "church"
which holds itself aloof from the common service of the
community, lest it compromise itself in the eyes of
some authority on which it depends, condemns itself as
unworthy of the name it claims a superior right to bear.
In any such friendly rivalry of Christian service Uni
tarians do not fear comparison with any other branch
of the universal Church. But are these the foes against
whom Unitarians are in-vited to join by those who,
claimmg to be the sole lawful representatives of the
Church, -wiU accept them if only they will so far modify
their interpretation of certain fundamental teachings of
Christianity as to adopt the formulas of faith and con
form to the outward practices of the body that invites
them? Unitarians do not think so. They think they
are being in-vited to war against far different foes.
They suspect that under the guise of a desire for peace
they are bemg tempted to turn against some of their
own most cherished affies. They do not regard it as a
smaU thing to give up their precious right to differ,
even to the bitter end, on such deep-going questions
as, for mstance, salvation for humanity through a specffic
incarnation of deity in a given man at a given time, or
Q

226 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
the meaning of the future of humanity as certffied by
the fact of a specific resurrection from the dead. They
would seem to be declaring war against their o-wn intel
ligence and their own honesty and shirking the solemn
responsibiUty laid upon them by the possession of minds
and consciences to use these to their best abUity in the
highest problems of the spiritual life. They dread any
alliance, however aUuring, that may turn them ever so
Uttle against these most precious of gifts. They would
rather stand alone outside of all reUgious organization
than enter upon compromises in which they must in
evitably sacrffice what gives them their special right to
be. They do not fear that the world will ever suffer
for lack of readiness to fall in with attractive promises
of apparent harmony. 'What they do fear is that men
may grow careless as to real distinctions of thought
and of spiritual character, and they desire to contribute
what they can toward making those distinctions clear
and signfficant. They are wilUng to beUeve in the
moral sincerity of all good men, no matter what their
reUgious confession ; but they feel also that any decUne
from absolute individual integrity of thought is pretty
certain to be reflected in a corresponding weakness of
moral fibre. The ancient proposition that "heresy, " i.e.
independent thought, impUes a certain moral deUnquency
seems to them quite as true when appUed the other way

THE CHURCH

227

round. At aU events they may perhaps be pardoned
if they prefer to take the moral risks of independence
rather than those of conformity.
To sum it up : Unitarians beUeve in a church, and
they wish it might always be a holy and a cathohc one.
They wiU contribute aU they have of hoUness and

tion because they beUeve CongregationaUsm to be the
form of association which gives at once freest play to
the mdividual and the soundest basis for effective com
bination.

CHAPTER VIII
WORSHIP
Prayer is the soul's sincere desire
Uttered or unexpressed ;
The motion of a hidden fire
That trembles in the breast. — James Montgomery.
Unitarianism, we have already seen, is a reUgion,
not a phUosophy, nor a system of morals. It aims to
be a reUgion that can be defended on sound philosophical
principles, and it hopes to express itself in a practical
moraUty that -wUl bear the test even of hostile criticism.
But its philosophy is only an mstrument to keep a
rational balance between the emotions, which are the
true basis of all reUgion, and the thinking mind, which
is equally a part of man's di-vine endowment. Its
moraUty is the perfect and natural flowering out into
conduct of this harmony between mind and feeUng. At
the centre, as source aUke and end, is the reUgious im
pulse, the natural outreaching of the human heart to
something higher than itself, — a something by which
it can explain itself and the universe of being that sur
rounds it, — something towards which it can express its
sentiments of gratitude for the weU-being it experiences;
22g

230 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
of desire for the things it lacks; and of reverence for the
beneficence and power it recognizes. This rehgious im
pulse, universal, so far as we know, among men would
seem to be the most purely personal of emotions, re
flecting each man's own instincts of love and hate, of
fear and desire. Yet, the farther back we go, the more
we find reUgion an affair, not of the mdividual, but of
the community, the famUy, the clan, the race, the
nation. As the individual finds himself m all other
relations a part of the social organism, so in reUgion.
The thing greater than himseff takes form m the tribal
deities, the mediators between the great unkno-wn and
his Uttle world of the kno-wn.
The dealings with the unseen powers pass mto the
hands of "experts" of one sort or another, and so the
priesthoods of the world have arisen. Their function
has been to speak for the people with the gods, to give
voice to the desires, the passions, at times to the sorrows
and the repentance, of the community. In turn they
have come to shape and guide these feeUngs. The com
munity has been bound to certain prescribed forms of
expression for its emotions, and the priesthoods, as ad
ministrators of these forms, have come to exercise su
preme control over reUgion and to extend their sway
over every detail of the associated Ufe of men. The
deaUng of men with the gods has seemed to overlook

WORSHIP 231
the mdi-vidual and put the community altogether in his
place. Only now and then, with great spiritual awaken
ing, some leader has arisen — Buddha, Socrates, Jesus,
Mohammed, Luther, Wesley — and has caUed men back'
sharply to the sense of their o-wn personal right and
duty, — their right to deal directly, face to face, -with
their God, their duty so to exercise this right that man-
kmd shaU be the braver and purer for it. Their call
has been heard; the priesthoods have dra-wn back into
their corners and bided their time; but their time has
never again been quite Uke the old times. Even though
the early zeal of reform has cooled and the old instincts
have led to new forms of spiritual tyranny, still the
ancient trammels have never sat quite so heavily as
before upon the individual mmd and conscience. Some
part of the people has become fully emancipated, and
the rest, in spite of their conformity, have gamed great
advantages from the freedom they cannot or wiU not
share. We are concerned here with two opposite theories of
the thing we caU "worship," but which might better be
caUed "the approach to God"; for by worship we do
not here mean merely or primarUy that glorif3Tng of
the divine name which may so easUy run over into a
formal ceremony, a "worshippmg -with men's hands as
though He needed anything." We mean rather by

232

UNITARIAN THOUGHT

worship the whole attitude of the soul toward God and
only secondarily its expression in outward forms. These
two theories may be defined as the sacramental and the
spiritual. From the begmnmg of the Church these
words have represented a contmuous conffict. On the
one hand we have had the great declaration of the
Master that the God who is spirit must be worshipped
m spirit. On the other, we have had the immense
weight of organized Christianity thrown solidly in sup
port of carefiflly worked out systems in the hands of a
class claimmg for itself a divine commission to guide the
souls of men in their approach to God. Wherever the
sacramental theory of worship has prevaUed, the spirit
ual theory has come to be regarded with pecuhar detes
tation. To come to God -without the agency of the
organized mechanism of the Church has been treated as
the worst of crimes. If we examine the most flagrant
cases of Christian persecution, we shall find that what
ever was the nominal pretext, the real offence was this :
that the mdividual had been guilty of presenting him
self -without proper introduction, as it were, before the
being whom he beUeved to be his maker and his friend.
On the other hand, whenever the spiritual view of wor
ship has found -vigorous expression, it has always been
against the sacramental system that it has protested
most loudly and most persistently. We are dealing

WORSHIP 233
here, therefore, -with one of the most profound antago
nisms of the religious consciousness, and it is worth
whUe to examine it a littie more closely.
The essence of the sacramental theory of worship lies
in the idea that there is an essential opposition between
man and God, a gulf that is to be bridged, a sm that is
to be atoned, an anger that is to be appeased, a dis
cord that is to be harmomzed. However far we may
seem to be removed from primitive notions of sacrifice,
this is the idea which under one or another form runs
through all "sacramental" processes. A something is
to be done which requires on our part a specffic effort
directed to a specffic end. We no longer sacrifice our
children or our first-fruits, but we are asked to beUeve
that, through acceptmg a supreme sacrffice on the part
of a bemg who was one of ourselves at the same time
that he was actuaUy God, we are taking part in a sac
rffice as real as any ever performed. It is true that
this sacramental idea of worship was profoundly modified
at the great Reformation. "Anti-sacramentaUsm" was
one of the catchwords of the reformmg parties. "No
mediator but Christ" was the battle cry that ralUed
the armies of the North against papal domination.
StiU, the idea of opposition between God and man has
remained, and, m the general shading off of differences
which is the tendency of our time, it has taken on new

234

UNITARIAN THOUGHT

and more subtly attractive forms. Its grosser aspects
have been toned do-wn to meet the advance of freer
thought. RituaUsm has been presented as after aU
only a means of satisf3dng a natural human desire for
form and of avoiding the crudities and extravagances of
individual effort. We are remmded that Uturgical
repetition appeals to a certain instmct of the human
heart. Forms, we are told, are valuable as aids to the
spirit. Through forms of ritual our mmds are removed
from the ordinary processes of logical reckoning and
guided gently mto the channels of spiritual reflection.
The attitude of the soul m worship should be as far as
possible removed from that of our non-worshipping
hours. We should cultivate the sense of form even m
the outward circumstances of worship. The very place,
the enclosure of the four waUs, should be m a special
sense "consecrated" by some specffic act on the part of
some recognized authority. The words there spoken
should be authorized in such a way that those who hear
them may be safe from the scandal of mdividual whim
or fancy. Even the tone m which they are uttered
should be "elevated" above that of every day. It
should be as far as possible dehumanized and made like
the tone of a mechanical mstrument lest the thought of
the individual intrude itself upon the worshipping mul
titude. EspeciaUy should the words of sacred Scripture

WORSHIP 235
be read in a voice deprived of aU semblance of humanity,
so that no particle of personal suggestion or interpreta
tion may mar its divme perfection. In a word we are
asked to beUeve that the most perfect and most accept
able worship is that m which the indi-vidual disappears
most completely because he has sunk himself in the
common impulse of surrender to the external influences
of a once powerful tradition. This kind of persuasion
is the more subtle because it contains a measure of
truth. It is true that we are aU sensitive m greater or
less degree to the influences of form, and that the repeti
tion of words as meaningless as "Mesopotamia" has its
effect upon our imagination. It must be a dull mmd
mdeed that does not respond to the incommunicable
suggestions of the Gothic Cathedral, or thrUl to the
sound of stately music written to enforce the solemnity
of majestic words. And it must be a hardened soul
mdeed that is not softened by the repetition of words
that have been sanctified to it by the impressions of
youth and by the tender associations of mature Ufe.
AU this would be admitted by every serious and
reasonable individuahst. The point of his conflict with
the rituaUst is not precisely here. It is rather upon the
question as to the soundness of tffis motive as a stimulus
to the rehgious Ufe, and it is just at this point that the
Unitarian attitude becomes clear and defensible. It is

236 UNITARLW THOUGHT
by this time hardly necessary to say that the Unitarian
begins m this matter as in others with the individual.
He knows perfectly well the power over the individual
of the sense of community and he would utilize this as a
valuable aid in strengthening the individual's sense of
his o-wn relation to God and to hfe. We have seen how
this balance of the individual and the community affects
his understanding of the nature and function of the
Church. The Church as an organization owes its whole
value, m his mind, to the nature of the mdividuals who
compose it. So it is with the question of formaUsm in
worship. The Unitarian would have no quarrel with
forms if he could be quite sure that they reaUy repre
sented the honest personal thought and feehng of those
who practise them. It is because he is not sure of this
— or, rather, because he is quite sure of the contrary —
that he dreads all formaUsm in worship, and is ready
to take his chances on the other side. What he thinks
he sees in the formahsms of worship is that they in
variably tend first to obscure and then to falsify the
thought of those who practice them. He does not
beUeve it is possible that any form of words can for
any long period of time continue to express the advan
cing thought of honest and independent men, and he
beheves that the arrangements of the reUgious hfe, as
of all other forms of associated hfe, should be made

WORSHIP 237
for the honest and the independent, — not for the shifty
and the timid.
It foUows, therefore, that the Unitarian is the de
clared enemy of aU consistent sacramentaUsm. He is
ready to define worship as the approach to God, but he
will not accept as guides along that road any formu
lated series of ordinances, no matter how cleverly they
may seem bound together by unbroken traditions of the
Church. He -will not admit the right of any man to
teU him how he may express the emotions of praise or
desire, gratitude, repentance, adoration, humiUty, which
make up his attitude toward the source of aU things.
These, he feels, are his own or they are nothing. If any
organization of men tells him it has a special divine com
mission to direct his expression of these feelings, he
meets its claim with a general denial. He will not
beUeve that any human orgam'zation knows any better
than another or any better than he himself the mind of
God, wffich is the end of worship, and so he is not afraid
to make his way alone. Worship seems to him so great
a thing that he cannot admit any intrusion into it on
the part of any one. He dares, because he must, bring
his o-wn sorrow, his o-wn thankfulness, his own aspira
tion, weakness, repentance and set them in the light
of that Infinite Presence m which alone they find their
true meaning for him. He dares this because he thinks

238 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
of God as his natural resort in aU his highest states of
feeling. That is what God means to him. It means
the source and centre of all that Life in which his Ufe
is a part, the strength of his weakness, the Ught of his
darkness, the goal of his ambitions, the giver of aU that
seems to him good, the giver also — in love — of what
seems to him evU.
These are the forms under which God presents him
self to his mind, and how then can he do otherwise than
set himself freely, without reserve and without media
tion, into relation with a being so mtimately bound up
with every deeper feeUng, every higher impulse of his
nature ? We have said the ritualist thinks of the in
dividual as intruding himself into a higher order, to
which he ought to be subject. The Unitarian has pre
cisely the opposite feehng. To him the ritual is the
intruding thing. The natural and normal attitude of
man is to be near to God. It is only when some false
authority tries to impose itself upon him, that he is
forced away from that natural and simple relation.
That is what seems to the Unitarian an intrusion: when
priesthoods and orders, rituals and Uturgies, come in
between man and his God. The impertinence, the
crime, seems to him to be on the other side. The
proper, the fittmg, thmg is that the man be free; the
false, the confusing, thing is that he be bound by any

WORSHIP

239

fixed system in the making of which he has had no
share. In this last word we find the clue to the Unitarian's
thought on the whole question of common worship. It
-wiU be objected here, as in the case of the Unitarian
idea of the Church, that the logical outcome would be
to drive every man apart by himself into the soUtude
of his o-wn soul when he desired most to draw near to
God. The Unitarian accepts the criticism and points
here again to the teaching of the Master. If there was
anythmg about which the teaching of Jesus was clearer
than another, it was this. If there was any e-vil he
thought it worth while to combat more steadily than
any other, it was the abuse of a soul-destroying rituaUsm
that had intruded itseff between the people and their
God until it seemed as if all the springs of a natural
piety had been parched and dried up -within them for
ever. The command of Jesus was to throw it aU off —
not to compromise or explain away, but to throw the
whole thing off at once and go back straight to the
simple worship in spirit of a God who was spirit. The
supreme harmony of man -with God was, so he taught,
to be attained only when the individual soul should
-withdraw itself from all outward influence — should
enter into its closet and pray m secret to its Father,
who sees in secret.

240 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
ShaU we then try to be absolutely logical and Uteral
in our understanding of this teaching? ShaU we say,
as some men have tried from the beginnmg to say:
Let us have no forms, no organization, no recognition of
the common instincts of humanity, no appreciation of
the subtle influence of the commimity upon the indi
vidual? To aU this the Unitarian answers, "No."
Here as elsewhere it is a question, not indeed of com
promises, but of proportion, of emphasis, of adjustment
between opposing forces. He beheves the teaching of
Jesus to represent the highest ideal of Christian worship.
The full and free communion of the individual soul
-with the soul of the universe seems to him the highest
conception of the reUgious attitude. At all costs this
idea must be retained. Without it Christianity would
cease to have a function m the world. Whatever really
opposes or impedes it must be rejected -without hesita
tion and without compromise. Whatever really aids it
must be cultivated and developed, so long as it seems
Ukely to continue helpful toward this supreme end.
Among these aids to the Ufe of the spirit, the Uni
tarian reckons the institution of common and pubhc
worship. He feels a certam mstinctive sympathy -with
those men who, from time to time, have sought to
realize in some Uteral fashion the individuaUsm of Jesus ;
but he cannot help seemg how even they have been

WORSHIP 241
compelled to recognize the demands of man's social
nature. Even they sought companionsliip in solitude.
Such is the history of monasticism almost from its
very beginnmg. Men were driven by a variety of
motives, into which it is well not to inquire too closely,
to forsake the company of their fellows and seek in
desert soUtudes the inner grace the world had faUed
to give them. It was a flattermg iUusion, — as if they
were sure of their own loftiness of nature and purpose.
It may weU have answered for a brief period of special
exaltation. But soon the social instinct, as deep-seated
m the human heart as any motive of personal advantage,
put forth its insistent claim and found its answer.
GraduaUy, without settled plan, these scattered "saints"
of the desert drew together into unformed groups U-ving
stffi in defiant seff-assertion, yet coming also into ever
closer touch -with each other and realizing ever more
clearly an ideal of a regulated community. Then came
leaders, — teachers of a constitutional system for the
separated Ufe. Then orders, — vast congregations of men
U-ving apart from the usual custom of society, yet de-
velopmg more and more a use and custom of their o-wn
that rivaUed or surpassed in completeness the codes of
cities or of states. But even this was not enough. The
principle of separation had proved its own destruction.
The monk had failed; the friar, the brother of aU who

242 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
needed him, came to take his place. The friar began in
poverty, in humiUty, and ignorance; but soon the
wealth of the spiritually awakened layman poured into
his satchel, the pride of power laid hold upon him, and
the learning of Europe was m his hands. The Jesuit
was the ciflmmation of this extraordinary history.
Separated from the world like all his predecessors, he
was yet in the very thick of the world's fiercest confficts,
making use of his separateness as a weapon to shape
the forms of social organization to his own iron scheme.
Separation as a working force has been effective only
in so far as its professors have violated their own prin
ciple and put themselves in relation with the working
agencies of the society about them. Just as the Mystics
of the Middle Ages, beginnmg with a rejection of aU
scholastic processes, ended by founding a "school" of
their own, so the indi-viduahsts in worship have found
themselves driven into some form of association lest
they remain m a sterile seclusion fatal aUke to them
selves and to the idea they represent. The Unitarian
shows his true cathoUcity in recognizing from the start
the dependence of the mdividual, even in so purely per
sonal a matter as worship, upon the Ufe of the com
munity. Only — and here is the gist of the whole
position — he thmks of the common Ufe as an aid to
the inner spiritual Ufe of the indi-vidual and only as

WORSHIP

243

such. He -wUl not accept it as a substitute for the
inner -vision. Neither wUl he admit it as an authority
dictating the terms upon which the mner vision may
enjoy its right to be. Again he reminds himself that
where there is no -vision the people perish; that is,
that the Ufe of the community depends upon maintam-
ing the clearness of the -vision which is and always must
be a thing of the mdi-vidual. The Unitarian would
admit, therefore, naturaUy, the largest Uberty as to
forms. WhUe his S3mipathy goes first to the simpler
expressions of the rehgious spirit, he will not Umit any
of his fellows in their choice of a more formal service.
The only thmg he msists upon is that the form shall
not impose itseff upon any man as something ha-ving
value m itseff.
The Unitarian is emphaticaUy Protestant in changing
the emphasis of noble service from the sacramental to
the personal and spiritual side. Where he retams the
word "sacrament" at aU, he has completely changed its
meaning — so completely that probably few Unitarians
reahze the fuU historic significance of the word. They
have forgotten, if they ever knew, that in the pre-
Reformation Church the word "sacrament" acquired a
secondary meaning which gave to the "sacramental"
act a certain -virtue of its o-wn, so that the mere perform
ance of the act by the right person and m the right way

244

UNITARIAN THOUGHT

had a certain effect upon the person who received it.
The whole process of the Reformation might be de
scribed as a contmuous protest against this view of a
sacrament, and yet the dominant parties m the Refor
mation were never tired of insistmg, as against its more
thoroughgomg elements, that they had not given it up
and did not propose to do so. Now the Unitarian be
longs historicaUy to these more thoroughgoing elements
of the Reformation. The former idea of a sacrament
as an observance which, even in ever so sUght a degree,
had a positive and effectual -virtue in itself {ex opere
operato) seems to him so dangerous to the spiritual Ufe
of the indi-vidual that he can be satisfied -with nothing
less than its complete abandonment. If he permits
himself to use the word at all, it is only in connection
with one of the several "sacraments" of the historic
church, the sacrament of the Eucharist, and even here,
if he stops to think, he -will rather use some other word.
He -will prefer the purely historic phrase, the "Lord's
Supper," or that other truly spiritual word, "com
munion," which conveys to him precisely the meaning
which has most sigmficance for him. In any case he
wiU be quite clear that the essence of the formal act of
participation consists wholly m its memorial character.
"In remembrance of me" is the clew to the Unitarian's
understanding of this, the great central feature of his-

WORSHIP 245
toric Christian worship. As such, as a reminder of the
Ufe and death of Jesus and of their value to themselves
personally as members of a modern Christian society.
Unitarians have generally retamed this simple memorial
service. They have no quarrel, however, with those
withm their feUowship who do not feel the need of
such formal remmder. They feel about this, as they
do about aU forms, that the man who cares least for
such formal expression may be most keenly aUve to the
spirit it is intended to cultivate. He may be precisely
the person who least needs the outward and occasional
reminder, because his whole Ufe is attuned to the spirit
of the common Master. What they dread above aU
thmgs else is, that this or any other rite should ever
become a substitute for genuine feeUng, and they feel
very keenly how great that danger is.
On this pomt Unitarians have gone ahead of most
other Protestants. They have kept even -with them,
however, m placing the emphasis of reUgious service
upon the two elements of preaching and pubhc ex
tempore prayer. In both these exercises they express
that sense of the value of the mdi-vidual which is the
key-note of their whole appeal to the reUgious senti
ment. In the preaching they value the direct summons
of one indi-vidual to others. In pubhc prayer they
express the leadership of an individual guiding others in

246 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
their direct approach to God. Umtarianism has had to
share -with other forms of Protestantism the reproach
that its sermons are not sermons at aU, but "lectures,"
no doubt exceUent in their way, but inappropriate as a
part of a religious service and ineffective as a stimulus
to the reUgious Ufe. This reproach assumes as its
starting-point that there is some generally recognized
standard of what a sermon ought to be and that any
discourse departing from this standard must be set in
some other category of Uterary form. Unitarians
would probably allow as wide a Uberty in this matter as
any other Christian body. They are wUling to listen
with patience to a great variety of forms of appeal from
their pulpits. They do not require that a text of Scrip
ture shaU be put forward as the real or nominal bond
of connection between the ideas the preacher wishes to
impart. They would not Umit him in the choice of
subjects for his discourse. His sermons may be doc
trinal, poUtical, moral, historical, scientific, even poeti
cal, as the Spirit gives him utterance. In aU this Uni
tarians do not differ greatly from other open-minded
Christians of aU denominations at the present day.
Even in those connections most inclined to hedge their
preachers about with limitations of form, when a man
arises who is really a man, and who speaks to his feUow-
men -with authority and not Uke the men of books, the

WORSHIP 247
people hear him gladly. What gives to the preaching
element in Umtarian worship a certain peculiar im
portance is the demand upon the preacher that he bring
to his preachmg always something of the same spirit
which he is trying to interpret to others. Or, to put it
in another way, that he shaU not be the mere echo or
reflection of an mstitution, a book, a creed, or any tra
dition whatsoever. The writer once heard an important
clergyman m an estabUshed and rituaUstic church say
that he gave very Uttle thought mdeed to his sermons.
He read through "the lesson of the day" the evening
before and jotted down the few random thoughts which
this suggested, and that was his sermon. This was
said, not at aU by way of apology for the very poor
sermon that resulted, but distmctly as a declaration of
principle. It was meant to convey the idea that the
personaUty of the preacher should be kept as far as
possible m the background and not allowed to "in
trude" itself upon the legitimate sphere of influence erf
the sacred traditions he was set there to maintain.
The Unitarian attitude is as far as possible from this.
It sees the danger the formahst would avoid, but it
does not fear it; or, rather, as between the two dangers
of indi-viduahsm and formaUsm, it deUberately chooses
the former. The Unitarian perceives, as every thinking
man must do, the e-vil of a blatant and defiant egotism

248 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
expressing itself in vulgar and theatrical appeals to
superficial and transient sentiments. He knows the
fatal lengths to which a straining after "originahty"
may mislead an undiscipUned talent. He sees these
thmgs, but he is wilUng to take the risk of givmg every
Uberty to every form of sincere effort. He thinks the
community is safer when it is caUed upon to measure
the men who appeal to it for a hearing than when it is
furnished -with men picked out beforehand by any expert
tribimal whatsoever. He beUeves that in the long run
- — and generaUy not so very long a run either — the
claimant -for influence among men gets judged about
as he deserves, and he wishes him to have his chance.
If worship means "the approach to God," then the
function of the sermon is to present to the mind of the
Ustener such ideas as shall aid him in that approach,
not at the moment only, but so long as he shall be able
to keep these ideas consciously or unconsciously m mind.
That is what we meant by saying that the preacher to
Unitarians must bring something of the spirit he is
trying to interpret. He cannot be a mere agent. He
must be himself, and he must draw others because he is
dra-wn by spiritual forces -within himself. He must
have that subtle quaUty we cannot otherwise describe
than as "personaUty." He may not thrust it mto the
foreground -without danger of spoiUng its effect; but it

WORSHIP 249
must be there, and it must be felt. It is this subtle
quaUty that must inform his treatment of every sub
ject with a -vitaUty that is swift to communicate itself
to every responsive listener. It is because he has this
quaUty that every subject of human interest is open to
him. He -will not lecture upon it as an expert. He
wiU not deal with capital and labor as an economist,
but as a man who can see in economic problems one
impressive phase of the struggle to realize the kingdom
of God on earth. He wiU not speak of nature and art
as an artist, but as one who sees in both some reflection
of divme order and beauty. He -wiU not deal -with the
rivalries of nations as a pohtician, but as an interpreter
of a di-vme ideal for the government of the peoples in
righteousness and peace.
These are lofty demands upon the Christian preacher.
It is certain that m the majority of cases they -wiU be
but imperfectly fulfiUed ; but the Unitarian can hardly
feel that this is a reason for abandoning them, and
being satisfied -with lower and more formal standards.
On the contrary, he thinks that difficulty of attainment
-wiU only stimulate to higher and more personal effort.
He cannot beUeve that the time has come, or ever -wiU
come, when the influence of one human personaUty
upon others, exercised through the living voice, wiU
cease to be potent for good. The preaching thus

250 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
remams -with Unitarians what it was m the first genera
tion of Protestantism, the central mcident of pubUc
worship. The early description of Protestants as
"those who go to the Preaching" m distmction from
"those who go to the Mass" holds good for them m aU
its original sigmficance. It expresses precisely their
stri-ving after the mdividual and spiritual as opposed to
the "sacramental" and traditional.
The same distinction enters also mto the Unitarian's
idea of prayer both pubhc and private. Prayer is to
him the most personal, the most sacred, the most inti
mate demand of worship. It is the approach to God
m the most eminent sense. If prayer is not personal it
is not, to the Unitarian, prayer at all. The "vain repe
titions" agamst which Jesus protested -with such con
sistent emphasis seem to him stiU a mockery of all that
is most essentiaUy Christian in the thought of the
Master. True, as we have already noted, there is a
legitimate sphere -within which the common spiritual
experiences of mankind may be formulated in words
that -wffi fairly express many of the states of feeling
that may properly be described as religious. Such
formulations undoubtedly serve in turn to call forth
such states of feeUng, and the Unitarian would be quite
willing to admit that it is better to have one's rehgious
emotion stirred on stated occasions than never to have

WORSHIP 251
it stirred at all. He even goes so far sometimes as
himself to make a limited use of formulas that seem
to him most aptly to express the feeling he has at the
moment in his mind. He gladly accepts the fellowship
of men who, agreemg fundament^Uy -with him in the
real nature, of reUgious experience, stiU cUng to forms he
no longer finds useful for himself. What he dreads in
himseff above aU else is a slackening of the hold upon
him of that personal tie which bmds him to the source
of all such experience. He fears lest m the stram of
Ufe he may drift unconsciously into that comfortable
half-world of reaUty and unreality in which he might
come to accept the phrase for the thought, the formula
for the feeUng it once expressed to some one not ffimself .
For to the Unitarian the very essence of prayer is
smcerity. The Roman CathoUc theory of confession
rested upon a perfectly sound idea. It is true that
every human soul needs frequently to be confronted
with some power outside itself and greater than itself,
before which it may strip off aU concealments and self-
deceptions and stand m naked reaUty waiting for help
to take up the burden and the strife agam -with greater
courage and a clearer hope. In rejecting the agency of
a human mediator, Protestants have not abandoned
this idea. The Protestant theory of prayer is precisely
this; that the mdi-vidual human soul makes its con-

252 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
fession direct to its God. The various branches of
Protestant Christianity have been true to this theory in
varymg degrees. To some it has seemed best to restrict
the individual as far as possible by supplymg formulas
intended to cover every legitimate need of the rehgious
hfe and prohibiting or discouraging personal expressions
of devotion as likely to confuse the minds of the simple.
Others have gone to the extreme of Quietism, avoiding
aU formal expression and seekmg for clearness in such
a complete absorption in the divine as would make aU
occasional utterances unnecessary. Umtarians would
find their place somewhere between these two extremes.
They beUeve in prayer, — first as an attitude of mind
and then as the expression of that attitude m words, —
not, mdeed, as a means of making it the more mteffigible
to God, but of making it clearer to themselves. In
trying to define prayer they cannot get far away from
the definition at the head of this chapter : "Prayer is the
soul's smcerd desire." It is the desire that makes the
prayer, and m this consists at once the comfort and
the awfiflness of it. The comfort, because we may be
sure that no defect of utterance on our part can work
agamst us if only our heart be pure — the a-wfulness
because we may be equally sure that no wordy de-vices
of ours, however much they may quiet our consciences
for the moment, can obscure the base desire that is

WORSHIP 253
reaUy at the bottom of our hearts. That is the Uni
tarian starting-point on this subject. What we really
desire we are actually praying for, not at given
moments, but aU the time. It is this desire that dic
tates the decisions by which our character is deter
mmed. We are what we are because of the desires
that have actuated us up till now, and what we shall
be m the future depends upon how we can balance and
regulate and purffy the desires of the years to come.
Starting -with this idea the Unitarian lays his emphasis
naturaUy, not so much on stimulatmg men to pray;
for so long as they really desire they are pra3dng, whether
they -wiU or no. Rather he puts his emphasis on the
nature of the things desired and the duty of so formu-
latmg one's desires to one's self as to be quite clear what
they are and whither they are likely to lead. The
Unitarian therefore beUeves in formal prayer, both
pubhc and private, because it helps him to know at any
given moment whether his mmost wishes are m harmony
-with that fundamental law which he aims to make the
standard and the guide of his spiritual Ufe.
It is clear from aU this what the opimon of Uni
tarians must be on the once much-discussed question
whether the prayers of men can alter the "plan of God."
They do not profess to know the plan of God, nor would
they set up their human judgments as standards by

254 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
which the governance of the umverse ought to be regu
lated. They jom -with aU rationaUy thinking men m
rejecting as mischievous superstition the notion that the
wishes of men expressed, no matter in what approved
form, can change ever so shghtly the operation of those
natural laws by which the hfe of mankind is shaped
and Umited. They would not pray for rain in drought,
but they would pray for -wisdom and strength to know
and do the things that might help to make drought less
frequent and less harmful. They would not pray that
bodily infirmity might be taken away from them by
some sudden change of material condition, but they
would pray, first for such knowledge of natural law as
might help them to avoid disease, and then for patience
to bear the burden that the ignorance and folly of the
race have laid upon them.
It -wiU be asked then, perhaps, if the thought of
Umtarians about prayer is wholly subjective; if they
are concerned merely with the reaction upon them
selves. The answer to this question would have to be
both "yes" and "no." Let us take the extreme iUus
tration which naturally suggests itself in all these dis
cussions. Umtarians would, of course, deny that any
wishes of men at a given time could affect the weather
— but this does not mean that men are therefore to
sink back mto a duU, fataUstic resignation to the "wiU

WORSHIP 255
of God" — see their crops fail, their cattle perish, their
chUdren starve. It means only that their desires are
to take some new form. They cannot beUeve it is the
wiU of God that men should be bom into the world to
starve or to Uve the Ufe of beasts. Let them, therefore,
pray -without ceasmg that the true -wffi of God may
be unfolded to them as they shall be worthy to receive
it. Such prayer, such mtense and persistent desire,
puttmg itself mto words and reacting in unforeseen
ways upon the acti-vities of mankmd does change even
the weather. Forests planted on barren hiUsides treasure
up the water that is to descend m the streams and rise
again to nourish the trees and water more and more
fields and so brmg health and -vigor to more and more
generations of men. But, it -wiU be said, could not
this be done -without prayer? The answer is that if
we mean by prayer the stri-ving of the human heart to
find the -wiU of God and adjust itself to it in ever widen
ing activities, then such results never have been acffieved
-without prayer, and so we may be safe in saying they
never -wffi be. . . . More things are -wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. . . .
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.
The Umtarian thought on this pomt is in entire har-

256 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
mony -with its fundamental prmciple. The indi-vidual
must first put himself m tune -with the harmony of
creation and then the aggregate, the mass of human
society, wiU fulffl its mission without discord. Prayer,
the smcere desire of the mdividual soul, becomes the
potent force whereby the kingdom of God may be
estabUshed among the nations of the earth.
We have left to the last the aesthetic aspects of Chris-
tion worship, because they stand last in the order of
Umtarian thought. HistoricaUy Unitarianism cannot,
if it would, deny its Puritan origin. It is rooted in the
traditions of men to whom forms meant httle and
spirit meant everything. Or, rather, to put it more
correctly, forms carried to our Puritan forebears very
real conceptions of e-vil. They dreaded beauty as sug
gestive of many positive laxities they were doing their
best to avoid. Umtarians cherish these traditions -with
affectionate gratitude. They know the history of the
struggle they represent, and would not willingly lose the
spirit of simphcity and sincerity embodied m them.
They cannot, however, overlook the change of feeling
in society at large upon these subjects. For good as
weU as for evil, the modern world is giving a large and
apparently an increasing place to the aesthetic side of
Ufe. ShaU Unitarians set themselves against the current,
reject the charms of architecture, of painting, of colored

WORSHIP 257
windows, of music, of theatrical display by which re
Ugion — Christian and non-Christian — has sought to
strengthen its hold upon society ? Or shall they say :
These thmgs are, to be sure, the beggarly elements of
rehgion, but if they serve to attract and hold the aUe
giance of any who would be repeUed by the seeming
coldness of a merely spiritual faith, then let us have them
by all means ? To these questions Umtarians as a body
have as yet made no decided answer, and it is quite
characteristic of their methods that the two processes
above suggested are going on side by side among them
and without mjury to the essential unity that Ues be-
hmd them. On the whole it may safely be said that
the tradition of simpUcity has been fairly maintained.
Unitarians in general have an mstinctive dread of forms.
They do not wish, as one of them has expressed it, to
see their mimsters "with gowns on their minds," and
as long as that healthy condition of things continues,
we need not greatly fear that the "rival attractions"
either of ecclesiasticism or "evangehcaUsm" wiU divert
attention from any spiritual reaUties that are worth
defending. Unitarians are Ukely to go on as they are
now doing, emphasizing the essential unity of men with
God, and therefore not greatly concemed -with the
mechanisms appropriate to overcome an opposition
which they do not feel. If their freedom from forms

258 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
repels the s}Tnpathy of a certam type of mind, they wiU
prefer to wait for that sympathy or to do without it,
rather than seek to attract it by concessions which do
not reaUy represent their honest thought.

CHAPTER rX
THE FUTURE LIFE
I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air ;
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care. — /. G. Whittier.
The idea of a Ufe after death is by no means pecuUar
to Christiamty. In one or another form it appears m
all reUgions with wffich we are acquainted. It seems
to have its source m some universal human instinct
pomting men, as soon as they begm to tffink about the
mysteries of Ufe, to some idea of compensation for its
manifest Uimtations. The forms wffich tffis idea as
sumes are many and varied. Sometimes the hfe after
death appears as the direct contmuation of eartffiy Ufe,
with aU its occupations, its struggles, and satisfactions.
AU these are hkely to be magnffied m the glo-wmg haze
of distance and m the purffied air of an imagmary
world. Agam, the future Ufe may be as far as possible
removed from all eartffiy analogies, a subUmated exist
ence, where aU the hmitations of human experience dis
appear m the boundless pri-vUege of "heaven." In
259

26o UNITARIAN THOUGHT
such a -view of the future it is tffis complete emancipa
tion from human motive that makes its essential quality.
Heaven is desirable precisely because it is not m any
sense like earth. Even where the images of heavenly
enjoyment are expressed in terms of the most acute of
eartffiy pleasures, these are conceived of as mfimtely
dffierent from anytffing earth can really offer.
Sometimes agam the Ufe beyond the grave is thought
of as absolutely conditioned by the Ufe on earth. Hu
man -virtue and human vice are rewarded in some
absolute fasffion. There is one world of the good spirits
and another of the bad, and these are so separated that
there can be no passage from one to the other. In one
ffie all is bUss, m the other all torment. It is of the
very essence of such a world, that it has no place for
the personal struggle and personal progress of the
eartffiy stage. Yet the condition of the soul in it is
absolutely determined by the record of its human ex
perience and is, either way, the reward of effort or of
neglect m the human struggle. Sometimes tffis notion
of reward changes to that of compensation in the nar
rower sense. Heaven is conceived as a place or state
m wffich the mequaUties of human hfe are all smoothed
away. If a man has been poor, he has a right to be rich ;
ff he has been thwarted m ffis desires, he has, as it were,
a claim to have those desires fulfiUed. Even the ¦wicked,

THE FUTURE LIFE 261
victims on earth of tendencies they coffid not altogether
control, shaU be given the ffigher joy of findmg them
selves Uvmg in harmony ¦with the di-vine wffi. It is
e-vident that m such a world as tffis all ideas of cause
and effect must disappear or be changed beyond human
recogmtion. If it be said that a man is here happy
because on earth he was imhappy, tffis cannot mean that
ffis eartffiy unhappmess was m any way the effective
cause of ffis supreme happiness. It can only mean
that an aU-wise admimstrator of the umverse, governed
by the prmciple of absolute justice, so distributes happi
ness and unhappmess that every human soul m the
long run gets ffis due share of each. Happmess thus
appears, not as the consequence of effort, but only as
the free gift of a power that can arrange the fortunes of
men at its discretion.
These are the cffief dommant notions that have
determined the forms in wffich men have clothed their
thought as to the future Ufe. We may roughly classify
them by the words, "contmuation," "opposition,"
and "compensation." Into the forms themselves, mani
fold and curiously interesting as they are, we are not
here caUed upon to enter. Sometimes the thought of
the future seems almost to have determined the cffief
acti-vities of the Uving, as, for example, in Egypt, where
the idea of continuation found, perhaps, its most

262 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
imposmg expression. Sometimes the dead actually be
came more important than the hvmg, as in Cffina and
wherever the worsffip of ancestors seemed to turn the
gaze of men perpetually backward instead of forward.
Sometimes the thought of future reward has led men to
regffiate their hves on earth -with scrupffious exactness;
sometimes it has turned them to a bhnd fataUsm that
has made them indifferent to the ordinary motives of
human progress.
However carefuUy we examine the varied forms of
human thought about the future, we shall never find
any system qmte consistent with itseff or qmte answer-
mg to our classification. The several elements we have
tried to distmgffish appear mingled in varying propor
tion, yet so that some one of them dominates the rest
and gives character to the system as a whole. Tffis is
emmentiy true of Christianity. The several peoples
among whom it made progress had each its o-wn thought
of the future, and in these we can discern without great
difficffity the elements of wffich the Christian thought
of immortaUty was made up. If we consffit the teach-
mg of Jesus, we find here, as on other pomts, an idea
held -with great tenacity, but not defined m any precise
fasffion. Jesus taught -with contmual emphasis the
idea of a heaven, wffich he described as the dwelUng-
place of God; but since the God he taught was spirit,

THE FUTURE LIFE 263
it foUowed that the heaven in wffich such a God could
dweU was a spiritual heaven. In other words it was
not a placCj but 9,,,swiditiQJl. He described death as a
return to God; i.e. as an entrance mto a spiritual state
freed from aU material forms and fitly described as com-
muffion with God. Here, as elsewhere, Jesus coffid not
altogether escape from the imagery of ffis people and
ffis age. He used language wffich may easUy be mter
preted mto the grossest materiaUsm ; but such language
must be read in the Ught of ffis profoundly spiritual
conception of aU Ufe. So read it becomes fuU of lofty
spiritual suggestion.
The sense of continmty, upon wffich all thought of a
future ffie ffitimately rests, appears then to be somethmg
uffiversally human. How it came, precisely m what it
consists, — these are matters for the speculative pffiloso-
pher. We are concerned offiy with the fact itself and
¦with the Christian interpretation of it. As Cffiistianity
began to assume a dogmatic form, the doctrme of a
future Ufe became one of its central pomts of attraction
for the inqffirmg outsider and of loyalty for its mem
bers. Of the three elements we have noted as dis
coverable in men's thought on the subject, all entered
in greater or less degree mto Christian speculation.
The idea of continuation appears m those extravagant
mffiemal schemes m wffich the faitffiffi are represented

264 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
as entering mto ecstatic enjoyment of a Ufe that was
only a magnffied reproduction of aU the joyf ffi experiences
of earth. Opposition was sho^wn ffi descriptions of
heaven as freed from the baser necessities of eartffiy
Ufe. Freedom from work, from conffict, from com
petition; pure existence ¦without conditions or hmita
tions, — these make the happy contrast ¦with the hfe we
know here. And then, rurming along with and through
these other ideas is the note of compensation. Chris-
tiaffity was makmg its appeal above all to the oppressed
and the neglected, the people to whom this world seemed
to have been unfair. It was natural that they should
be summoned to the foUo^wing of the prophet of eartffiy
failure by the promise of redress ffi a hfe to come.
On the whole it was tffis last element that gained
upon the others and remained as the cffief claim of
Christiamty ffi rivalry with other reUgious systems.
The ¦wUd dreams of a miUeffium made up of ecstatic
material joys were driven mto the background by the
cahner reflection of tramed minds. They remained as
dramatic decoration ffi moments of revival or ffi the
poetic raptures of samtly dreamers; but as articles of
faith they shared the fate of other extravagances that
had served their turn ffi stimulatmg loyalty and ffispir-
ffig courage under assault. The idea of opposition, —
that everytffing in the future Ufe must be the opposite

THE FUTURE LIFE 265
of everytffing here, — tffis Ungered stffi and jomed ¦with
the idea of compensation to make up the Christian
thought of a desirable future. The lack of tffis world
was to be made good under conditions the opposite of
those that prevaU here.
It wiU be seen that these two ideas run easily into
each other; for compensation coffid not be possible
unless the conditions of h-vffig were radicaUy changed.
In a world of competition, for example, perfect fairness
was untffinkable. The weaker, ffi any sense, must go
to the waU. But ffi that world of compensations pre
cisely the weak were to find redress for their long-suffer-
mg. It was to be a world, not of human justice or even
of human fairness, but of infinite mercy, where aU the
mequaUties of earth shoffid be smoothed away by a
power capable of holdmg the balance over the fortunes
of its cffildren. But how about those sons of earth
who seemed to need no such compensation, the rich, the
strong, the successfffi ? Why shoffid they value a heaven
wffich coffid seem to offer them offiy a dimimshed re
tum of happmess? Christianity met tffis persistent
inqffiry by its doctrine of the essential uffimportance
of eartffiy distmction. It preached to these fortunate
ones the lesson of humiUty and the real equahty
of aU righteous men ffi the sight of God. It used its
doctrme of compensation as a weapon to compel such

266 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
to righteous U-vmg. At first it was even tempted into
counsels of social equaUty on earth, but it sloughed these
off with the skin of its first great transformations and
kept only so much of them as it needed to enforce its
lesson of a spiritual equahty. In the final compensation
of heaven the miseries of the throne were to deserve
the same consideration as the miseries of the hovel, no
more and no less. After aU, the great lesson was that
the seemmg mequaUties of Ufe were not the real in-
equahties. Here and hereafter it was the inner life
that counted, and tffis alone would be considered ffi the
Great Assize.
So far we have spoken of a future life for the inffi-
-vidual as a tffing to be desired ; but it is hardly neces
sary to say that if there is to be a future life at all, it is
not a question of its desirabiUty or its undesirabiUty.
The question is only what it is like and how we are to
conduct ourselves here in view of its inevitable ap
proach. It is true there have been attempts to draw
a hard and fast Une between an immortality for the
good and anniffilation for the bad. Such an alternative
belonged in the same region of thought that produced
the apocalyptic -visions of a sensuous mUleffium. "An
niffilation," a word that meant notffing, was a natural
coroUary to the equally unmeaning phrases of a vacant
and aimless rapture. Serious Christian thought got

THE FUTURE LIFE 267
rid of both, and ffi their place put the two notions of a
Christian heaven and a Christian hell. It aUowed the
widest Ucense ffi clotffing these notions in beatific
-visions on the one hand, and the most lurid imagery on
the other; but the essential fact is that Cffiistianity
accepted the idea of a future life for all men. The
ghastUest pictures of infernal torment carefffily pre
served the idea that these wretched victims were stiU
alive and coffid not escape the doom of life. The ffiven-
tion and elaboration of a purgatory, a probationary
stage ffidefimtely prolonged, was only another Ulustra
tion of tffis same cUngmg to the idea of Ufe as stiU sub
ject to the di-vffie laws of justice and mercy. Whatever
we may think of the Christian doctrine of a future Ufe,
tffis is clear, — that it does not,presentJmmortality as a
reward, but as a fact. It is not a question whether we
shaU Uve forever. It is only a question wffich Ufe we
are to Uve. If there is immortaUty at aU, it is for aU
men. It is not a promise made on certam conditions;
it is as Uttle withffi our control as our birth or our death.
That is about as far as it is safe to go ffi definffig the
ffistorical meaning of the doctrine of immortaUty witffin
the Christian Umits. The Church, in its authoritative
capacity, has not attempted to define it much more
rigorously. It has used it as an attraction and as a
weapon, but it has been content to accept it without

268 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
trying to give too exact a picture of the Ufe that is to
be. Outside the Umits of the Church such attempts
have not been wantmg. From the beginffing until now
the desire to give defimte form to tffis universal ffistinct
has proved notffing short of fascinatffig to speculative
minds. Even our o-wn scientific days have not escaped
the inevitable attraction of tffis problem. All the
thought of personahty in tffis life has led to its exten
sion into the Ufe after death. Theologians, philosophers,
scientists, men of the most diverse trainmg and moved
by all varieties of interest, have tried their hands at an
explanation, ff notffing more, of a belief that has had
so profound a hold upon the imaginations of their fel
lows. An explanation, yes, but not a solution. If one
reads over, for instance, the ffiscourses on immortahty
that have been deUvered witffin the past few years at
one of our most important centres of education, one
cannot help feeUng that aU tffis acti-vity of our best
mmds has not advanced the real question a single step
nearer to an ffitimate answer. Many ingenious devices
have been put forward for gi-ving to the whole question
a meanmg different from that wffich it has always had
ffi the general understanding of men. The terms of
the problem have been stated and re-stated in a variety
of suggestive ways; but the tffing that reaUy interests
mankmd, ff they are ffiterested at aU, the ancient de-

THE FUTURE LIFE 269
mand: If a man die, shall he — he and no other —
really live again ? and if so how, when, and where ? —
tffis demand, frankly and squarely put, has not been
frankly and squarely met. The field is open for specula
tion as -widely as ever.
Tffis is the stage at wffich the Unitarian thought ap
proaches tffis subject. It frankly accepts it as an un
solved problem, stffi open to the -widest variety of under
standing. It has no solution of its o-wn to offer. Properly
speaking, there is no such tffing as a Unitarian doctrine
of immortaUty. It is not one of the subjects on wffich
the mmd of Umtarians is incUned to dweU. Tffis dis-
inclffiation comes partly from reaction against the un
due prominence that was given to it by the special type
of theology from wffich Unitarianism revolted. The
fear of eternal pimishment seemed to the first rebels
against the traditional theology a motive ffi Ufe only less
unworthy than the hope of a salvation wffich shoffid
take the form of unendmg bUss ffi a world reUeved of
all the elements wffich give value to the triumphs of
eartffiy effort. What repeUed them, and what has
always repelled Unitarians, is tffis impUed severance of
any possible future existence from the Ufe that now is.
Wffile they were not inclffied to formffiate a doctrine of
their o-wn, there were certaffi tffings they felt strongly,
and it is these thmgs, partly negative and partly posi-

270 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
tive ffi their expression, that still constitute the Uni
tarian thought of immortahty.
First of all, Uffitarians are sure that if there is an
inffividual future Ufe, it must be for all men, good, bad,
and mdifferent. If the good are to be permitted to hve,
<the bad must be condemned to hve. But, since it is an
article of Unitarian faith that no man is or can become
altogether good or altogether bad, they are unable to
imagine any dividing hne by wffich two future worlds
coffid be formed that would eqffitably separate mankind
mto their appropriate dwelUng-places. The notion of a
midway tffird region, where the surplus of evil left
after the trials of earth shall somehow be removed and
the soffi set free to enjoy the bUss of heaven, they ffis-
miss as a cffildish dream, mteresting only for the ghmpse
it gives of an unconquerable faith in the perfectibiUty of
human nature that is the redeeming touch of even the
cruelest theology. In short, the Unitarian cannot con
ceive of anythmg worthy to be caUed Ufe -without the
element of diversity among individuals which is the very
mark of a human society. But then, agam, diversity
seems to imply necessarily conffict, struggle, and there
with all that we include under the word "progress." It
is mconceivable that there should be a world of human
souls, aU content to stand still, satisfied with "the sta
tion to wffich it has pleased God to caU them. " That

THE FUTURE LIFE 271
corresponds to no idea of hfe with which Unitarians are
famffiar. Rather, it suggests the very idea of death, a
death of the soffi worse than any physical decline.
Again, it seems clear that any conceivable form of fut
ure existence must in some sense be a social existence.
The inffi-vidual soffi retaffiing its ffidi-viduality must do
so at the price of conformity to some social ideal. It
cannot be thought of as enjoying or suffermg merely as
an ffidi-vidual. It must have relations to other souls, and
if we try to imagine what these relations are, we faU mevi
tably into the categories of earthly affections and earthly
duties. ShaU we try to imagine a heaven without love
from man to man ? And ff love is to exist, what is to call
it forth ? It must be some form of appeal, such as ser-vice
or sympathy. Unless, indeed, we are to imagine such a
boundless promiscffity of charity that all personality
shaU be lost and all distinctions among inffividuals disap
pear. It is plain that the moment we try in this way to
work out any conception of the future based upon human
ideals we are involved in the old familiar roundabout
that brmgs us back to the picture of a Ufe that is only
the enlarged reproduction of the life we are now Uvffig.
But is it possible for the human mind really to live by
any other than human ideals? We have no others. If
it be said that death brffigs us at once into a world in
wffi'ch absolutely dffierent ideals govern, then we may as

272 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
weU cease to tffink about it whUe we are here, because
we ha\'e no terms in wffich to clothe our thought.
It is tffis despair of findmg adequate forms of expression
for any ideal state of existence that has led thoughtfffi
men mto explanations of the Christian doctrine of immor
tahty wffich run perilously near the margin of imperson-
aUty. We have heard much in these days of a kind of
umversal immortality. We are remmded of the analogies
of aU orgamc Ufe. The tree does not ffie. It passes
mto other forms of Ufe, wffich in their turn give place to
new and ever new combinations of elements. We are
shown the eternal cycle of the sea, the cloud, the fertil-
izmg raffi, the earth, and agam the sea, and we are told:
Thus it is with the life of man. It, too, can never die, but
is taken up into the universal Ufe. Its material parts
go back into the eternal round of Nature, from wffich
they sprang. But what of its spiritual part, the only
part that here reaUy interests us ? Tffis, too, we are told
lives on forever. Every human thought or word or
action has its permanent effect upon the aggregate of
human experience. No particle of tffis spiritual activ
ity of man is wasted, any more than is any particle of the
acti-vity of Nature. Character, — the accumulation of
spiritual quaUties that constitutes the real man, — tffis
never dies, but goes on influencing the world of human
bemg and through tffis affecting even the world of matter

THE FUTURE LIFE

273

to the remotest verge of time. And tffis is immortaUty.
The indi-vidual soffi lives in the truest sense in its unend
ing influence upon the universal Ufe.
Tffis Une of discussion is at first thought especially
attractive to the Uffitarian. It appeals readily to ffis
sense of the uffity and interdependence of all that we call
Ufe. He is ready to accept all there is in it of observed
fact and of deduction from tffis fact to the processes of
the spiritual ffie. That the indi-vidual soffi hves on in in
fluence, dynamicaUy, if one please, in the great scheme of
tffings, — tffis sffits perfectly -with ffis ideas of the nature
both of the human soul and of the universe in wffich it
forms a part. But is tffis, in any rational meaning of
the words, a doctrine of individual immortahty ? Hon
esty compels ffim to admit that it is not. It is pleasant
for me to tffink that my worthy actions will go on doffig
good forever. It is a valuable discipUne to remember
that my e-vU actions must bear frffit forever in a more or
less disordered uffiverse. But if I, the same I that does
these good and evil tffings, am not to be conscious of my
contmuing personaUty, it is cold comfort to tffink that
it is going on ffi spite of me. The same tffing is equally
true of the tree and the drop of water in the ocean. It
is aU true, but it is not enough to constitute in any serious
way a solution of that problem of individual immortaUty
that has puzzled the ages. What men are seekmg to-day,

274 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
as they have always sought, is some basis for their in-
-vmcible ffistinct that, having once Uved, they are going to
keep on U-vmg. That instinct the Unitarian shares. He is
no more concerned to know where it came from than he
is to know the origin of hfe in general. He is glad to own
ffi tffis, as in so many other matters, ffis fellowsffip with
the honest stri-ving of all the ages to come to some clear
ness of thought. As he looks over the attempts of ffis
fellow Christians to give definite shape to the common
ffistinct he recognizes many close analogies to ffis own
thinking. The difference between Unitarian thought on tffis sub
ject and that of most other Christians is in the degree
of defimteness that can possibly be reached. Wffile others
have formffiated their thought and their feeling into qffite
precise images of happiness or misery or a combination of
these ffi a hfe too fataUy like the present. Unitarians
have been content to let tffis subject remaffi in the region
of instffictive feeUng, in wffich precision is dangerous.
It has resffited from tffis attitude that the doctrme of
immortaUty is one of those ffi wffich Uffitarians do not
take a very acute ffiterest. Their respect for human
nature, their sense of the harmony of the universe, their
con-viction as to the imperativeness of the moral law,
their profound faith ffi the goodness of the eartffiy ffie
as a part of the goodness of aU Ufe rightly understood, —

THE FUTURE LIFE 275
aU these combine to fix their attention rather on tffis
life than on the Ufe after death. Their thought of death
as a necessary condition of Ufe precludes them from
attachffig supreme importance to the change it may
bring. They are -willffig to rest in the confidence of the
poet as expressed ffi the lines at the head of this
chapter. There is another modern "proof" of immortaUty that
must be mentioned because it has a pecuUar charm for a
certain tj^e of mffid. It is the so-called demonstration
by the method of science. There are those who imagine
that the darkness of the world beyond the grave can be
penetrated by the same methods of observation and
deduction by wffich we seek to imderstand the material
life of the earth. They remmd us that not merely tffis
material side of earthly Ufe, but at least the border-land
of our psychic experiences, has been made the subject of
scientific investigation, and they believe that we have
reached at least a few solid bits of result as to the inter
dependence of the two. Now, they say, why should not
tffis border land be widened ? 'Why may not the same
processes of psycffical and even of material investigation
be extended ffito the world beyond ? They are convinced
that certain of the phenomena of spiritual manifestation
from the world after death into the world of earthly
experience are established beyond the reach of criticism.

276 UNTPARIAN THOUGHT
However few these established facts of spiritual commu-
mcation of the dead with the living may be ; however
sUght their revelations of the conffitions prevailing in that
other world, it is enough for these observers that some-
tffing is estabUshed. They point to the analogies of other
sciences ; how these have crept on from point to point,
and they say : Here at last we are on firm ground. If
offiy one disembodied spirit has communicated with men
on earth, there we have the absolute demonstration that
that spirit is still going on, the same individual personal
ity it was during its earthly life. And if this one, then aU.
They are con-vinced that it needs only the proper apph
cation of the scientific method to bring the whole popu
lation of the spirit world into active communication with
the whole population of tffis. So far tffis appalling calam
ity has been averted, but it is easy to see how readily
minds otherwise sound may be drawn into this trap of
pseudo-science. It is less their fault than it is the fault
of better trained men, who have played with phenomena
they ought to have kno-wn to be beyond the reach of
mortal powers, as if they were actually withffi the scope
of human methods. It was inevitable that individual
Uffitarians, -with their respect for true science, should have
faUen under the spell of tffis fatal delusion ; but it may be
said -with entire confidence that Unitarians as a whole
have not aUowed its superficial attraction to take any hold

THE FUTURE LIFE

277

on them whatever. They have discerned instinctively
that the nature of the evidence on which all such conclu
sions must rest is hopelessly far removed from the con-
-vincffig quaUty of true scientific e-vidence. They have
distrusted the plausible ghbness with wffich the leaders
in psycffic investigations have often masked their actual
creduUty and reaffiness to see tffings that were not there.
Even ffi cases that seemed to chaUenge all their powers
of resistance, they have on the whole been able to keep
their heads and to distingffish between actual proof and
the inabffity to disprove. Because certain phenomena
coffid not be accounted for on any clearly defined grounds
they have not accepted tffis as proof that they were
caused by the action of the spirits of the departed. They
have been content to wait and meanwffile to trust their
future in the same hands that have gffided their past and
are leadffig them in their present struggle toward the best
that is in them.
The one argument for personal immortaUty that im
presses the Uffitarian is the uffiversahty of the human
instinct of indestructibiUty. He cannot resist the feel
ing that what all men have always demanded and beUeved
in with such intensity must have its roots far down in
the absolute facts of universal being. Anffihilation is
untffinkable. Absorption in the mass of universal Ufe
is an evasion of the question. There is notffing in Uni-

278 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
tarian thought that contrafficts the idea of continffing
personahty. AU it asks is that it shaU not be called upon
to give to this idea any precise and definite form. It
refuses to think of this hfe as unworthy, merely because
it may be only a moment in the course of eternal being.
It fails to see why tffis moment is not hkely to be as
worthy as any other. Its obvious imperfections burden
us because we know them ; but tffis is not to say that any
conceivable form of future life would be without imper
fections. Imperfection is of the very essence of Ufe.
Without it there would be notffing to hve for, no goal
toward which to strive, no happiness in the overcoming
of obstacles, nothing which, so far as we can formulate
it, woffid make hfe worth living./At all events Unitarians
are sure that whatever the future may have in store for
them must somehow depend upon the use they make
of the opportunities offered them here and now. In
this thought they find the real significance of faith in a
Ufe to come. In truly comprehending the harmony of
law and love and work here they beUeve they -will gain
the most confident assurance for the hereafter.

CHAPTER X
the thought of god
One thought I have, my ample creed,
So deep it is and broad,
And equal to my every need, —
It is the thought of God. — Frederick L. Hosmer.
We give to the subject of the Thought of God the
final place in the order of our reflections because we reach
it through the series of lesser problems we have thus far
been foUowffig. We began with the nature of man, his
origin, his complex personaUty, his hmitations and his
hope. We end -with the idea of God, which gives to
man the centre about which he may group all that is
ffighest in the hfe of the spirit as it is to be lived here on
earth. The order of our thought on this subject will be
similar to that foUowed in our discussion of the future
life. Here also we are deaUng with a problem that has
profoundly interested thinkers of every age and race,
as soon as the age.yOr the race passed from the stage of
bUnd acceptance of traffition to that of reflection upon
the how and the wherefore of its highest ideal possessions.
Here also we must give up from the beginning any claim
279

28o UNITARIAN THOUGHT
to absolute, demonstrable knowledge and confess our
selves frankly to be moving in the realm of faith, — yet of
a faith none the less strong because it is not subject to
material or logical methods of proof.
We start once more from a great universal fact. Man
kind, so far as we have any acquaintance with it, has
always made for itself some formffiation of a divine ideal,
no matter how crude this might be. Even though, as
sometimes happened, the figure of Deity was sometffing
apparently lower than the men it served, so that they
could command it to do their bidding, stiU, after all, it
could do something for them that they could not do for
themselves. It represented to them powers beyond their
understanding or control. Their lives were somehow
bound up -with its larger sanctions. And when we pass
from these lower stages of divine representation to the
higher reaches of spiritual conception, we see still more
clearly how insistent has been this demand of the human
mind and soul for some understandable figuring forth
of a universal ideal. It used to be the fashion to classify
all such attempts according to their relation to our own
accepted traditions of the divine nature and deaUng.
We assumed with a certain arrogance, the natural arro
gance of all ignorance, that what was different from our
own must necessarily be absolutely less worthy. We
took it for granted that we had heard the last word of

THE THOUGHT OF GOD 281
di-vine revelation of itself, and that all wffich preceded this
must therefore be delusion, in which error and vice were
about equaUy divided. In short, we were incUned to
assume a certain absolute standard of true and right in
men's thought of God and to try aU shades of difference
by that standard. Or, rather, to put it quite frankly,
we went back of aU human thought and, starting with
God ffimself as absolute being, we imagffied that he had
given to us and to us alone such a complete definition of
ffimself that neither we nor any other human being had
either the need or the right to think about the matter
at aU. All we had to do was to accept what had come to
us by the flattering method of a special revelation,
entrusted once for all to a book or to a church or to a
specific line of prophets or in whatever other way reve
lation might be guaranteed to a waiting world. To admit
that the ffivine ideal was subject to the varjdng inter
pretations of men seemed to imply an uncertainty, a
variation in Deity itself, which must be fatal to the re
spect of mankind. It used to be accepted as a fact of
nature that God made man in his own image; to have
said that on the contrary man had always made his God
in his own image would have carried -with it an almost
blasphemous suggestion.
This attitude of mind has in these latter days been
pretty radicaUy changed. A new science, that of Com-

282 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
parative ReUgion, or, to give it its more modest title, the
History of ReUgions, has made its way qffite naturally
and without flourish of trumpets into the accepted group
of definable sciences, and is going on from day to day with
ever new suggestions clearing up obscurities and opening
the ways of God to men. The lesson of this new science
is above aU else the lesson of all true learning, namely,
respect for other points of view than our own. It is
teacffing those who needed to learn it that whatever may
be the absolute nature of the power or powers that encom
pass the earthly Ufe of men, that nature is not revealed to
any one part of the human race in any such final or com
plete fasffion as to exclude the honest differences of the
rest. It is teacffing us first of all the unity of the relig
ious instinct. It is showing us that the impulse which
leads the primitive savage to reach out beyond ffimself
into a world unseen indeed, but of whose existence he is
almost more certain than he is of the -visible world about
ffim, is ffi its essence the same impulse that guides a
Plato or a Jesus, a Marcus Aurelius, or a Savonarola.
But tffis is teaching us somethffig more than the lesson of
respect, for respect may easily run over into a kind of
gentle tolerance as narrow as the ancient hatreds and less
frmtful. Knowledge of the forms of religion is showing
us that our own reUgious ideas are inextricably bound up
with those of other peoples and other times, so that we

THE THOUGHT OF GOD 283
cannot even understand our own thoughts about reUgion
until we have gained some of this wider vision. We
are learning to think of these other ways of reaching out
to God, not as ffivergences from a given standard to be
tolerated by our charity, but as indispensable contribu
tions towards a completer understanffing of the ffivffie
mystery. The variations in these methods of coming into rela
tion with the powers that control the life of men seem at
first sight to be infmite in number and in character ; but
as we come closer to them they faU qffite naturally into
three prmcipal classes. For our purposes we may think
of the forms of Deity as grouped under the heads of poly
theism, duaUsm, and unity. By polytheism we under
stand that conception of Deity which presents it to us
ffi practice under many aspects, each clothed in a form
and accompanied by a symbolism pecffiiar to itself. In
other words polytheism gives us a series of personifications
of Deity, each appeahng to some specffic sense of the di-
-vine in man and offering some peciffiar response to a
specffic demand of human nature. By duahsm we mean
that idea of the divine which represents it as divided into
two essentially opposed and irreconcilable elements,
warring -with each other for the control of the world of
Nature and of Man. This opposition is conceived of as
eternal, without beginffing or end, the inevitable expla-

284 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
nation of the contradictions and imperfections of our
mortal experience. By unity we imply a notion of Deity
in which aU variations are excluded and all oppositions
reconcUed, so that in place of the multiplicity of poly
theism and the discord of duahsm our minds are fixed
upon the eternal sufficiency and the eternal harmony
of a single divine ideal.
It woffid be possible to present these three aspects of
the ffi-vine nature as so many successive stages of human
reflection upon the problem of the divine. It might be
shown with a certain approach to truth that polytheisms
are the natural product of that cffilffiike faith ffi the
reaUty of occffit forces behind the phenomena of nature
wffich leads men to personify these forces and to deal
with them on equal terms. Polytheism has in it a some
tffing essentially popular. No matter how carefully
priesthoods and governments might seek to safeguard the
integrity of the official company of the gods, they could
not prevent the popular mind from working actively
and frffitfuUy ffi the creation of new divine images or
the cherisffing of older, perhaps forbidden, ones. The his
tory of polytheisms is fuU of such illustrations of the ap
peaUng nature of its principle to the simple minds and
hearts of natural men. One is almost tempted to say that
tffis is the form of rehgion best adapted to the daily needs
of plaffi, unsopffisticated human nature. Its -wide hospi-

THE THOUGHT OF GOD 285
taUty to di-vine suggestions, its elasticity, enabUng it to
add ever new figures to its pantheon as new relations of
Ufe might arise, the readiness -with wffich it could trans
late the deities of other polytheisms into the terms of
its o-wn, aU these are qualities that render the notion of
a mffitipUcity of deities most attachffig to the student
of religious ffistory. One qffite comprehends the feeling of
the gentle poet of nature as he tffinks of the compara
tive forlornness of ffis own ffiherited creed and almost
longs to Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
And hear old Triton blow his wreathfed horn.
It reqffires a considerable wrench to pass from tffis
naive contentment -with the humane guidance of the
uffiverse to the atmosphere of perpetual conflict suggested
by the dualistic scheme of tffings. The very essence of
tffis idea is reflective, almost scholastic, in its suggestion.
It hardly seems possible that men could have arrived at
it except by a gradual ehmination of the variations in
volved in polytheism. The simplification of the ffivine
idea here presented could only be the resffit, we feel, of
a persistent dwelUng upon the notion of conffict as seen
in the world of human effort and implyffig therefore a
corresponding conflict in the world of divine control.
In place of the implied harmony of the polytheistic uni
verse, we meet here a universe ffi which discord is the

286 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
dominant note. The popularity of such a system impUes,
so we instinctively feel, a sombre and almost fatalistic
-view of Ufe among the people that could accept it. A
duaUsm seems to us to exist only to be resolved into some
thing else. It cannot, at least to our minds, carry -with
it the idea of permanence essential to any convincing
theory of a ffivinely ordered uffiverse.
And, yet, precisely because it is a simplification, dual
ism may be a stage towards a stffi greater subUmation
of the ffi-vine ideal. Through it the human mind may
advance to the idea of uffity. Uffity appears as the
resolution, not only of duahsm, but of polytheism as
well. It represents the victory at once over diversity
and opposition. It is not, on the face of it, popular in
its appeal. It is not content to rest where the pffilos-
ophy of duahsm rested, -with the fact of conflict and the
mere transplanting of that mto the world of Deity. It
relies upon the ffigher impulses of the thoughtful and the
loyal among the people. It needs the continual inspi
ration of prophetic voices to keep it before the people 's
mffid as the ideal toward wffich they are bidden to
strive and for wffich they are summoned to labor and to
sacrifice. The long Une of Hebrew prophecy is our most
familiar -witness to the loftiness of this ideal and to the
difficulty of maintaining it in its freshness and -vigor
ffi the popffiar heart. The highest note of Moslem

THE THOUGHT OF GOD 287
piety is always struck when it goes back to the origi
nal summons of its prophet to the worship of the one
and only God. The most eloquent appeal of Christian
devotion is found in the unbroken Une of argument
and exhortation needed to draw men out of the snares
alike of persistent polytheism and still more insidious
duaUsm. This presentation of the three conceptions of deity
as so many successive stages of reflection upon the divine
nature has much that is attractive, but it is not quite
exhaustive or con-vincing. We speak Ughtly of the simple
faith of the primitive polytheist, but we have no means
of being sure that ffis family of gods is not itself an evolu
tion out of a stffi earher idea of uffity. Perhaps, after
all, uffity is simpler than diversity, and, for all we know,
the peoples we caU primitive are as far removed from a
previous stage of uffified reUgious beUef as we are from
their observable stage of polytheistic faith. At all
events, even in the most elaborate of polytheisms with
wffich we are acquainted, it is not ffifficffit to recognize a
persistent notion of unity. Certainly, as soon as men
under a polytheistic reUgion begin to tffink about the
nature of their faith and to put their thought into words,
they come ine-vitably to an idea of unity underlying the
diversity of their many personifications. The mind of
man, as soon as it seeks for causes, goes back by a law of

288 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
its own being to a First Cause and is forced to relate aU
other being to this.
The mffid is driven to the idea of uffity because it is
otherwise unable to correlate the diverse forces it feels
and so far has been content to worsffip, each within its
o-wn sphere. 'What shall it say? Are these forces aU
equal and independent? In that case they must inevi
tably come into conflict, one -with the other, and there
seems to be no rational way out of this conflict. Or
are they all parts of one original and pervading force,
which acts through them to fuffil its various functions?
If so, then they have no real existence for themselves, but
are merely so many expressions of a dominant, though
concealed. Unity behind them all. Or, is there one among
these mffititudinous deities that is superior to all the rest
and from whom they derive their rights and powers?
Then again we reduce the polytheism to a unity, of
which the variations are but the subject agents, doing
its will and responsible to it. It is, of course, at the
highest points in the history of the religious thought of
a polytheistic people, the points at which reflection in
the minds of philosophers has come to take the place of
an unquestioning faith, that we find the literary evidence
of this transition from complex to simple ways of present
ing the di-vine idea. Yet we may well doubt whether even
the most childlike acceptance of the popular mythol-

THE THOUGHT OF GOD 289
ogies was not always accompanied by this same con
sciousness of an underlying or super-vising or pervading
Unity. Men liked to deal directly with their familiar
spirits of earth and air and water. They liked to group
these agaffi under the headsffip of a family of superior
gods, Uke the group of princes who ffirected the affairs
of their several bands of followers; but then again, far
above all these, there was the remote and solemn Great
Spirit, too far away for the immediate confidence of
his human subjects, but as necessary to certify and
guarantee the powers of the rest as was the earthly
sovereign prince to hold together the doubtfffi allegiance
of the local cffieftains.
Ordffiarily tffis consciousness of the divine unity would
not become acute. For aU the orffinary deaUngs of Ufe,
the kindUer lower spirits, akffi to the men they served,
were enough. It was only under the stress of national
danger or racial enthusiasm that the voices of poet or
prophet or pffilosopher summoned the people to rally
around Jehovah or Ammon or the all-pervading Sun-god
or Zeus, father of gods and men, as the only sufficient
expression of the people's unity. At such times the
lesser powers are momentarily obscured, only to fall
into their place once more when the normal conditions
of life are restored. Sometimes, as in the cases of
Christianity and Islam, the appeal to unity prevails.

29P UNITARIAN THOUGHT
The people, not the gifted ones, but the plain workers
and sufferers, seize upon the idea of a single ffivine spirit
interested in them as inffividuals, as an escape from the
ills of a divided and ineffectual ffivine control. But it
-wffi be noticed that the conception of God thus success-
fffily presented does not correspond with any one of
our supposed means of rehef from polytheism. He is
not one of a group of ffitherto equal deities, getting the
better of the rest by ffis superior power or wisdom.
Neither is he the One of wffich these are the expressions
and the servants. He is the One by the side of whom
there are no others. There is but one God, and there
fore the rest are the mere imaginations of men, without
reaUty. Tffis God is not the expression of the reUgious
consciousness of a single race or nation. He is the one
all-sufficient Source and Cause and Upholder of aU races.
Before Him aU earthly distinctions ffisappear. He is
the Father, the Friend, the Judge, the Redeemer of the
people. Thus polytheism is not only readily resolvable
ffito uffity. It carries with it the germs of a unity with
out wffich it coffid not hold together, any more than a
human society coffid hold together without some prin
ciple of uffity strong enough to overcome aU its tenden
cies to ffisruption.
But what can we say of duahsm, first ffi its relation
to polytheism? The evolution of a duaUsm from a

THE THOUGHT OF GOD 291
polytheism is far less reaffily understood, and yet in fact
such evolution has taken place. Within the history of
Cffiistiaffity, for example, we have the phenomenon of
Mafficheism ser-ving as a stepping-stone to orthodox
faith. Such an evolution coffid hardly take place except
ffi the course of a search after uffity. One of the obvious
difficffities in any clearly marked polytheism is found,
as we have seen, in the inevitable confficts that must
suggest themselves between the various forms of mani
festation of ffivine power. As soon as one begffis to trans
late these confficts into the ordinary language of humanity,
they are pretty certain to assume the form of antagonisms
to wffich we involuntarily give the names of "good"
and "e-vil." We tffink of the di-vine acti-vities, that is,
in terms of advantage or ffisadvantage to ourselves.
Startffig from tffis point of -view we may reaffily imagine
ourselves ranging aU the powers of the unseen world into
two lines, the one working for us, the other against us.
Beffig engaged thus in hostile activities, so far as we
are concerned, they must, from our level, appear hostile
to each other. The imphed harmony of the polytheistic
heaven is broken up mto a continuous warfare between
two opposing armies. But these armies must have
leaders, just as the host of the earUer heaven had its
leader, and thus we arrive at the notion of two supreme
antagonistic deities ffi-viding the empire of the universe

292 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
between them. They are engaged in a conffict, but
there is no reason to expect the absolute victory of either.
The conffition of conflict is the very essence of the duahstic
scheme of tffings, and its resolution would mean the end
of the universe as we picture it to ourselves. It is not
ffifficffit to foUow tffis course of thought by wffich a
polytheism may be resolved into a duaUsm, but one
cannot help feeUng that it is not a course of thought dic
tated by the nature of the polytheistic problem itself.
If it be said that polytheism contains ine-vitably and of
necessity the chaUenge to work it out into uffity, the
same cannot be said of its relation to duaUsm.
If now we come to the question of the relation of
duahsm to unity, we meet a new set of difficulties.
Polytheism seems to point ffirectly toward a solution
into unity, but duaUsm appears at first as a system com
plete in itself. If we can once accustom our minds to
the idea of an eternal opposition of good and evil as
expressed ffi a government of the universe by two spirits
eternally hostile to each other, there seems to be notffing
further to do. That one of these ruUng powers shoffid
overcome the other would imply the destruction of the
system wffich we have accepted as permanent. And
yet, so insistent does the demand for unity appear to
be, that in the most ffighly developed duaUstic schemes
-with wffich we are acquainted there has come a time

THE THOUGHT OF GOD 293
in wffich men's thought refused to be bound witffin the
narrow Umits of an eternal deadlock and moved for
ward to the notion of an ffitimate victory of the good
over the e-vil powers. It is obvious that if tffis possi-
bihty is once admitted, no matter how far into the future
tffis victory may be removed, the very fact that it is
commg impUes a superiority of the good over the e-vil
wffich dffils the edge of the aUeged duaUstic equaUty.
In other words, a perfect duahsm is no more possible
than a perfect polytheism. It is a far simpler idea.
It relegates aU the subordinate figures of the pantheon
to a perfectly clear subjection under the lead of two
great controffing spirits. It has its basis in an antago-
ffism that every human being can at once comprehend.
It presents the world of spirits under forms easily par-
aUeled ffi human experience. And yet, after all, it does
not satisfy, and it never has qffite satisfied, the human
cravffig after an ffitimate sometffing that shall be hfted
above aU antagoffisms ffito the clearer air of absolute,
controffing law.
So we come along these highways of multipUcity and
antagoffism to the way of uffity. It has never been a
broad ffighway, traveUed by great and exffiting throngs.
It has rather been a steep and rugged path, where only
those who have had a clear vision of calm heights beyond
have been content to cUmb. For, in fact, no sooner have

294 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
men fancied that they had won the victory over their
many gods and their dual gods than they have found
the -vision of the one single ffivine being too splenffid for
their mortal gaze and have begun to throw veils of
compromise and mediation between it and them. That
is what happened -with Christianity. Preached by a
Semite to Semites, it was the reassertion of that
principle of the ffi-vine uffity of wffich the Semitic race
seems to be the most ffighly endowed representative.
As a Hebrew preacffing to Hebrews, Jesus made use
of aU the highest imagery of Hebrew tradition to
enforce tffis ideal, wffich in every moment of storm
and stress had raffied the best there was in ffis people
to new demonstrations of national energy. Jesus was
speaking to Hebrews already powerfuUy affected by
the examples of polytheism and duaUsm forced upon
them by other peoples -with whom they had come into
-sdtal contact. Without compromise and without the
refinements of pffilosophic speculation, he held before
them the grand, simple, ffi-vine ideal that had inspired
their fathers and would, so he confidently taught, bring
them once more back into the position of influence they
had lost.
Jesus fell a -victim, not to human baseness, but to legal
ism on the one hand and pffilosophical acuteness on the
other. His word, rejected by the gffides of Hebrew

THE THOUGHT OF GOD 295
reUgious thought and by the trained pffilosophers of the
Greco-Roman schools, went on. Singffiarly enough each
side borrowed from the other enough to make it acceptable.
The Gentile, already weU on the way toward a unified
conception of Deity, found ffis thought along tffis
Une now fortffied by the ancient Hebrew faith in the
oneness of God. The Hebrew, already profiting by the
subtler processes of Greek speculation, foimd new inter
pretations of the narrow dogmatism of his fathers in
its maffifold suggestions. The result was a fusion, in
wffich Hebrew uffity formed the chief ingredient yet
was never able qffite to free itself from the cUnging rem
nants of the ancient polytheism, nor even from the attrac
tion of the duaUstic solution. The creeds of Christendom
growing out of tffis mixture reflect their origin in the
clearest manner. The principle of unity, seeking expres-/
sion, now in the extreme of Sabellianism and now in
the opposite extreme of Samosatianism, was driven
from both these positions by the persistent demand for,
a statement of the ffi-vffie nature wffich should still
satisfy the latent instinct of polytheism. It was not
possible to carry the mass of Christian theologians up to
the poffit of accepting a di-vine ideal that should take
away aU meffiation and so bring man face to face with
ffis God. Arianism tried it once more and failed. Every
subtlety of the Greek ffitellect was invoked to show that

296 UNITARLAN THOUGHT
in thus demanding a multiplex defiffition of God no
¦violation of the principle of unity was intended ; and yet
no sooner ffid any one take the theologians at their word
and proclaim a real and single divine unity than he was
declared the most impious of heretics. It was in vain
that the ritual of the Church emphasized in every way
the true humanity of Jesus ; the hold of the ffi-vinity in
ffim upon the imagination of a polytheistic world was
too strong. It rooted itseff in the affections of Christen
dom until it seemed at times almost to endanger the
digffity of God ffimseff. The same instffict appears also
in the reaffiness with wffich the same polytheistic gener
ation found rpom for all that half-world of demi-gods
and heroes against which the early zeal of Christianity
had protested so loudly. The old legend-building activ
ity set in once more and produced that dehghtful multi
tude of humanized deities and deified mortals which,
under the categories of angels and of saffits, have
charmed the cffildish fancy of every Christian age.
So also ffid it fare -with the duaUstic influences sur-
roundmg the birth and early growth of Christianity.
Uffity was declared, but only at the price of maintaining
unchanged and unabashed the notion of an eternal con
ffict. Witffin the innermost circle of the Christian
apologists we find a continuous and persistent effort to
give to Christian doctrine a duaUstic color. 'Whenever

THE THOUGHT OF GOD 297
tffis effort became too clearly defined, so that the cry of
"Manicheism !" could be raised, then it was squarely met
in controversy or by law and seemed to be vanquished.
Yet its traces are to be found at every stage of formu
lation of the Christian confessions. It went all lengths
except the farthest and at many crises of the later as
well as the earher Church it has almost seemed as if the
figure of the Prince of Evil would overshadow that of
the Lord of aU Good.
Such has been the ffistory of the struggle witffin Chris
tianity to maintain one of its carffinal tenets. The
uffity of God has been constantly threatened and has
needed to be as constantly defended. It is here that the
Uffitarian thought of God becomes clear. It begins,
continues, and ends with tffis simple, fundamental, and
sufficient proposition, — that God is One and can be
understood and worshipped as One. The Unitarian is
not without sympathy with aU the devices for making
God inteffigible that we have here been considering. He
feels the charm of polytheism and the logic of duaUsm.
He is qffite ready to beUeve that there have been times
and peoples that could have had no other ways of bring
ing the di-vine ideal -witffin reach of their human powers.
¦What most impresses him, however, is that in those
very times and among those very peoples the best minds

298 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
were able to rise above the popffiar forms to the essential
uffity that gave them Ufe. Even more than tffis: he
thinks he can see, even in the feehng of the popffiar
heart, the same true instinct pointing to uffity as the
explanation cf diversity. What Unitarians dread for
themselves and for others is that insistence on multi
pUcity should ffivert their thought and their allegiance
from the one central idea of unity wffich is to them the
source of the harmony of aU tffings. As Christians they
beUeve that it was the mission of Jesus to declare precisely
tffis uffity and to make it clear to men as the one sufficient
explanation of the law that bmds them to each other and
to the uffiverse. They follow, with as much patience as
may be, the famihar arguments to show that the ffivffie
nature cannot be comprehended under any other form
than that wffich the Church has sanctioned in its creeds,
and they remain unconvinced. These forms seem to
them the clever ffiventions of theologians, founded in
some very ob-vious and very powerfffi human instincts,
but not touchffig the root of the matter. Back of aU
these forms they find ever the plain, simple, and suffi
cient fact of final and necessary uffity. Least of all can
Uffitarians have any part or lot in the process by wffich
the nobihty of the human Jesus is confused with the
abstract and theologic Christ. As in the chapter about
Human Nature we were led into a ffiscussion of the

THE THOUGHT OF GOD 299
divine, so here, if we were to begin the consideration of the
divine in Jesus, we shoffid be forced to repeat what we
have already said about ffis essential humaffity. Enough
here to say that the Unitarian emphasis on the manhood
of Jesus only throws into stronger reUef the unclouded
piurity of the ffi-vine idea of unity.
Uffity is the ffist fact of the ffivine nature as to wffich
the Uffitarian is sure beyond the possibiUty of doubt.
The second is that the God he worsffips is not himself.
He can conceive of God offiy as being outside the thinking
mind of man, the "somethffig not ourselves" that sums
up to us aU our ffighest ideas of what is needed to hold
the uffiverse ffi order and to make clear to us our true
place ffi that ordered uffiverse. In other words, the God
of the Uffitarian is a transcendent God, a reaUty, and not'
a fiction of the human mffid. But the moment he has
made tffis clear to ffimseff, there comes another thought
equally clear and equally insistent, namely, that tffis same
God, outside ourselves and outside the uffiverse, is at
the same time witffin us and witffin the universe. Tffis
double aspect of deity is possible only through the earUer j
con-viction that God is spirit. If we allow ourselves ever
so sUght a waverffig on tffis poffit; if we indulge for a
moment ffi the tempting illusion that God is to be de
scribed ffi material terms, as form, substance, essence, or

300 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
by whatever other stiU less substantial image we wiU,
then we must place ffim somewhere, either whoUy out
side ourselves or whoUy -withffi ourselves. Either of
these alternatives excludes the other. If, however, we
can rise to tffis ffist primary defiffition of Jesus, that
God is spirit, then we can satisfy both our needs at once ;
we can think of God as transcendent and at the same
time as immanent. All the imagery of aU the prophets
is not too grand to picture ffis supreme and unrivaUed
exceUence, but we feel no less poignantly the stiU, smaU
voice that reveals ffim to our inmost heart.
Tffis is the firm ground on wffich the Unitarian rests
aU ffis further thought of God, the basis of unity and of
transcendent immanence. Beyond tffis he must frankly
confess that thought is so dependent upon language and
language is so completely a thmg of human habit, that
it is impossible to get beyond the hmitations of human
ideas. The only tffing we can do is to free ourselves as
far as we can from every temptation to imagine that the
human forms in wffich we must clothe our thought are
reaUy adequate expressions of the ffi-vine. Umtarians
can accept fully the traditional summary of the divine
nature under the terms of power, wisdom, and love.
They do tffis because they have no command of language
that can carry them beyond these categories. They
foUow with entire understanding the course of reasoffing

THE THOUGHT OF GOD

301

by wffich theologians of many generations have sho-wn
the completeness of tffis threefold -view of the ffivine
nature. It is enough for them also. They worship the
spirit of power informed by -wisdom and restrained by
love ; the spirit of wisdom moved by power and guided
by love ; the spirit of love made active by power and en
lightened by wisdom. It is a helpful and a conveffient
summarizffig of their thought, but they are aware that
it is not a defiffition.
Above aU, Unitarians like to tffink of God under the
endearffig name of Father. It expresses to them more
fully than any other word could do that freedom of
access wffich is to them the most precious thing in their
relation to God. It makes concrete to them all that we
have been saymg about unity. As human fatherhood
admits of no division in love or responsibiUty, so the
figure of the ffi-vine fatherhood removes God at once
from any possible rivalry. It sums up all that we have
said about worsffip, for, as we have no eartffiy relation
so free and ffirect as that of parent and child, so no
figure of words could express more fuUy aU that the
Unitarian feels about ffis right to address ffimself freely
and directly to the Power making for righteousness, that
is also infmitely -wise and infinitely good. It represents
his protest against the claims of all priesthoods and
sacraments, orders and institutions, to come in as

302 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
Ucensed agents of a beffig to whom he is nearer than
to all these.
These are some of the ways in which Unitarians seek
to make the idea of God clearer and more present to
their thought and their feeUng. None of them is an
original way. AU these figures have been used over
again in the long record of the Christian Apology.
What ffistingffishes Uffitarian thought on this subject
from that of the traffitional theology is the consistency
Avith wffich it cUngs to this particular circle of ideas and
1 refuses to confuse them with others that do not seem
* to belong with them. Its criticism of the prevaihng
creeds is that they have allowed the emphasis to be
transferred from the essential to the secondary aspects
of Christian speculation. It dwells upon the idea of
uffity because the Christian traffition seems to have
sacrfficed that essential of a really comprehensible uni
verse to a desire to crystallize certain aspects of deity
into actual personaUties.
In like manner Uffitarians are accustomed to use the
\word "Creator." In so doing they do not commit
themselves to any theory, theological or scientffic, as to
the origffi of the -visible universe or of man as a part of it.
Certaffily, aU their habits of thought point them away
from the notion of a sudden creation as expressed in the
sacred books of the Hebrews and of many other peoples.

THE THOUGHT OF GOD 303
That seems to them only a chilffish fable born of the
instinct for the concrete and the dramatic that is one
of the most ob-vious marks of cffildhood, whether it be
the cffildhood of the individual or of the race. These
same habits of thought make them instinctively sym
pathize with that other notion of the origin of tffings,
to wffich we give the name of "evolution." Such an
idea seems to them consistent with the sense of law
that governs them in so many other conclusions. Yet
there woffid probably be found among Uffitarians as many
shades of opimon about the details of evolution as among
thinking men ffi general. Their thought of God as
Creator does not depend upon any fixed -view of the
process by wffich creation was performed. It may, so
far as this is concerned, have been a short process or a
long one. All the Unitarian means is that, as he tries
to give account to ffimself of what God means to ffim, he
finds it impossible not to tffink of ffim as the final
Source from wffich all being flows. He cares Uttle
under what form tffis idea is presented. He reads the
ffistory of the long struggle in the earUest centuries of
Christianity to produce an idea of God that should be
free .of tffis element of creatorsffip; how so many of the
keenest mmds were unable to admit it into their defi
nition at all and declared that only by a degradation
of the ffi-vine ideal could God be conceived of as comffig

304 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
into direct contact -with matter in the process of creation.
He foUows these men in their further argument : that the
actual creative work must have been done by another
and lesser being, acting as the obeffient, though uncon
scious, servant of the true and absolute God. And then
he Ustens to the triumphant reply of TertulUan : that
even though tffis were the case, tffis lesser deity, pre
cisely because he was the creative spirit, would be the
deity whom men must love and worsffip, and he finds
his sympathy going out to tffis warmly human con
viction rather than to the faffitless logic of the "men
who knew. " It is not so much that God is the Creator
as that the Creator is God. Humanity is so made that
it will worsffip the being who gave it the gift of Ufe and
made the uffiverse in wffich it has its part. The sense
of dependence is an element of the religious instinct,
and it is precisely tffis sense of dependence that is ex
pressed in the word "Creator."
See how close the connection of ideas here is. The
same tffinkers who were trying to teach the doctrine of
a non-creating God were the very ones who were most
deeply impressed -with the idea of the reaUty of e-vil
and of its expression in the world of matter. Matter to
them lay over against spirit, so completely severed from it
that it could be explained only on the supposition of a
ffifferent creator. Man, being hopelessly involved in a

THE THOUGHT OF GOD 305
material form, must also be the work of this lesser and
imperfect being. How foreign aU tffis world of thought is
to the sphere of ideas in which the Unitarian moves !
To ffim there is no such opposition of spirit and matter.
For ffim " the whole round earth is every way bound
by gold chains about the feet of God." The law of
harmony he accepts includes -witffin its working the
mind of man and the order of the universe in wffich
he hves. There is no room in ffis scheme of tffings
for any antagoffism that could draw a hne between
God and ffis work. He can tffink of all creation as one
tffing ffi many parts and these parts aU necessary to
its complete and orderly workmg. He therefore confesses
ffimself gladly in the foUowffig of those who in that far
off, critical period of the Church's Ufe saved it, once
for aU, from the deadly error of a pffilosophic duaUsm
that woffid have left mankind floating in the dreary
waste of an orphaned universe.
Finally, the Unitarian adds to aU these other aspects
of Deity the notion of an unchanging Law. The quaU
ties we have just been considering carry -with them each
the impUcation of a WiU. Power, wisdom, love, the
creative activity, — these all suggest the necessity of a
-wiU to ffirect their action. Power without the -wiU to
exercise it, -wisdom without the wiU to direct it, love
without the -wiU to apply it, creative acti-vity -without

3o6 UNITARIAN THOUGHT
the will to set it in motion, — these are such untffinkable
ideas that men have gone all lengths in translating the
ffi-vine acti-vity into terms of human will. In so doing
they have, generaUy with a certain consciousness, re
jected the idea of law as necessarily limiting the free
dom of action of the ffivine. A God of law has seemed
to suggest the very opposite of a God capable of wilUng
to do or not to do what pleased ffim. The Unitarian
escapes tffis difficulty because to him there is no essen
tial antagonism in these two ideas of will and law.
Witffin the Umits of human experience, indeed, such an
antagonism is obvious. It is true that to us, in the affairs
of our daily lives, law impUes the restraint of our wills,
and freedom of the will suggests escape from law. The
very definition of wUl, we say, is the freedom to do or
not to do what at the moment seems good to us, without
restraffit from any outward compulsion.
And yet, even within these narrow limits of our o-wn
human observation, we ffiscern the possibility of a
partial reconciliation between these opposites. As we
have aheady noted, the highest human understanding of
freedom of the wiU is freedom to adjust it to what we
conceive to be the ffi-vine will. And how could we make
tffis adjustment ff the ffi-vine will itself were to be thought
of as something fitful, whimsical, transient, affected by
the passions wffich ffisturb our own. It is precisely

THE THOUGHT OF GOD 307
because of this disturbance of our own passions that we
seek outside ourselves for something steady and perma
nent to counteract them. The name for the steady
and the permanent is Law. We do our best -within our
human Umits to define the law, but we are always con
scious that we have not reached a satisfactory definition.
Beyond aU human stri-ving there is, we feel, another and
a ffigher law combining aU those perfections we vainly
seek to embody in our earthly systems. That highest
law the Uffitarian does not fear to caU the Will of God.
He is not afraid of the charge that he is Umiting God by
tffis thought of ffis -wiU as law. If he should for a moment
pretend to understand that law, then mdeed he would
expose ffimself to tffis charge. For no law that he could
understand would be worthy of comparison with the
ffivffie wiU. It is because he thffiks of the ffivine law
as beyond human knowledge that he can think of it also|
as the perfect expression of the di-vine -wiU. In the effort
to make ffis -wffi correspond to the ffi-vine law as far as
he can see ffito it, he feels ffimself to be adjusting his
will to the -will of God.
Or, to put it in this way : the ffighest idea of earthly
law would be such a law as should express the highest
impulses of the human -will. If our law could pro-vide for
the best development of indi-vidual power and individual
character, while at the same time securffig the widest

308 , UNITARIAN THOUGHT
exercise of aU the social virtues, love, charity, fairness,
help, self-sacrffice, generosity, and by whatever other
name we may call the best there is in us, then we should
say: we have a perfect law. In fact, it would be so
perfect that it woffid not appear as law at all. It would
seem to be only the natural action of the perfected human
wills of men perfectly adjusted to the highest human
ideals. We should most perfectly obey the law when
we most completely followed our own will. Now some
thffig like this is what the Unitarian means when he
calls the ffivine law the perfect expression of the ffivine
-wiU. His thought of God includes a will wffich is so
balanced that there is no name for it but law and a law
so perfect in its beneficence that there is no name for
it but wiU. 'What men are always striving for and
never attaining, that is precisely the imperfect suggestion
of what the ffi-vine must be. The moment we pass out of
the region of our own hmitations into the atmosphere
of pure faith, all seeming contraffiction between the no
tions of -wiU and law disappears, and we see that these
are but two aspects of the one ffivffie ideal.
1 The thought of God to the Uffitarian is thus the sum
\ of his highest conceptions of the Being that is at the
I centre and heart of all tffings seen and felt under the
, varied aspects of unity, power, wisdom, love, and law.

THE THOUGHT OF GOD

309

Though he comes slowly to ffis formulations, thinking
his way along from the startffig-point of his o-wn human
nature, through the lesser problems of the Christian
traffition, wffi'ch are also the problems of aU religion,
and only ffi the Ught of these more tangible results
arrives at last to a certain clearness as to the divine, still
this ffivine ideal is none the less the central and informing
spirit of what we may now venture to caU for the first
time the Unitarian Theology. As all our thought has
been leadffig us up to this final summary of Christian
specffiation on the highest tffings, so we might now reverse
the process and show how the Unitarian's thought of
Man and ffis fate, of Scripture, the Church, Worship, the
person of Jesus, and the limits of the Supernatural are aU
to be ffiterpreted in the Ught of ffis conception of the
divine nature. That reverse process, however, we leave
to the patient reader, who shaU have followed our thought
thus far. If he can pursue it with ease and clearness,
the purpose of tffis httle book -wffi be answered. If not,
that -will be the sufficient proof that it has failed of its
desired object.

Printed in the United States of America.

BY THE LATE
CHARLES CARROLL EVERETT
Bussey Professor of Theology and Dean of the Faculty of Divinity,
Harvard University
Theism and the Chnstian Faith
Edited by Edward Hale, from students' notes
Cloth, xviii + 4g2 pages, $2.50 postpaid $2.75
This volume gives the substance of Dr. Everett's main course on
Theology, including theism and the doctrines of Christianity. His line
of thought develops the implications of the three ideas of the rea=on, —
truth, goodness, and beauty, — and so proceeds to the study of the prob
lems of theology and of the position of Christianity among religions.
The recovery of the lectures by Mr. Hale's skilful use of several sets
of students' notes (in part ste ographic) has been performed with more
than ordinary success, and Dr. Everett's students will recognize the
living form and manner of his discourse.
The volimie is published as Supplementary -Volume No. i , of the Har
vard Theological Review, ai\d it is for that reason possible to offer it at
the price of $2.50.
" A book which ... no thoughtful minister can well afford to leave out of his
library, unless he can borrow it. . . . The calm, impartial discussion of great
themes in these pages." — Tke Auburn Seminary Record.
"This book again brings to one's notice Professor Everett's almost un
rivalled faculty of illustration. . . . Perhaps no book dealing with the themes
of which this book treats was ever before published so abounding in a wealth
of aptly chosen iUustrations. . . . To the preacher who is dealing with life at
first hand, and who wants ideas that are immediately applicable to the needs
of human souls surrounding him, this book is of the highest value. . . . Few
books on homiletics are half as useful to the man who has a weekly sermon to
produce, for here are practically all the themes on which th* preacher needs to
sneak set forth in outlines with convincing power." — The Christian Register.

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