otherwise comes in contact with external life. Up to the days of Channing himself, the Yankee race may be likened to a Puritan child gravely playing alone. However crude its traits, however simple, however unwinsome, they were hardly such as reasonable men, without the guidance of dogmatic teaching, would conclude to indicate irrevocable damnation.

So even by the time of Edwards, Calvinistic dogma ✓ and national inexperience were unwittingly at odds. Our glances at subsequent American letters must have shown how steadily the native human nature of America continued to express itself in forms which could not reasonably be held infernal. In New York, for example, the first third of the nineteenth century produced Brockden Brown and Irving and Cooper and Bryant; and, at a period distinctly later than that with which we are now concerned, the literature of which they were the leaders faded into no deeper decadence than the work of Poe, of Willis, and of the Knickerbocker School. Not eternally memorable, even the worst of these personages does not seem worthy of perdition as distinguished from neglect. Turning to certain phases of New England at about the same time, we saw in its public life the patriotic intensity of Webster and the classical personality of Everett, establishing a tradition of sustained dignity which passed only with Mr. Winthrop, who lies beneath the well-earned epitaph, "Eminent as a scholar, an orator, a statesman, and a philanthropist, above all, a Christian." And when we came to

the scholarship of New England, we found it finally ripening into the stainless pages of Ticknor, of Prescott, of Motley, and of Parkman.

In a society like this, Calvinistic dogma seems constantly further from truth, as taught by actual life. If everything which men do is essentially damnable, if they can be saved from eternal punishment only by the divine redemption which comes to the elect through Christ, the incarnate son of God, men ought continually to behave abominably. However true

to experience in dense old worlds, such habitually abominable conduct was untrue to the national inexperience of America, and particularly of renascent New England. The social structure of this region had been pretty rigid from the beginning. Well into the nineteenth century the clergy maintained much of their pristine social lead; and this partly because of a trait which remained unaltered throughout the rise and the decline of Unitarianism. As a class, they were deeply earnest and sincerely truthful. Even in the eighteenth century, then, a considerable number of these ministers, particularly of the region about Boston, began insensibly to relax the full rigour of dogmatic Calvinism. There was no formal break, but in the utterances of Boston pulpits you were less and less apt to scent hell-fire.

When good Dr. Freeman, then, minister of King's Chapel, was compelled to revise the Anglican Prayer Book, and found himself conscientiously disposed so to alter the liturgy as obviously to modify the dogma of the Trinity, he may not have felt half so radical as time has proved him. After the interval of a century, his King's Chapel liturgy, still in use and sometimes held to mark the beginning of Boston Unitarianism, presents a startling contrast to most older forms of Christianity on this continent. Its insistence on the divine unity of God, and on the loving inspiration of God's word, undeniably implies a tendency to regard Christ only as an excellent earthly manifestation of God's creative power. He seems no longer a mystic being whose divine interposition is needed to preserve humanity from destruction. The question of his essential nature is rather neglected. Half-God and half-man, if you choose so to believe, he is not exactly God. Men need him not as a redeemer, but as an example.

The King's Chapel liturgy was published in 1785. About twenty years later, Harvard College succumbed to the temper which the liturgy embodies. The chief theological chair at Harvard is the Hollis Professorship of Divinity; — at present

held by a scholar whose knowledge of Babylonian inscriptions is justly celebrated. Up to 1805 it had remained a stronghold of Calvinistic doctrine. In that year it was given to the Reverend Henry Ware, an avowed Unitarian, whose conceptions of human nature were introspectively confirmed by lifelong contemplation of the fact that " Ware was honest as all Wares be." The orthodox party at Harvard had opposed Ware with all their might; so when he was made Hollis Professor, the ancestral college of Puritan New England was finally handed over to Unitarianism. Until very recent years this remained its acknowledged faith. At last its liberalism became such as to make even Unitarian dogmas inconvenient; its avowed religion is now described as non-sectarian, and its chapel has long abandoned the use of the sacrament.

Defeated at Harvard, the orthodox party retreated to Andover, where they founded the Theological Seminary which until very lately forlornly defended old Calvinism in a region abandoned to its enemies. Nowadays the whole thing is fading into history, but at first the conflict was heart-breaking. There is a pathetic story of Professor Pearson, who, on the election of Ware, retired from Harvard to become one of the founders of Andover. In his last days the good man's speech was paralysed; and when toward the end of his life an old Harvard friend, who had not seen him for years, came to visit him, time had done its work. With mournful tears in his eyes the dumb old Calvinist took his friend's hand and stroked it, unable to speak his grief that their ways had parted for eternity. For on each side faith was fervent; and if the conquering Unitarians believed themselves to be destroying pernicious and ugly heresy, the Calvinists believed just as sincerely that in angelic guise the devil had possessed himself of New England. In their mood, there was a consequent depth of despair to which the Unitarians have hardly done full justice. To the Unitarian mind there has never been anv valid reason why good men of other opinions than theirs should

not enjoy everlasting bliss; but the very essence of the Calvinists' creed condemned to everlasting woe every human being who rejected the divinely revealed truth of their grimly uncompromising system.

To suppose, however, that the founders of Unitarianism were not Christians would be totally to misunderstand them. They revered the Scriptures as profoundly as ever Calvinists did. The difference was that they discerned in Scripture no such teaching as the experience of old-world centuries had ✓ crystallised into Calvinistic dogma. In the first place, they found in the Bible no passages which necessarily involved the dogma of the Trinity. There might be puzzling sentences; but there were also clear, constant statements that there is one God, who made man in His image. Very good, they held; this assertion amounts to proof that men are the children of God, and that incidentally they have inherited from God the divine faculties of reason and of conscience. When in the Bible, then, there are puzzling texts, or when in life there are puzzling moments, our duty is to face them in a conscientiously reasonable temper. If we are truly made in the image of God, we shall thus reach true conclusions; and meanwhile, to guide our way, God has made that most excellent of his creatures, Jesus Christ, and has authentically recorded his career in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Search these yourself; use the light of the Scriptures; remember the example of Christ; and all will be well. If there be any such thing as damnation, it can result only from lack of self-searching, from deliberate neglect of scriptural light, or from wilful disregard of Christ's example.

From this state of faith there naturally resulted in Unitarianism a degree of spiritual freedom which allowed each minister to proclaim whatever truth presented itself to his conscience. Unitarianism has never formulated a creed. It has tacitly accepted, however, certain traditions which have been classically set forth by its great apostle, William Ellery

J

Channing. He was born at Newport in 1780; he took his degree at Harvard in 1798; and from 1803 to 1840 he was minister at the Federal Street Church in Boston. He died in 1842.

In 1819, he preached at Baltimore, on the occasion of the ordination of Jared Sparks, his famous sermon on Unitarian Christianity. He took his text from 1 Thess. v. 21: "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." His first point is that "we regard the Scriptures as the records of God's successive revelations to mankind, and particularly of the last and most perfect revelation of his will by Jesus Christ." The Scriptures, he goes on to say, must be interpreted by the light of reason. So, applying reason to Scripture, he deduces in the first place the doctrine of God's unity, "that there is one God, and one only;" secondly, that "Jesus is one mind, one soul, one being, as truly one as we are, and equally distinct from the one God; " thirdly, that "God is morally perfect; " fourthly, that "Jesus was sent by the Father to effect a moral or spiritual deliverance of mankind; that is, to rescue men from sin and its consequences, and to bring them to a state of everlasting purity and happiness;" and, fifthly, that "all virtue has its foundation in the moral nature of man, that is, in conscience, or his sense of duty, and in the power of forming his temper and life according to conscience."

On this supreme authority of conscience Unitarianism tended to throw more and more emphasis. Toward the end of Channing's life he wrote some introductory remarks to a collected edition of his works from which the following paragraph is worth attention:

"We must start in religion from our own souls. In these is the fountain of all divine truth. An outward revelation is only possible and intelligible, on the ground of conceptions and principles, previously furnished by the soul. Here is our primitive teacher and light. Let us not disparage it. There are, indeed, philosophical schools of the present day, who tell us that we are to start in all our speculations