CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
P79 
 
 PAOES 
 
 FftOM THE 
 
 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTOEY 
 
 OP 
 
 NEW ENGLAND. 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029254426 
 
PsA & E S 
 
 FROH THE 
 
 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 
 
 NEW ENGLAND, 
 
 DURING THE CENTURY BETWEEN 
 
 1740 AND 1840. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 JAMES B. DOW, PUBLISHER. 
 
 1847. 
 
ADYEETISEMENT. 
 
 These Paqes originally appeared in the Episcopal Ob- 
 server. They were copied into other periodicals; and 
 their republication in the present form, has been requested. 
 The design with which they were written, was to present a 
 historical review, rather than a history. Such a review 
 must contain facts, may imply opinions, and cannot but in- 
 volve inferences. The facts which are contained in these 
 Pages are either generally familiar, or else preserved in 
 printed documents, — numerous, — though often ephemeral. 
 The opinions which are implied, relate to subjects on which 
 no Christian can desire disguise. The inferences which are 
 involved, are as much with the reader, as with the writer. 
 
PAGES, &C. 
 
 CHAPTER L 
 
 The Reformation tore down images and shrines 
 within the temple of Christian doctrine ; but it left 
 the foundations, the walls and the columns as they 
 had stood through the revolutions of ages. Still 
 was the structure cruciform ; a triune glory was 
 still reflected in its parts ; and the holiest spot was 
 that at which were still eelebra,ted the mysteries 
 that commemorated the one atoning Sacrifice. 
 The rash man who dared, in the revival of primi- 
 tive instructions, to find and follow the footsteps of 
 Pelagius, of Arius, or of Paul of Samosata, was 
 not safer on the southern bank, of the Tweed than 
 on the northern, and might as vainly seek a shelter 
 among the -republicans of Geneva, as at the courts 
 of electors or emperors. Amidst the wide effer- 
 vescence of thought, a few scattered minds, each 
 in its own manner, assailed the common faith of 
 the reformed, and the penalty was exacted. The 
 five or six sufferers und^r Edward, Elb^abeth and 
 James, had blended with sprnething like the Arian 
 opinion, fantasies which would have effectually 
 prevented its propagation through .their single- 
 handed labors. Servetus, an itinerant Spanish 
 1 
 
6 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 physician, if he bore not about the insane wreck of 
 a fine intellect, must have been at least a Pan- 
 theist. Gathered from several countries, a com- 
 pany of exiles established themselves in Poland 
 and Transylvania; and the Socini left them a 
 name. Persecution disturbed their flourishing seats 
 in Poland ; and some tens of thousands of Tran- 
 sylvanians were the only body on the European 
 continent, that preserved an ecclesiastical organiza- 
 tion and denied the Trinity. 
 
 " The father of English Unitarianism," in the 
 language of a distinguished Unitarian, was John 
 Biddle, who was rejected from the wide toleration 
 of Cromwell, and after the Restoration died in the 
 prison which had become his home. His spirit 
 revived in Thomas Emlyn, a dissenting minister, 
 who, towards the end of that century, published 
 his Humble Inquiry into the Scripture Account of 
 Jesus Christ, and was sentenced to an ignominious 
 punishment at Dublin. Biddle, however, was a 
 Socinian ; while Bmlyn seemed to ascribe to the 
 Saviour the throne which Arius had allowed, 
 above angfels and archangels. The bold and pe- 
 culiar mind of Milton had chosen a path of its 
 own, and, giving to the Son of God every honor 
 except that of eternal generation and consubstan- 
 tial equality with the Father, adored and accepted 
 the vicarious propitiation. A cool, cautious and 
 negative strain of thought drew upon Loclje the 
 reproach, as it was deemed by himself, of Socin- 
 ianism ; but the claim of those who have loved to 
 number him with Newton, amongst their more 
 secret precursors, is compelled, as with Newton, to 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 7 
 
 seek its sanctions from his silence or his less une- 
 quivocal language. The great Dr. Clarke paused 
 where his conscience would still permit the wor- 
 ship ,of . the English church ; while Whiston, 
 earnest, eccentric, learned, intrepid, threw himself 
 back upon what hp deemed an Arianisni earlier 
 than Arius. 
 
 Freedom from ecclesiastical restraint was the 
 inheritance of the children of nonconformists. 
 While civil liberty was attaining its full stature 
 under the house of Brunswick, a spirit of unawed 
 investigation asserted its rights in the domain of 
 religious knowledge. Early in the reign of George 
 the First, two or three of the most eminent dis- 
 senting ministers in Devonshire were charged with 
 the Arian error. The defection proved more ex- 
 tensive : — a stormy tumult agitated the whole 
 body of nonconformists; the offending teachers 
 were at length expelled from their meeting-houses ; 
 and the general assembly at Salters' Hall con- 
 demned their doctrine. But the effect of the decis- 
 ion was counterbEdanced by the refusal of a large, 
 a respectable and generally an orthodox portion of 
 that assembly, to throw their own belief into any 
 form of words which had not been, copied from the 
 Scriptures. It became settled in many minds, as 
 a part of the freedom of dissent, that no other creed 
 should raise its battlement against heresy, above 
 the rampart of the Bible ; and the popular attach- 
 ment to the religious liberty which had been so 
 late and so hardly won, and the popular prejudice 
 against bigotry, a prejudice so peculiarly popular 
 
8 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 in times of spreading intelligence, were allnred to 
 the side of innovation. The cause of freedom it- 
 self wa;s naturally associated with the cause which 
 claimed protection from the asgis of that freedom. 
 
 In the mean time, the human mind, pushing its 
 inquiries in all directions, had approached and en- 
 tered the metaphysics of religion. The disclosure 
 of ancient errors in natural science, as well as of 
 the falsehoods of the papacy, had cherished a 
 rising habit of doiibt, till incredulity was deemed a 
 token of superior Wisdom. A depraved heart and 
 an evil life had also made a class of unbelievers, 
 distinct from the speculative doubters of that day ; 
 and the writings of these, though refuted and re- 
 jected, and sometime^ suppressed, and sometimes 
 only suggesting what it was unsafe to say, yet by 
 their very existence confirmed the spirit of doubt 
 where they did hot create the spirit of denial. 
 Theologians felt the influence, or yielded without 
 consciousness. Il was as if a mist had silently 
 overspread the landscapie ; and neither tree nor hill, 
 neither the hbiise of God below, nor the bright 
 heaven above, was seen clearly. Not a land nor a 
 church in Western Europe was exempt from that 
 peculiar aimosphere, in which all forms of specula- 
 tion glided into incredulity, as all morbid condi- 
 tions of the body sometimes glide into the prevail- 
 ing pestilence. In Holland, the critical skepticism 
 of Bayle was attended by the skeptical criticism of 
 Le Clerc. France had banished the Huguenot 
 leaven by which she might have been half pre- 
 served ; and within the very bosom of the national 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 9 
 
 church, doubt paused at no middle triumph, but 
 subjecting priests, nobles and philosophers to the 
 genius of Voltaire, ripened into all unbelief, tUl 
 " blood came out at the wine-press, even unto the 
 horse-bridles." The intellectual life of the Spanish 
 peninsula was insufficient to disclose to the world 
 the growth of that infidelity in its churches and 
 cloisters, amidst which Blanco White long after- 
 wards nourished his indignation and his discon- 
 tent. Even at Rome, it might have seemed that 
 the old foundations were broken, when Ganga- 
 nelli put on the tiara ; a better man, it may be, and 
 a purer Christian than his later predecessors, yet 
 surely not elected for the firmness of his faith in 
 the system which made the Roman See a papacy. 
 Voltaire and Rousseau exulted contemptuously in 
 the assertion of a silent Sociriianism at Geneva. 
 The theologians of Germany stood for a while, 
 offering the passive and motionless resistance of a 
 dike to the slightest onset of doubt; but when they 
 yielded, it was as the failing dilce throws open 
 meadows and villages and broad plains to the rush 
 of the ton-ent. In the Scottish and English estab- 
 lishments the operation was a doctrinal lethargy, 
 preserving, in the former, the staid sobriety of the 
 ancestral manners, and investing itself, in the lat- 
 ter, with the robes of courtly dignity, or passing 
 into the mass of city and country worldliness. 
 
 Amidst such an atmosphere, so widely spread, 
 
 the instructions of the English nonconformists 
 
 grew more and more indistinct. The spirit of the 
 
 age forbade too cordial a belief in any thing which 
 
 1* 
 
10 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 the senses could not discern, and which natural 
 reason had failed to discover ; and the passion for 
 religious freedom insisted that the teachers should 
 be protected against the assaults of the inquisitive. 
 It was made but a question of individual opinion 
 and taste, whether one doctrine more or less should 
 be announced from the pulpit, or whether it should 
 echo only the inculcation of a virtuous practice. 
 Minister after minister became a literary writer, a 
 critic, an antiquary, an essayist, a chemist, an en- 
 cyclopaedist, a political economist, a controversial- 
 ist; any thing rather than a herald, whose clear 
 trumpet might sound out the old gospel of the 
 Puritans. Congregation after congregation faded 
 away, though instructed by the learning of Lard- 
 ner, the eloquence of Foster, the diligence of Ben- 
 son, or the varied information of Kippis. This 
 could not be, however, without resistance ; the 
 stricter and the more indistinct drew off into sepa- 
 rate companies ; and probably the accidental pre- 
 ponderance of numbers or of refinement, rather 
 than any peculiarity of discipline, brought most of 
 the modern liberality into the Presbyterian body, 
 and most of the ancient zeal into the Independent. 
 The founders of the chief colonies of New Eng- 
 land were of one heart and one mind ; and this 
 was the source of a great error in their ecclesiasti- 
 cal system. It forgot that never again could the 
 community which they founded, be what it was at 
 first ; that they had collected and brought into the 
 wilderness a peculiar people, but must afterwards 
 meet human nature as it arose, in all its varieties. 
 
HISTOEY OF NEW ENGLAND. 11 
 
 They^ could exclude from their communion or 
 banish from their territory the man who would not 
 share their faith ; but they could not decide the 
 character nor annul the birthright of the children 
 who should succeed to their own places. The 
 apostolic conception of a church as an assembly 
 of believers, received, on the profession of their 
 faith, to the sacraments, and to the fellowship of 
 the saints, and seeking there the grace by which 
 they might be trained for heaven, and subject to 
 exclusion on the proof of wilful and persevering 
 sin, till they should furnish the fruits; of penitence, 
 was not at all obscure or difficult. It was no ob- 
 jection that it might be compared with the net of a 
 fisherman, which gathers up all alike, or with a 
 field in which tares are nightly sown by an enemy. 
 The settlers of New England, however, had learned 
 to dread chiefly the ills of a church which was 
 identical with a nation ; and it was their endeavor 
 so to fence round their own, that, as far as might 
 be, it should embrace none but spiritual, accepted 
 followers of the Captain of salvation. That the 
 children of such should accompany their parents to 
 the baptismal waters, they gladly granted ; but 
 since the children might forsake the footsteps of 
 the parents, it was necessary to the idea of a pure 
 church to deem baptism only an entrance to an 
 outer porch, while the Lord's Supper, or the pre- 
 vious assumption of the covenant, admitted to the 
 church itself, the inner sanctuary. But each suc- 
 ceeding generation felt the evil ; and each, in its 
 own manner, attempted its removal. It was dis- 
 
12 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 tinctly at war with the practice of the apostles ; it 
 claimed for the Puritan churches a character which 
 the primitive churches never possessed ; it pushed 
 the hereditary principle in baptism to a height un- 
 known to a religion that has no respect of persons ; 
 it discouraged many honest and devout hearts, by 
 requiring the certainty of perseverance before it 
 offered a welcome to the holy table ; it made the 
 delay of a religious profession a matter of pru- 
 dence, of modesty, almost of duty ; it lessened the 
 value of the sacraments and of all Christian com- 
 munion ; it threw a mantle of personal sanctity 
 over those who had already passed the barrier; 
 and it sanctioned a practical falsehood, since, after 
 all, no man believed that many who were within 
 were indeed purer than many who were without. 
 The " Halfway Covenant," first adopted in 1662, 
 was the earliest effort against this system, giving to 
 parents who were not communicants, the privilege 
 of baptism for their children, and of a solemn ac- 
 knowledgment of Christian truth for themselves. 
 But while it widened the circle of the baptized, its 
 natural effect was to strengthen the hesitation of 
 the undecided, and 1o lessen the company of com- 
 municants. By the next effort, the communion 
 table was thrown open ; but the excellent Stoddard 
 of Northampton, and his associates in the defence 
 of this principle, were embarrassed by their Cal- 
 vinism. It compelled them to acknowledge that 
 every communicant, at the period of his admission, 
 was either distinctly renewed in spirit, and there- 
 fore sure to persevere, or else as distinctly unre- 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 13 
 
 newed, and therefore quite destitute of the inward 
 affections without which the sacrament must be a 
 vain, if not a profane observance. The feeblest 
 faith might be nourished by such an ordinance ; 
 but its administration, where not even the feeblest 
 faith was supposed or hoped, could not but be, to 
 many an earnest mind, a painful and repulsive 
 practice. It is not strange that Edwards, the grand- 
 son and successor of Stoddard, renounced such a 
 discipline ; but it is strange that he was not shaken, 
 either in his own doctrine of perseverance, or in its 
 application. In the European communions, that 
 doctrine, like that of predestination, with which it 
 was linked, had no voice, except for the encourage- 
 ment of the wealc, and the comfort of the despond- 
 ing. But when, in the conversation of every day, 
 the propositions were placed side by side, that none 
 but the regenerate ought to be members of a Chris- 
 tian communion, that regeneration was a spiritual 
 change of which he who had received it could 
 hardly fail to be clearly conscious, and that the re- 
 generate could never lose the prize ; many must 
 have advanced with presumption, many must have 
 withdrawn with timidity and regret; many must 
 have willingly seen themselves left to their own in- 
 difference, unfit by their own acknowledgment; 
 and many others must have looked with peculiar 
 suspicion towards the small number who seemed, 
 as they imagined, to profess not so much their 
 humble hope, as their established holiness. Neither 
 principle, however had quite prevailed ; and when 
 Whitefield first passed like a cloud over New Eng- 
 
14 PAGES FEOM THE ECCLESIASLICAL 
 
 land, with thunder and lightning and rain, there 
 was already, a stricter and a gentler party. One 
 was easily open to fanaticism ; the other was far 
 too much inclined to erase the stronger lines that 
 enclose the camp of salvation. There was not 
 much communication with the theologians of the 
 mother land ; and Arianism had only been named 
 as a distant heresy. 
 
 CHAPTER 11. 
 
 It was on a September evening in 1740, that 
 Whitefield, a young Presbyter of the Church of 
 England, arrived at Boston. The " Great Awaken- 
 ing," which began six years before at Northamp- 
 ton, under the ministry of Edwards, had spread 
 through some neighboring regions of Massachu- 
 setts and Connecticut, and for the time had died 
 away. Whitefield, whose fame had gone before 
 him while he traversed the colonies, was met, 
 several miles from the town, by a company of gen- 
 tlemen, with one or two ministers ; and for ten 
 days he preached to such congregations as had 
 never before been assembled in America. There 
 were in Boston eleven places of worship of the 
 established order. Foxcroft and Ghauncey were 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 45 
 
 the ministers of the first church; the elder, an 
 Episcopalian by education, but ardent in his love 
 of the Puritan doctrines, and the most attractive 
 preacher of his time, till an early paralysis some- 
 what shook his powers ; the younger, less pleasing 
 in the pulpit, but a cool, bold and vigorous thinker. 
 The pastor of the Second, or Old North Church, 
 was Joshua Gee, a man of superior talents, but 
 uniting doctrinal zeal with constitutional indolence. 
 Over the Old South Church were Sewall, whom 
 Unitarianism has described as the greatest bigot of 
 the time, and Prince, the pious chronologist. The 
 Brattle Street Church bad been organized apart 
 from the Cambridge platform, under a plan which 
 gave to the whole people the election of their min- 
 ister, and for some time it was excluded from the 
 general fellowship ; but it had long prospered, and 
 was prospering still under the learned Colman, its 
 earliest pastor, now the oldest of the clergy of Bos- 
 ton, and under his ardent colleague, William 
 Cooper. Webb was the minister of the New 
 North Church ; Checkly, of the New South in 
 Summer street ; Samuel Mather, the son of Cotton 
 Mather, of a congregation which separated with 
 him from the New North Church, and worshipped 
 in the building which was called the New Brick 
 Meeting-house ; Moorhead of the congregation in 
 Federal street, which was founded by Irish Protes- 
 tants, and was Presbyterian in its constitution; 
 Mather Byles, of the church in Hollis street ; Wel- 
 steed, of that in Middle street ; and Hooper, a 
 Scotchman, who afterwards received Episcopal 
 
16 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESrASTICAL 
 
 orders, of the West Church, which had been but 
 three or four years in existance. Within all these 
 churches rang the clear music of that youthful 
 voice which every where so bowed the hearts of 
 men ; and when, on the return of Whitefield from 
 the Eastern coast, he preached his farewell sermon 
 on the Common, he supposed, somewhat extrava- 
 gantly indeed, that he had thirty thousand hearers. 
 After a few months, Whitefield was followed by 
 the bold and unsparing Gilbert Tennent. There 
 was a wide and almost tumultuous swell of relig- 
 ious emotion ; angels rejoiced in heaven, and good 
 men on earth, over many a repentant sinner ; the 
 stranger saw a new seriousness on the face of vil- 
 lages and towns ; and pastors acknowledged with 
 a gush of gratitude, that a single season had yielded 
 them a richer harvest than a lifetime before. But 
 the youth of Whitefield and the harshness of Ten- 
 nent had disowned the prevailing reverence for 
 authorities, and both of them had intimated with 
 distinctness and with great uncharitableness, their 
 opinion of the spiritual estate of many of the clergy. 
 The college at Cambridge was pronounced by 
 Whitefield to be, " as far as he could -gather, not 
 far superior' to the English Universities in piety 
 and true godliness." " They told me," says Whee- 
 lock, then a warm itinerant, recording in his journal 
 the effect of a sermon of his own at Boston, — 
 " they told me they believed that Mather Byles 
 was never so lashed in his life." The tide of censo- 
 rious enthusiasm rose higher and higher ; and on 
 its topmost wave came Davenport of Long Island, 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 17 
 
 who was not afraid to pronounce publicly the 
 names of the unconverted ministers. A declara- 
 tion prepared by all the GoUgregational clergy of 
 Boston refused him their pulpits ; the law laid its 
 hand upon him; the ministers interceded; and he 
 was acquitted as insane, and published afterwards 
 a recantation of his extravagance. 
 
 The appearance of Davenport in Boston was in 
 1742 ; and as he was but the foremost of a con- 
 siderable body who were scattered through the 
 provinces, the pastors of Massachusetts, when they 
 met in their general Convention in 1743, after a 
 very careful, faithful and judicious sermon from 
 Appleton of Cambridge, appointed a cornmittee of 
 inquiry. On their report, a "testimony" was 
 adopted, against the doctrinal errors of relying on 
 secret impulses without the word, of affirming that 
 there can be no conversion without a knowledge 
 of the time, or without assurance, of denying that 
 sanctification is an evidence of justification, with 
 other Antinomian and Familistical opinions ; and 
 against the disorders in practice, of itinerancy with- 
 out the assent of the settled pastors, of assuming 
 the sacred office without knowledge or a call, of 
 ordination without a charge, of separation, of pro- 
 nouncing judgment on the spiritual state of others, 
 as if the heart could be seen, and of tumultuous 
 and indecent confusion in religious assemblies. 
 At the same time they testified also against the 
 impiety of reproaching the work of the Spirit in 
 the souls of Christians. A majority of thirty-eight 
 upheld this testimony, while others would have 
 2 
 
18 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 concurred in guarding the people against the delu- 
 sions which might be easy at such a season as had 
 lately been witnessed, but would gladly have added 
 a distinct testimony to the revival of religion in the 
 provinces. Another convention was summoned 
 by this minority ; and on the day after the com- 
 mencement, ninety ministers were present, all of 
 whom were substantially united in judgment. 
 The " testimony" which they signed, received also 
 the consent of thirty who were absent ; but about 
 thirty of the whole number of signatures were 
 those of clergymen in New Hampshire, Maine, 
 Rhode Island and Connecticut. It was cautious 
 and discriminating, but decided and solemn, and 
 embraced a warning against being drawn into 
 Arminianism, as well as Antinomianism, through 
 fear of the opposite errors. There were at that 
 time about a hundred and seventy-five congrega- 
 tions in Massachusetts ; so that at least half of the 
 clergy were thus arrayed as friends of the more 
 ardent efforts and appeals which had been so 
 widely fruitful. 
 
 First among the opponents of the excitement, 
 Chauncy had published an account of the French 
 Prophets, which was republished in Scotland, and 
 obtained for him a Bcottish doctorate ; and when 
 the " Thoughts on the Revival," by Edwards, ap- 
 peared in 1742, they were followed in 1743, by 
 Chauncy's " Seasonable Thoughts on the State of 
 Religion in New England." While Edwards ac- 
 knowledged the evils, but insisted that they ought 
 not to obscure the proofs of a mighty and infinite 
 
HISTORY OP NEW ENGLAND. 19 
 
 blessing, his adversary contended that they had 
 held a most unhappy preponderance in the whole 
 commotion. Turell, of Medford, published in its 
 defence a dialogue on the times, with directions to 
 his people ; which, notwithstandingj were bitterly 
 assailed by Andrew Croswell, the enthusiastic 
 champion of Davenport and of excess. A sermon 
 on charity, which was preached by Ashley, of 
 Deerfield, in the Brattle street pulpit, and after- 
 wards printed, compelled Coopei: to remonstrate 
 through the press against being supposed to have 
 changed the views with which : he had signed the 
 second testimony. The opinions of Ghauncy and 
 Ashley were sustained by Hancock, of Braintree ; 
 Prescott, of Salem ; Picltering, of Ipswich ; Balch, 
 of Bradford; Tucker, of Newbury; Barnard, of 
 Haverhill ; and others of the Essex ministers who 
 were known as Arminians. 
 
 In the Autumn of 1744, Whitefield a second 
 time visited New England and Boston, a some- 
 what older and wiser man ; but he was now en- 
 countered by a wide prejudice, which the remoter 
 issues of his first visit, ijot yet disclaimed by him= 
 self, had not unjustly nourished. Although at the 
 request of Colman, he administered the sacrament, 
 a letter from two neighboring associations of minis- 
 ters to the associated ministers of Boston and 
 Charlestown, remonstrated against his admission to 
 the pulpits of Massachusetts, avowing the belief 
 that his former journey had resulted in less of good 
 than of evil. Another entire association, at the re- 
 quest of Appleton of Cambridge for their counsel, 
 
20 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 offered the same opinion. The whole faculty of 
 Cambridge prepared a public testimony against his 
 enthusiasm, uncharitableness, extempore preaching, 
 itinerancy, and mismanagement in the affairs of 
 the Orphan House, in Georgia; Yale College 
 added a similar declaration ; a vehement letter, of 
 the same character, was issued by Henchman of 
 Lynn ; and testimonies followed from associations 
 in Norfolk, Plymouth, Middlesex, Worcester, and 
 Bristol. Several of these divines, such as Apple- 
 ton, Sewall, Cotton, Eells, the elder Walter, Per- 
 kins, Allen, and Prasident Holyoke, had given 
 their aid or their testimony to the revival; but 
 many of them had regarded it from the beginning 
 with suspicion and alarm. 
 
 Whitefield replied to Chauncy and to the faculty 
 of Cambridge, in the language of respect and can- 
 dor ; acknowledged some of his early mistakes ; 
 but gave little satisfaction. He was upheld at 
 Boston by Prince, Webb, Foxcroft, and Gee ; and 
 when he was there again in 1745, the commanders 
 and soldiers who conquered Louisburg, drank from 
 his eloquence a more religious energy than that 
 which usually attends an army to its campaigns. 
 Tn the mean time, the several sermons before the 
 Convention of ministers, very precious documents 
 for him who would note the progress of theological 
 opinion, directed their shafts against the exhorters 
 and the separatists. Such was the discourse, in 
 1742, of Loring, of Sudbury, a divine warmly at- 
 tached to the doctrine of justification by faith alone. 
 So Chauncy, in 1744, chose for his theme the con- 
 
HISTORY OP NBW fiNGLAND. 21 
 
 tempt into which the ministry must not permit 
 themselves to fall, and pointed to the rigorous ex- 
 ercise of discipline as the remedy for the ills of the 
 times. In the following year, Clark, of Salem, a 
 decided Calvinist, yet more directly urged this 
 hazardous counsel. The friends of the revival, 
 however, met in Boston, in the autumn of 1745, 
 and issued yet another testimony. While they 
 magnified the display of the doctrines of the gospel 
 during the revival, and lamented the profaneness 
 which had flowed from the opposition, they spoke 
 distinctly of an awful danger that the doctrine of 
 the agency of the Holy Spirit might be banished, 
 first from the pulpits and then from the land ; and 
 they called on all ministers, whatever might have 
 been their judgement of the revival, to unite for the 
 defence and promotion of the truth against all 
 errors, "in particular the Socinian, Antinomian, 
 and Arminian." The Convention sermon of 1746 
 was preached by Gay, of Hingham, on the dove- 
 like character which is enjoined on Christian min- 
 isters. But the tendencies of the day broke forth 
 in a controversy on Arminianism, between Balch, 
 of Bradford, on one side, and Wigglesworth, of 
 Ipswich, and Chipman of Beverly, on the other. 
 
 When the sounds of the revival were now echo- 
 ing more faintly and passing away, the clergy of 
 New England might probably be arranged under 
 four classes, in their relation to that extensive tem- 
 pest of feeling. A considerable body esteemed it 
 a divine interposition throughout ; and while they 
 would not justify disorder, vet pointed to fifty 
 2* 
 
22 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 thousand new communicants, and honored White- 
 field with an unalloyed reverence. A smaller 
 company adhered to the revival, but deplored and 
 condemed the career of Whitefield, when they saw 
 the unhappy errors with which the revival had 
 been blended. More numerous was that class, 
 embracing probably half of the ministers of Mas- 
 sachusetts, and almost all in Connecticut, who 
 could not speak without hesitation, of the march of 
 events, nor desire its renewal, while yet they be- 
 lieved and preached the doctrines of their fathers, 
 and implored the special grace of the Holy Ghost, 
 for every success in their labors, and every blessing 
 on their own spirits. Tliere remained a few, who 
 were cold at heart towards some portions of the 
 common creed ; were secretly, and perhaps uncon- 
 sciously, willing to exchange it for a form of doc- 
 trine which Arminius would not have recognized 
 as his own ; and were less anxious for any doctrine 
 than for their own intellectual freedom. It was no 
 slight calamity, that during the remainder of that 
 century, these parties and all others as they arose, 
 were ever verging towards a simpler division, until 
 two only survived ; two, directly and irreconcilably 
 hostile, and hostile only. 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 23 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 Edwards led the way at Northampton, in assert- 
 ing with strictness the principle that evidence of 
 piety, beyond a profession of the faith, and a wish 
 to observe the commandment, should be offered 
 before any should be received to the table of com- 
 munion. An open strife ensued ; and the middle 
 ground could be occupied by neither party, because 
 it would have seemed at variance with the doctrine 
 of necessary perseverance, sustained by both, and 
 also with the metaphysical theory of conversion, 
 adopted by Edwards. That middle ground would 
 have been, to suppose that where a deep and 
 earnest wish to seek the grace of God in his ap- 
 pointed paths is united with the belief of the gos- 
 pel, the grace w^hich is sought is already present ; 
 and that when the wish ceases, or ceases to be 
 deep and earnest, the branch has lost its inward 
 union with the vine, and should either renew it or 
 no longer attempt to preserve its outward symbol. 
 On one side of this ground, the system of Wil- 
 liams of Lebanon, who was the opponent of Ed- 
 wards, seemed, though he repelled the interpreta- 
 tion, to admit that those who knew themselves to 
 be unmoved by heavenly grace might safely sit 
 down at the holy table. On :the other side, Ed- 
 wards demanded, before perseverance, the proof 
 which perseverance alone could furnish ; and, since 
 
24 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 all perceived that many who had laid their hands 
 upon the plough had turned back from the field, it 
 became needful, either to practise a long, unau- 
 thorized and perilous delay, or to hazard an exten- 
 sive and singularly dreadful hypocrisy, or to brave 
 the just odium that could not be shunned by a 
 tribunal which assumed the office of searching the 
 hearts, and of answering to men for their own sal- 
 vation. In the progress of the controversy, Ed- 
 wards was compelled to withdraw from his parish 
 at Northampton ; but his eminent name became a 
 rallying standard ; and men grew more than ever 
 accustomed to associate any other " doctrine of the 
 will " except his own with the most perilous here- 
 sies. He left his strong grasp deeply imprinted on 
 the divinity and the religion of New England ; 
 which have owed much to the depth of his char- 
 acter and the firmness of his conscience, but little 
 to the austerity of his temper, and to that alliance 
 which he founded between devout feeling and 
 metaphysics. 
 
 There had been much that commanded respect 
 in the frank, direct, and courageous opposition of 
 Chauncy. While many had wavered, and many 
 had shrunk, for a time, from declaring the suspicion 
 which they felt, he stood up though alone amongst 
 the clergy of the capital, and resisted the whole 
 flood of innovation. He was no orator ; he wrote 
 without elegance ; he seems to have had little 
 imagination, and little warmth of feeling, except 
 that which speaks in the sharp, angry reply ; but 
 he employed vigorous argument with masculine 
 
HISTORY OP NEW ENGLAND. 25 
 
 ability ; assailing, in the same tennper, episcopacy, 
 the revival and the doctrines of Sandeman. To 
 him, however, among all the eminent divines of 
 New England, belongs the unhappy pre-eminence 
 of having been the first to take the spirit of doubt 
 to his bosom. He was said to question the con- 
 sciousness of the soul between death and the 
 resurrection ; he wrote in his latter days against 
 the eternity of retribution ; and he nourished that 
 sarcastic hostility to the sentiments of past ages and 
 the determinations of venerable bodies on doctrine, 
 which, like a light troop of scouts, precede the main 
 assault, and explore the danger. Deeply significant 
 was his passing sneer against the " Homoousianity " 
 of the Nicene council. 
 
 In the Brattle Street Church, Samuel Cooper 
 succeeded, in 1746, to the place of his pious father, 
 and in the next year died the able and venerable 
 Colman ; while Jonathan Mayhew, of the mission- 
 ary family of the Mayhews of Martha's Vineyard, 
 succeeded Hooper at the West Church, and 
 Hooper, having taken episcopal orders, became 
 the rector of Trinity Church. At the ordination 
 of Mayhew, he received the charge from the lips 
 of his father ; but it was soon apparent, that he had 
 inherited more of the Puritan hostility to episco- 
 pacy and the Puritan coldness to royalty than of 
 the divinity which his ancestors had taught amongst 
 the remnant of the aborigines. Bold, liberal, in- 
 dignant, with talents of some brilliancy, and with 
 much liveliness of style, he was chiefly anxious for 
 freedom from all the bonds which human author- 
 
26 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 ity can impose upon the mind, and he seemed to 
 himself to see oppression in the doctrines of his 
 predecessors and his associates. He refrained 
 from union with the Boston association of min- 
 isters ; he assailed with a high hand the doctrine 
 of justification by faith ; he called the Athanasian 
 creed, " a riddle, still somewhat enigmatical, not- 
 withstanding all the labors of the pious and meta- 
 physical Waterland ; " he jested on the Canticles ; 
 he corresponded with Lardner, Benson, Kippis, 
 and Blackburne ; and he ventured allusions which 
 seemed even to himself too rash and reckless, to 
 that doctrine of the divine nature which was held 
 by Christendom, as of all doctrines the most 
 august. 
 
 In 1754, Whitefield was again in Boston ; but 
 the old enthusiasm awoke no more. Far other 
 voices were now heard from England ; voices, 
 whose chief burden was the unbounded praise of 
 freedom of inquiry. Under a shield so broad, the 
 rising spirit of doubt could always obtain a shelter, 
 and push its attacks at once securely and secretly. 
 The dread of creeds and confessions was uttered 
 aloud ; especially in sermons and charges at many 
 ordinations. But men were never accustomed to 
 complain earnestly of the jurisdiction of a power 
 whose decisions they approved ; or, if they began 
 with opposing simply the power, they would be 
 drawn, in the excitement and prejudice of the con- 
 test, to arraign also its decisions. There could be 
 no small peril from any other creeds or confessions, 
 except those of the ancient church, or those which 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 27 
 
 had been accepted and established by the fathers 
 of New England. One class or the other must 
 have been felt as a burden, or feared as a tribunal 
 of appeal. The ancient creeds had been chiefly 
 framed in defence of the doctrine of the Trinity ; 
 the modern added the doctrines of election, re- 
 demption, and sanctification. From the latter, 
 especially, the appeal to the language and spirit of 
 the Scriptures was pushed by many divines who 
 disliked the Calvinistic view of election, and were 
 inclined to a general system of theology which 
 lacked the more repulsive features of Calvinism. 
 In a warfare like this, they could not despise the 
 aid of able allies ; there were able allies, whom 
 they themselves at first deemed dangerous; but 
 they soon learned the phrases, and ceased to shrink 
 from the peculiarities, of those who fought at their 
 side. Andrew EUot, in 1754, addressed to a min- 
 ister, in an ordination sermon, the following lan- 
 guage, which was repeated on a similar occasion 
 by Cook, of Sudbury : " As to the sublime and 
 mysterious doctrines of the gospel, the essence of 
 God, the manner of the divine substance, the de- 
 crees of God, predestination, election, reprobation, 
 the manner of the divine operation upon his crea- 
 tures, upon moral agents, and of the Spirit in the 
 conversion of a sinner, (which some delight to 
 dwell upon in their preaching,) they are the deep 
 things of God, which the Spirit of God alone can 
 search out ; and when you mention them, if you 
 are wise and have an humble sense of your own 
 weakness and ignorance, you will not be wise 
 
23 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 above what is written." In the spirit of such a 
 counsel, these loftier themes were touched by many 
 of the succeeding generation of preachers, only 
 through a repetition of the mere words of Scrip- 
 ture. But a practice so uncandid in its motive, 
 could not but be dishonorable in its issue. If the 
 doctrine of Calvin, or any of these theories, were 
 not believed ; if the Westminster Confession or 
 the Thirty-Nine Articles had uttered false or un- 
 certain statements ; it was easy, and it would have 
 been manly to have met them with direct denial, 
 sustained by open argument. But to throw a vast 
 mass of glorious truth entirely into obscurity, be- 
 cause its light had dazzled too much ; to forbid 
 the exercise of thought on the high things of holy 
 writ, even so far as to their expression in different 
 words ; could but end in all doubt and confusion. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 It was in 1756, that an edition of Emlyrl's 
 Humble Inquiry appeared at Boston. A direct, 
 elaborate, and weU known argument against the 
 deity of the Redeemer was launched abroad, at a 
 period when books were few, and when the printer 
 of such a book could not well have relied merely 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 29 
 
 on public curiosity for his reimbursement. The 
 enterprise was afterwards ascribed to Mayhew and 
 some of his frieinds, by those who believed it an 
 honor to his name ; and he has been styled the 
 first Unitarian preacher in America. When the 
 elder President Adams, in his old age, affirmed 
 that Unilarianism had been taught by some dis- 
 tinguished divines, as early as the middle of the 
 last century, and named amongst them Gay and 
 Mayhew, his wishes may have deceived bis mem- 
 ory in one instance as well as in the other ; for, in 
 1746, Gay had expressly named the Son " a divine 
 person, the mighty God," and the Spirit, a "person 
 of the Godhead." The testimony of the daughter 
 of Mayhew, who knew her father only in her child- 
 hood, is no more decisive. He was unknown to 
 Freeman, who describes him as an Anti- Trinita- 
 rian of the school of Clarke, and as allowing the 
 pre-existence of Christ, and the atonement. Flis 
 own writings, except a few daring passages, w^hich 
 rather disclose his temper than his doctrinal sys- 
 tetn, neither sustain nor repel the censure or the 
 eulogy, unless, indeed, they should be interpreted 
 by their silence. But that silence itself; the in- 
 fluence of his example ; and the manner of Chaun- 
 cy, who, in his funeral sermon, defends him with 
 vigor against the charge of rejecting the atonement, 
 while he speaks not a word of the charge by which 
 it had been, no doubt, accompanied, — all confirm 
 the conclusion that his mind was, at least, leaning 
 to the system of negation. He was not a timid 
 man ; and had he absolutely disavowed the ortho- 
 3 
 
30 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 dox belief, he might probably have avowed his 
 opinion ; but the very boldness of his mind, with the 
 aid of two or three lay friends who had advanced still 
 further, might have led him to indulge his oppo- 
 sition to the commandments of men, by circulating 
 a work that would throw over an established and 
 a mysterious doctrine some air of doubtfulness, 
 and therefore of unimportance. However it were, 
 the book was published, with a dedicatory letter 
 from "a layman," (G. T.,) to the clergy of all de- 
 nominations in New England, couched in the half- 
 respectful, half-ironical style of a daring but skilful 
 innovator. An answer was prepared by President 
 Burr, of Princeton ; and a sermon by Pemberton, 
 on the divinity of the Saviour, appeared, with a 
 preface bearing the signatures of Sewall, Foxcroft, 
 and Prince, and lamenting, without naming, the 
 recent republication, which had been " to the great 
 grief and offence," they said, "of many amongst 
 us." 
 
 The Convention sermon of Rand of Kingston, 
 in 1757, betrayed the spreading sentiment of 
 jealousy, lest any should exercise dominion over 
 the faith of a Christian, and was cool in its tone 
 and spirit; while that of 1758, by Townsend of 
 Needham, was practical, but indecisive in doctrine. 
 President Burr survived not long his answer to 
 Emelyn ; and Edwards was his successor, only to 
 be snatched away ; while the death of Prince, at 
 Boston, removed another of the honored pillars of 
 ancient orthodoxy. The publications of Mayhew 
 had already stirred up a sentiment of alarm, which 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 31 
 
 was, perhaps, greatest at a distance. Bellamy, one 
 of the ablest of the stricter Calvinists, after speak- 
 ing, in 1760, of the manner in which the Shorter 
 Catechism had been remodelled in New Hamp- 
 shire, " even to omit the Trinity," proceeds in this 
 strain : " Come from New Hampshire along to 
 Boston, and see there a celebrated doctor of di- 
 vinity, at the head of a large party ! He boldly 
 ridicules the doctrine of the Trinity, and denies the 
 doctrine of justification by faith alone, in the sight 
 of all the country, in his book of sermons." Per- 
 haps it was for this cause '- that the Convention 
 discourse of Parkman of Westborough, in 1761, 
 the theme of which was the constraining love of 
 Christ, closed with the ascription of glory to the 
 Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost ; an ascrip- 
 tion scarcely ever appended to the printed sermons 
 of that day. At the following Commencement, 
 too, the venerable John Barnard, almost at the age 
 of fourscore, poured forth a fervent exhortation to 
 the clergy, in which, when he told them that, de- 
 parting from the truth, they might cast " an un- 
 seemly sneer at the great doctrine of the true 
 divinity of Christ," none could mistake the allu- 
 sion to Mayhew. He himself, however, pursued 
 his own path ; and, in the next year, startled men 
 by a sermon on the divine goodness, which, while 
 it denied the possibility of any punishment, except 
 for the good of the offender or of others, certainly 
 urged the argument to a length and with an eager- 
 ness, which could not but shake all serious drea3 
 of future retribution. Still, when he was publicly 
 
32 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 charged by Cleaveland of Ipswich, with denying 
 its eternity, he turned upon his adversary with a 
 copious, and not wholly unmerited invective, and 
 called him to witness that he had employed the 
 very words of scripture, " eternal " and " ever- 
 lasting." 
 
 The son of Cotton Mather, who long after wrote 
 against the doctrine of a final and universal resto- 
 ration, Lowell of Newburyport, Prentice of Charles- 
 town, and Tucker of Newbury, were the next 
 preachers before the Convention. Tucker had just 
 been accused of heterodoxy by some of his pa- 
 rishioners ; and, indeed, when he spoke of being 
 "prepared, by a penitent return to duty, for the 
 pardoning mercy of God by Jesus Christ," he dis- 
 played no anxiety to shun the charge of attributing 
 even forgiveness rather to man and his return to 
 duty, which were to precede, than to the Mediator, 
 and that mercy through him which was to follow. 
 In 1766, Mayhew was removed in his prime ; 
 Cuming, who had succeeded Prince, had died yet 
 earlier in life ; the younger Checkley died also in 
 1768 ; Foxcroft and Sewall, within one fortnight, 
 in 1769, and before the end of the same year, the 
 elder Checkley. Except Mayhew, these had been 
 men of like mind and of the ancient school ; and 
 the more penetrating minds among the theologians 
 of New England looked not without anxiety for 
 the results of such vacancies. Hopkins of Great 
 Barrington, the acute founder of a system, had 
 arraigned the doctrines of Mayhew during his 
 lifetime, but had extorted no reply. He says, in 
 
HlStORT OF NEW ENGLAND. 33 
 
 1768, that he preached a sermon at the Old Sornth 
 Church, " under a convictioH that the doctrine of 
 the divinity «rf Christ was much neglected, if not 
 disbelieved, by a number of the ministers in Bos- 
 ton." The successor of Mayhew was Howard, 
 who trod gently in his steps, and against whom 
 Croswell publicly aimed the charge of Arianism. 
 The younger Cbeckley was succeeded by John 
 liathrop ; and two years after the death of Sewall, 
 two pastors. Bacon and Hunt, were settled over the 
 Old South Church, on the same day. Amongst 
 all the clergy of Boston, immediately before the 
 Revolution, there was not one commanding in- 
 tellect, except that which still glowed in the hoary 
 age of Channcy. 
 
 The public mind was overshadowed and agi- 
 tated by the tokens of the national struggle which 
 was approaching from afar. While the clergy 
 were more than enough enkindled with political 
 zeal, the people had little leisure for discussions of 
 less immediate urgency. A frost settled upon the 
 pulpit, except when a patriotic warmth had mount- 
 ed so high ; and the love of civil liberty even en- 
 couraged the habit of regarding forms of doctrine 
 as a hateful restraint. Almost all of the published 
 sermons of that day, indeed, acknowledge in some 
 manner the atonement ; and a very large proportion 
 of them contain language which not even a Semi- 
 Arian could utter. The sagacious West, the antag- 
 onist of Edwards and Hopkins, asks in 1764, how 
 any man " can imagine that he faithfully preaches 
 Christ, who very seldom in his discourses men- 
 3* 
 
34 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 tions his name ; and who never insists on the doc- 
 trine of the atonement, with which the New Testa- 
 ment so much abounds ? " Foster, of Stafford, in 
 1770, violently opposed the term, " total depravity," 
 and openly condemned Supralapsarians and Sub- 
 lapsarians alilie. Some years afterwards, he con- 
 tended that man is placed, by the gospel, under a 
 new and inferior law of obedience ; a doctrine 
 which drew an answer from Buckminster. But 
 Foster was still an explicit Trinitarian, and em- 
 ploys the most emphatic language to describe the 
 humiliation of the Saviour : " Behold the Ancient 
 of days, the Father of eternity, pursuant to the 
 divine counsel, leaving the realms of bliss and 
 everlasting day, and becoming an infant of a span 
 long for you! " Minds less confused than his, 
 refused, however, to bind themselves by any very 
 distinct statements of doctrines. President Locke 
 delivered, in 1772, one of the most dry, liberal, and 
 philosophical addresses, which was ever preceded 
 by a text ; and, speaking of our Lord as " coming 
 down, a ray of his Father's glory," he declared, 
 however, that " Christians were far from agreeing 
 how to settle the canon of fundamentals." This 
 example of Locke as a moral preacher, might have 
 been more persuasive, had he sustained the repu- 
 tation of a moral man, when, soon after, he with- 
 drew from the academic chair. Langdon, the 
 succeeding president, though once charged with 
 Arianism, yet always declared himself a Trini- 
 tarian, and was a Calvinist after the model of the 
 synod of Dort. 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 35 
 
 Morehead, of the Federal Street Church, died in 
 1773, and had no successor till after the Revolution. 
 Byles, of the Holiis Street Church, followed his 
 son, the rector of Christ Church, to the provinces 
 which observed their loyalty. In 1775, the dis- 
 mission of Bacon, and the death of Hunt, left the 
 Old South Church for several years without a 
 pastor. The Summer Street Church, too, was 
 vacant almost till the close of hostilities. Pember- 
 ton died also in 1777; and Eliot, who had re- 
 mained in Boston during the blockade, survived 
 him but a year. Wight was elected to the pulpit 
 of Byles ; Clarke became the colleague of Chaun- 
 cy ; Bckley, in 1779, was ordained- over the Old 
 South Church, which then worshipped in King's 
 Chapel ; and John Eliot very naturally succeeded 
 his father. During the war, the voice of religion, 
 however strong in private breasts, could not often 
 rise on the air above the thunders of battle. In 
 1785, the number of parishes in Boston was actu- 
 ally less than hedf a century before. The successor 
 of Cooper, in Brattle street, was Thacber, whose 
 fervid eloquence, while he was yet almost a boy, 
 had won the admiration of Whitefield. 
 
36 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 At the close of the Revolution, while the future 
 constitution of American society was yet unsettled, 
 no master-mind was active amongst the theolo- 
 gians of New England. The elder Edwards was 
 long since departed ; the younger never held the 
 sceptre of his father; Chauncy was sinking into 
 the grave; Dwight was still very young; Stiles 
 lavished considerable strength on a heterogeneous 
 multitude of topics ; and if Hopkins and Bellamy 
 still swayed a rising and an extensive school, it 
 was probably more through the absence of other 
 leaders, than through the felicity of their own pow- 
 ers or system. At such a time it was that an 
 Unitarian congregation was first known in Amer- 
 ica. The war, dispersing the officers of the British 
 government, had left but a handful of the worshippers 
 at King's Chapel. After it had been closed for 
 some time, it was for five years lent to the Old 
 South congregation, banished as they were from 
 their desecrated edifice. Its ministers, who had 
 fled, returned no more ; and though an Episcopal 
 Church, it was, of course, without episcopal super- 
 vision. Seven years of confusion had gone by, 
 yrhen the remnant of the people, increased by some 
 accessions of such as had purchased pews of late, 
 but were not familiar with the system of the Eng- 
 lish Church, fixed their eyes upon James Freeman, 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 37 
 
 a student of much promise, and employed him to 
 read the liturgy. He was attached to the ritual, 
 but had yet to frame his theological opinions. He 
 gave himself to the current of free investigation; 
 and no ecclesiastical authority restrained his pro- 
 gress, or menaced him with public annoyance. 
 Some changes in the Common Prayer were re- 
 quired by the change in political relations ; and, 
 after a time, Freeman avowed his wish to changej 
 with these, those parts in which the Trinity was 
 acknowledged. Although his manner was bad, he 
 had taste and talent, and great frankness of char- 
 acter, and had acquired the tegard of the congre- 
 gation. If Clarke be iexcepted, he was prbbably 
 the ablest man who then occupied the desk in 
 Boston. Doubts like his own had been at least 
 encouraged by Chauncy and Mayhew ; it was, in 
 the judgment of many, one of those questions " of 
 the manner of the divine substance," which, like 
 Andrew Eliot, most of the Congregational clergy 
 of the capital seemed willing to destine to a dis- 
 creet silence ; for Freeman was ready, with them, 
 to employ all the words and phrases of Scripture. 
 By a vote of twenty to seven, the proprietors of the 
 chapel adopted the ritual with his proposed altera- 
 tions. He asked in vain for orders from the new 
 bishops of the United States; and in 1787, the 
 wardens proceeded deliberately, and with a kind 
 of laying on of hands to a kind of ordination, 
 against which seventeen protested. From this 
 time, Unitarianism became a substantial reality in 
 Boston. 
 
38 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 In the same year, Chauncy had departed ; and 
 Belknap had been installed over the Federal Street 
 Church. Wight was dismissed in 1788, and West 
 was his successor. In 1790, extracts from the 
 book of Emlyn were republished at Boston ; and 
 Alexander, of Mendon, prepared an elaborate an- 
 swer. At this period, most of the sermons and 
 charges at ordinations comprised some allusion to 
 the Trinity, to the divinity of Christ, or at least to 
 the atonement and to eternal retribution. But the 
 Hopkinsian theologians, at whose head Emmons 
 of Franklin, with his clear pen, was now taking 
 his place, had so remoulded the system of Calvin, 
 that while they seemed to themselves to glide over 
 its harshness, they tenibly shocked the religious 
 sensibilities of mankind. With whatever satisfac- 
 tion the calm student in their metaphysical divinity 
 might contemplate some of its lucid outlines, it 
 could not supplant, in the pulpit and in private 
 discourse, the living glow of scriptural appeal and 
 instruction, without swelling, far and wide, the 
 popular disgust which would one day become a 
 formidable and almost irreconcilable foe. Men 
 could not hear with complacency, instead of the 
 gospel, discussions of the questions, whether the 
 Almighty was not the author of sin ; whether a 
 saint could not so far submit his own will to the 
 divine will as to consent to lose his own soul; 
 whether any promise was given to the prayers of the 
 unregenerate. The very discussion of such themes, 
 which were older than the Hopkinsians, distracted 
 many a community that would gladly have lis- 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 39 
 
 tened to the most solemn truths of the Bible, and 
 heaped up, almost everywhere, a mass of prejudice, 
 which " bode its time." 
 
 But the clergy of Boston, and many of their re- 
 moter brethren, presented no such repulsive doc- 
 trine. Fifty years were now complete since the 
 first visit of Wbitefield ; and could another White- 
 field have passed that way, not only his burning 
 eloquence and unrestrained zeal, but the very 
 themes of which he loved to speak, would have 
 come upon the startled congregations like a tem- 
 pest upon some calm lalie, with its glassy expanse. 
 The same towers and spires, indeed, still looked 
 down upon the generation of republicans, which 
 had looked down upon the squadrons that watched 
 a province. Only the churches in Brattle street 
 and Hollis street had been rebuilt; and while one 
 or two congregations had ceased to exist, the chapel 
 once built for the worship of the peculiar servants 
 of royalty, had been ranged with the tabernacles of 
 the Puritans. But a Whitefield had now found 
 no Foxcroft, or Gee, or Colman, or Sewall, or 
 Prince ; and scarcely even the doctrine, with the 
 hostility, of Chauncy. How much, indeed, the 
 system of their fathers had yielded to a riper 
 knowledge of the Scriptures, to the freer march of 
 reason, to the caprice of innovation, or to the neu- 
 tralizing deadness of the spirit of doubt, no eye 
 could discover. It was a process of which the ex- 
 tent was known only in private circles or private 
 bosoms. The pulpit taught chiefly those general 
 lessons of upright practice, founded upon those 
 
40 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 general truths of natural religion, and those gen^ 
 eral facts of the evangelical history, which had 
 never been questioned by any who bore the Chris- 
 tian name, and which alone had been heard from 
 so many divines of the English Church, during so 
 much of tha;t century. But the minister of the 
 English Church had still read a liturgy, which 
 distinctly announced to the people the doctrines 
 from which, as an honest man, he could not in the 
 theory have departed, without forsaking his office. 
 The only liturgical form which could fasten such 
 a restraint on the liberal ministers of New Eng- 
 land, was the doxology at the close of the service ; 
 and this was so inconsiderable a part, that the 
 custom might .easily cease without notice, and 
 even without motive, through an accidental omis- 
 sion, which might grow into an usage, or through 
 the mere taste of the musical performers. In 
 prayers, he but uttered his own language ; in 
 preaching, he chose his own topics ; he disclaimed 
 and disdained the shackles of uninspired forms of 
 doctrine; and, sustained by a widespread^ ardor 
 for liberty of conscience, he declined meeting the 
 cross-examination of the obtrusive. For the charge 
 of heresy, though it were true, he had furnished no 
 foundation ;, and he had furnished as little for the 
 praise of orthodoxy. If, now and then, some 
 bolder expression startled the ear of a watchful 
 sentinel, and spread for a moment an alarm or a 
 suspicion of treason, in the next hour the broad 
 banner of the Scriptures was unfurled, the words 
 of the Scriptures were proclaimed abroad; and 
 
HISTORY OF NEW KNGLAND. 41 
 
 who could ask for more ? Even now, it is pos- 
 sible that the theology of those divines r&ay be 
 misinterpreted ; but if it should b^j they but pay 
 the penalty of a position so close, so cautious, and 
 so indecisive. 
 
 As early as 1789, i<'reeman, whose attitude gave 
 boldness to the doubts of Others, could say in a 
 letter to Belsham, the English leader of Soeinian- 
 ism, that there were " many churches in which thfe 
 worship was strictly Unitarian*" The community 
 and the clergy felt that the opposite doctrine was 
 shaken ; but where; how far, in what ininds, and 
 in what congregations, could only be determined 
 by observing atfeurately silence as well as language. 
 " Individuals, both clergyineii' and laymen," says 
 one of their advocates, " were satisfied With the 
 discreet enjoyment of their opinions, while they 
 were not called to profess any thing contrary to 
 them ; " and there was not one of the ministers of 
 Boston, who had the firmness of heart and the 
 distinctness of faith. Which might have urged him, 
 as a friend or foe to change, to hasten its devel- 
 opement. The oldest pastor, Howard, went down 
 into the vale of years " neither a Calvinist," said 
 Freeman, " nor a Trinitarian." Lathrop spofce 
 with significance wheii he said, " the Sayings of 
 the prophets and of the apostles, and especially of 
 Jesus, demand assent ; but not the sayings of 
 Calvin or ArminiUs, nor of Saiilt Athanasius." 
 Eckley was earnest in heart, but of a mild and 
 tolerant temper ; and, while he held thei other doc- 
 trines of the ancient system, hesitated to afUxitt ihe 
 4 
 
42 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 absolute equality of the Son with the Father. The 
 yielding, if not contradictory words of Thacher 
 were like the courtesy of Glaucus to Diomed ; an 
 exchange of the golden armor of revealed doctrine 
 for the brazen shield and helmet of accidental 
 opinion. " For myself," said he, " I can say that 
 I believe the true and proper divinity of Jesus 
 Christ ; the awful depravity of human nature ; the 
 necessity of regeneration and of the agency of the 
 Divine Spirit in effecting the change ; the insuffi- 
 ciency of our own works to justify us in the sight 
 of God ; our acceptance with him only on account 
 of the merits and atonement of the Son of God ; 
 the necessity of holiness in heart and life, in order 
 to fit us for heaven ; and the utter futility of the 
 hope that, in the future state, we shall have the 
 opportunity of rectifying the mistakes as to our own 
 religious character, which we make in the present. 
 I could easily declare these, I say, to be doctrines 
 which I esteem to be clearly revealed in the word 
 of God, and necessary to be plainly preached by 
 any minister who wishes to do his duty ; but great 
 and good men, men much greater and better than 
 I am, have materially differed from me in their 
 ideas upon these subjects." Well might the cause 
 of orthodoxy exclaim, while it was thus modestly 
 upheld for himself, and abandoned for mankind, 
 
 "Non tali auxilio, nee defensoribus istis! " 
 
 Although it was said of Eliot, that in his youth, 
 when he was invited to become assistant to the 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 43 
 
 Rector at Halifax, he " fully approved the doctrines 
 and -views of the Episcopalians," and after his 
 death, that he " was far from considering ail opin- 
 ions concerning the mysteries of Christianity alike 
 innocent or safe," and was " remote from each of 
 the extremes in systematic theology ; " yet this 
 was said when one of these extremes had been 
 wonderfully removed, in the community in which 
 -he lived, beyond that negative sphere, where shone 
 his favorite authors, " Erasmus, Le Clerc, and es- 
 pecially Jortin." Clarke was a man of elegant 
 powers and close study. His publications afford 
 no token of his belief, beyond the most elementary 
 doctrines ; but he was viewed as the head of a 
 party which was moving steadfastly though quietly 
 onward. Everett was less eminent, but espoused 
 the latitudinarian side ; emd in 1792 retired to sec- 
 ular occupations. West had been educated in 
 Calvinism ; but it is said that in his later years he 
 was not entirely the same ; and the changes of tha,t 
 day were mostly in one direction. Belknap had 
 published in 1779, when he was minister of Dover, 
 a sermon, in which he spoke of the Saviour as 
 " that glorious and exalted being, who was in the 
 form of God, who was in the beginning with God, 
 and (by virtue of the most perfect and intimate union 
 of the WHOLE Deity to him) was God ; " and of his 
 pre-existent state as " a state of entire union with 
 God, and perfect happiness resulting therefrom ; " 
 but when in 1792, the sermon was republished at 
 Boston for general circulation, these latter words, 
 and those in parenthesis, were omitted. 
 
44 PAGES FHOM THE EOGLESIASTICAI^ 
 
 It would be very unjust to suppose that Unita- 
 lianism, as a distinct form of belief or negation, 
 was held and concealed by a large company of 
 the pastors of Boston and of Massac^Jiusetts. They 
 were within the region where the atmosphere of 
 doubt hung thick and heavy. So often had they 
 assured themselves and mankind that good men 
 might differ, and that freedom of thought must not 
 be fettered, as at length to have lost the sense of 
 the perfect, absolute certainty of any interpretation 
 or of any troth dedared by such interpretation. 
 But if it were not certain, it would not be infinitely 
 important ; and thus, that which in all ages had 
 been deemed the foundation of Christian faith and 
 hope, was left in doubt and dimness, to the mere 
 chances of a popular opinion, from which the ap- 
 pointed guides withheld its due instruction. Had 
 there but been a class of divines, nay, had there 
 been but one high, earnest and eloquent mind, that, 
 ^hile estranged from the metaphysics of Edwards 
 and HopJcins, and careless of Calvinism, " the 
 name and the thing " alike, had firmly upheld and 
 fervently preached the doctrines which all Christen- 
 dom honored ; nay, had even a Dwight, w^ithout 
 his magisterial mien, been found amongst the 
 clergy of Massachusetts, the wave of innovation 
 might probably have ebbed into its accustomed 
 channel; the spirit of doubt might have departed 
 with its mists ] and the rock of revelation might 
 have been seen and felt, as unshaken as ever. 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 45 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 In the Convention sermon of 1793, Barnard, of 
 Salem, admitted a difference amongst the clergy. 
 Coldly and calmly, he required that no condemna- 
 tion should be pronounced ; and, as if to throw off 
 from all a possible imputation of assenting to So- 
 cinianism, he ventured to introduce the Redeemer 
 as speaking, and as saying, " I left the high honors 
 and enjoyments of my Father's presence." But 
 upon the shores of Plymouth, Robbins still preach- 
 ed the ancestral faith ; and when he was called, in 
 1794, to stand before his brethren, he determined 
 not to descend to the grave, without having lifted 
 on high the banner which the Pilgrims had trans- 
 mitted to his hands. He spoke, though not too 
 boldly, of depravity, of the atonement, and of 
 Christ, " in the most unequivocal sense, the true 
 God and eternal life." It was in that year that 
 Priestley landed in America ; but he came not to 
 Boston, and his presence would scarcely have been 
 desired by a single pastor ; for his daring frankness 
 and his extreme opinions might easily have been 
 fatal to the gentle harmony which, at whatever 
 price, all seemed most studious to preserve. It 
 was in the same year that Kirkland was ordained 
 over the Summer-street Church ; and his father, a 
 venerable missionary, thus charged him in the 
 
 presence of the people, in words which may often 
 4* 
 
46 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL. 
 
 have rung in bis' ear : " O never rob him of bis 
 glory, who is God-man, Mediator ; never deny the 
 Lord who bath bou,gbt you!" 
 
 A Httle while after the arrival of Priestley, Free- 
 man wrote to Belsbam, that he was " acquainted 
 with a number of ministers, particularly in the 
 southern part of Massachusetts, who avowed and 
 publicly preached the Unitarian doctrine ; " while 
 others, "more cautious, contented themselves with 
 leading their hearers, by a course of rational and 
 prudent sermons, gradually and insensibly, to em- 
 brace it." " The people," he added, though he did 
 not quite approve this method, were " kept out of 
 the reach of false opinions, and prepared for the 
 impressions which would be made on them by 
 more bold and ardent successors, who would prob- 
 ably be raised up when these timid characters were 
 removed oif the stage." So sagacious a prophet 
 was doubtless an accurate, even if a sanguine, 
 observer. 
 
 Belknap, in the Convention sermon of 1796, 
 still speaks of " the Holy Spirit, with his powerful 
 influence ; " an expression, however, which some- 
 times appears in the discourses of those who can 
 hardly have believed the distinct personality of the 
 Comforter. He " silently adores," too, " that tre- 
 mendous justice which suffers so many unhappy 
 souls to plunge themselves into the misery of the 
 future world." In 1797, Tappan delivered the 
 discourse ; who, five years before, had succeeded 
 Wigglesworth, in the Divinity Professorship at 
 Cambdidge, and who, to clearness of thought and 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 47 
 
 eloquence of style, added the fervor of a pions 
 heart, and the steadfastness of a faith that saw in 
 the " proper divinity of Jesus Christ, the rock of his 
 eternal life." A few weeks before the meeting of 
 
 1798, Clarke, in the midst of a sermon on " the 
 Holy One who inhabiteth the praises of Israel," 
 dropped down, smitten with fatal apoplexy. He 
 was but forty-two ; and the " unfeigned piety and 
 active goodness" of bis life were commemorated 
 in the Convention sermon by Osgood, of Medford, 
 a divine who adhered to the orthodox creed, but 
 with determined mildness. A few weeks after, 
 Belknap, whose historical labors adorned his coun- 
 try, and whose published discourses have a correct 
 and solemn tone, was struck down by a blow al- 
 most as sudden. Tn the Convention sermon of 
 
 1799, a warm tribute to his memory was paid by 
 the aged Forbes, of Gloucester, who, while he dis- 
 played an aversion to other forms of doctrine than 
 the Scriptures, and a desire to divest religious truth 
 of mystery, yet alluded to " the divine, the human, 
 and the mediatorial character " of One, " in whom 
 alone these characters could be united." 
 
 From time to time, some voice was heard, utter- 
 ing what many feared, or hesitated, to believe. 
 Single ministers called out, to admonish all of the 
 rapid current, which, without a breath of air, was 
 wafting them away. Leonard Worcester, a printer 
 of Worcester, who had vainly attempted to lead 
 Bancroft into a controversy on doctrine, was not 
 afraid to say in 1795, that '' Socianianism or Arian- 
 ism had, very extensively if not very generally, 
 
48 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 taken the place of Arminianism." Much, indeed, 
 of the Arminianism of the times had left so poor a 
 station in its system for the office of a Redeemer, 
 that the mind ihus prepared, might easily start with 
 wonder at the dazzling majesty with which the 
 common doctrine invested his person. But when 
 Emerson, in 1799, succeeded Clarke at the oldest 
 church in Boston, the advanced guard of innova- 
 tion was pushed forward. Emerson was a pleas- 
 ing writer, and filled his station gracefully; but 
 his mind was prepared distinctly to decry and de- 
 ride the Trinitarian theology, and his rhetoric 
 seems scarcely to have touched, as it skimmed 
 along, the surface of revelation. The Convention 
 sermon of 1800 was by Lathrop, of Boston, the 
 constant champion of freedom from formulas of 
 faith. That of 1801, by Dana, of Newburyport, 
 was unequivocally orthodox. Almost the last of 
 the " charming accents " of Thacher, were heard 
 in that of 1802 ; for in a few months, he hastened 
 to a milder sky, and sank into the grave. 
 
 After the pulpit of Belknap had been filled for 
 three years by Popkin, afterwards the Greek Pro- 
 fessor at Cambridge, the year 1803 was marked by 
 the settlement, in their stead, of William EUery 
 Channing. The Federal-street parish was then 
 small; but the thoughtful, fervid eloquence of the 
 preacher soon drew an admiring and devoled as- 
 sembly. With a delicate frame and an unpleasing 
 countenance, he spoke in subdued tones and in 
 short sentences, that singularly blended simplicity 
 and animation. Meditative habits of mind had 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 49 
 
 nourished his aspirations for thehappiness of man ; 
 and consciousness of strength breathed boldness 
 into his high argument. He began his brilliant 
 career, the pupil of that undefined Christianity 
 which then reigned around him ; " abstaining," as 
 he afterwards said, " most scrupulously from every 
 expression which could be construed into an ac- 
 knowledgment of the Trinity." But such was the 
 unaccustomed glow of the doctrines which he 
 could proclaim, when they came from his lips, that 
 some of the youngoj., and more zealous hearers of 
 Eckley, who was, at that time, perhaps, the most 
 orthodox of the Boston clergy, withdrew to Fed- 
 eral-street, imagining that the faith of their ances- 
 tors was rising frpm its slumbers. In the begin- 
 ning of 1S05, too, at the age of twenty-one, 
 Buekminster was ordained as the successor of 
 Thacher. His father, the excellent minister of 
 Portsmouth, was a devout Calvinist ; and could 
 not but remind him, when he preached at his or- 
 dination, though but in a passing allusion, bow he 
 had " presented him at the baptismal font, and 
 washed him in the name of the sacred Trinity." 
 The son, whose whole ministry was accomplished 
 before the age at which many men have just com- 
 pleted their preparation, gave himself to the breeze 
 which bore on his elder brethren of all the churches 
 of Boston, in such a tranquil harmony. All that 
 was extraordinary-in his powers, and all that was 
 beautiful in his life, was added to the dawning 
 beams of that day of supposed illumination which 
 was ready to brealc, but still lingered, on the moun- 
 tains. 
 
50 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 For, in the meanwhile, Tappan, the honored 
 Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, had died in 
 peace. The Professorship remained for two years 
 unoccupied ; and reflecting men perceived that the 
 hour of conflict was certainly approaching. Hollis, 
 the founder, a London merchant, had given a par- 
 tial endowment for the support of a Professor "of 
 sound, orthodox principles ; " and was himself at 
 once a Calvinist, a Baptist, and the friend of a 
 large religious liberty. Of the five Fellows of the 
 College, three were ministers; Lathrop, Pearson 
 and Eliot. The choice fell upon Ware, of Hing- 
 ham, a divine of great respectability of character, 
 but of very moderate powers, and distinguished 
 chiefly by his supposed and undisclaimed Unita- 
 rianism. The right to examine him on his doc- 
 trines, however, was denied ; and these, when he 
 was questioned by a member of the Senate, were 
 not distinctly disclosed. Indignation could no 
 longer be restrained ; Pearson retired from his 
 Professorship; and Spring, of Newburyport, at 
 once published two sermons on the self-existence 
 of Christ ; in which he openly and directly assailed 
 this appointment, as a violation of a sacred trust, 
 and a most perilous triumph of heresy. He did 
 not exaggerate its importance. From that day, 
 the continuance of union among the churches of 
 the Puritans was really impossible ; and those who 
 would not at once cast themselves upon the sea of 
 strife saw the waves mounting higher and higher 
 with every year, till the narrow ground on which 
 they stood was abandoned or overwhelmed. 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 51 
 
 It was indeed wonderful that, by a kind of con- 
 sent, the gathering storm should gather so silently. 
 But in truth the parties themselves were unpre- 
 pared for acts of decision, which must estrange 
 parish from parish, neighbor from neighbor, shake 
 the whole system of the commonwealth to its foun- 
 dations, rend many communities asunder, and 
 bring into families and into individual hearts a 
 boundless distress. To pause was natural, and 
 was merciful ; even though to proceed might have 
 been martyrdom for principles. Besides, the lib- 
 eral divines by no means knew the strength with 
 which they could stand together, should a separa- 
 tion be hastened. Few of them, probably, had 
 embraced the Socinian doctrine; and these might 
 have dreaded that a wider gulf would be found 
 between themselves and the Arians or Semi-arians, 
 than between these and the orthodox. Had the 
 contest been brought to an issue on the ground of 
 the atonement, it might have ended in an utler 
 overthrow of the innovating party. They were 
 content to proceed without an open struggle ; 
 trusting much to time and to the progress of the 
 mind, unincumbered by authority. On the other 
 side, the orthodox were somewhat divided by the 
 metaphysical differences between the main body 
 of the older Calvinists and the detachment that 
 followed Hopkins. Soniie of them, too, like Lath- 
 rop of West Springfield, now for half a century- 
 the grave, and sensible minister of one parish, could 
 not well bear the prospect of a deadly schism be- 
 tween churches which had stood side by side from 
 
52 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 the first settlement of the country. Even amongst 
 the orthodox, the jealousy against authoritative de- 
 termination in doctrine was somewhat excessive 
 and morbid. They were not without hope that 
 the steps of some of their brethren might yet be 
 be retraced. They had not the experience of the 
 succeeding generation. Some of them were prob- 
 ably in a state of indecision on one or another 
 question which might become the test ; so that a 
 wide controversy might throw their own ranks into 
 an unhappy confusion. Such also had been the 
 pruHence of their adversaries, that exposed and 
 prominent points of attack were not numerous: 
 it was a perilous thing to be unable to sustain a 
 serious charge, after it should once have been ad- 
 vanced at the public bar; and, if prejudice were 
 once thus driven to the side of error, the mischief 
 must be far more disastrous. With mingled hopes 
 and fears, they remained almost silent ; but on 
 both sides, every preparation went on. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 The great works of Horsley and Magee had 
 expelled from the English Church most of the 
 remnants of that doubting temper which had once 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 53 
 
 sprung into visible existence. These works had 
 crossed the sea, as soon, at least, as the Unitarian 
 volumes which were presented to public libraries, 
 and they had aided to sharpen the zeal and stir the 
 suspicions of those who knew how much was now 
 at hazard. Not a single book had yet been written 
 against the Trinitarian doctrine, by any American 
 pen, except the treatise on the atonement, pub- 
 lished in 1803, by Ballou, the Universalist leader. 
 The minister of Mansfield in Connecticut, whose 
 name was Sherman, now published his disbelief 
 in the Trinity ; and was deposed by his brethren. 
 Such tidings could not but enkindle still more the 
 suppressed indignation of such a man as Emerson ; 
 who, at the head of the oldest church in the capital 
 of New England, knew well that he was open to a 
 censure as stern from any ecclesiastical body which 
 should Tepresent the hereditary theology* A pe- 
 riodical publication, called the Monthly Anthology, 
 was at that period just commenced, and chiefly 
 under his charge ; and though it was dedicated to 
 literature, its occasional blows at orthodoxy and its 
 habitual praises of religious liberality, were not the 
 less effective. On the death of Howard, his post 
 was supplied by Lowell. The Convention sermon 
 of 1806 was preached by Lyman, of Hatfield, who, 
 on the Connecticut, upheld with vigor an unyield- 
 ing Calvinism, and who now,befote the-assembled 
 .clergy, dared to speak of " total depravity," and of 
 Christ, "essentially God, and equal with the'Fath- 
 er." An orthodox magazine, the Panoplist, arose, 
 and for many years did faithful service to the cause 
 
 
54 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 of its founders. It would seem that the sermon of 
 Lyman had been resented ; for the next preacher, 
 Reed, of Bridgewater, for some time a member of 
 Congress, devoted his whole discourse to a heart- 
 less inculcation of indifference to doctrine ; cen- 
 suring, in the common language of the day, the 
 practice of " anathematizing others on account of 
 their religious opinions ; " while he denounced 
 such " censorious persons " as persecutors ; and 
 eoforced that maxim, so happily prepared to 
 equalize all truth and falsehood, and make the 
 reign of doubt perpetual — that "we should re- 
 member that we differ from our adversary as much 
 as he differs from us." 
 
 Willard, the President of Harvard College, a 
 man of moderate, probably of moderately ortho- 
 dox, opinions, died before the election of Ware to 
 the Divinity Professorship. His successor, Web- 
 ber, a mathematician, had those views which Ware 
 could name " liberal and enlightened ; " and dur- 
 ing his presidency of six years he relinquished the 
 theological influence of the institution to his more 
 decided and zealous associate. But a mightier 
 influence was arising in an Essex village. Almost 
 at the same moment, magnificent schemes of boun- 
 ty to the Church of Christ were formed in the bo- 
 soms of several persons of great wealth, in New- 
 buryport and the neighboring region. A few 
 eminent clergymen, of decided Calvinism, Dana, 
 Spring, Morse, Pearson, and Woods, were their 
 counsellors ; and their designs at length centred in 
 the foundation of the Theological Seminary at 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND, 55 
 
 Andover, with a princely endowment, for which 
 the names of Bartlett, Brown, and Phillips will be 
 honored with those of Wykeham and the " Lady 
 Margaret." It sprung into flourishing life at its 
 very birth ; and the muflled step of the innovating 
 bands felt itself compelled to halt, as if it had 
 stumbled all at once on the unseen outposts of a 
 strong battalion. 
 
 There were several landmarks, whose appear- 
 ance continually suggested the true position of the 
 parties. The creed or covenant of a Congrega- 
 tional church may be changed by itself, without 
 counsel or publication ; and sometimes the older 
 covenants had been so rigidly Calvinistic, that some 
 change might have been approved by all consider- 
 ate Christians. But when the clergy met in coun- 
 cils, to assist in the ordination of a brother, the 
 examination of his failh, which custom had sanc- 
 tioned and conscience might require, was often 
 discarded as an encroachment on his freedom of 
 doctrine and that of the people by whom he had 
 been elected. The exchange of pulpits brought 
 the same topics home, with the same earnestness, 
 to the heart of the sincere believer in a revealed 
 system of doctrine. To demand such intercourse, 
 without offering any other assurance of a Christian 
 faith than the general declaration of belief in the 
 Scriptures, was a claim which could never have 
 been made, except by innovators who dreaded too 
 early an exposure ; and could never be granted, 
 except under an almost desperate determination to 
 sacrifice all for peace. It was not granted ; but 
 
56 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 was the occasion of much strife for years. Still 
 the parties met and mingled at the summons of 
 other churches, with which their own had held he- 
 reditary alliance. When, after a struggle, the 
 choice of the Old South parish fell upon the mild 
 and conciliating Huntington, to be the associate of 
 the roild and conciliating Eckley, and the Church 
 was recovered or preserved for the doctrines of its 
 fathers, Lathrop, Channing and Lowell, all pub- 
 licly united in the act of ordination. On the death 
 of West, HoUey, a brilliant orator, was installed 
 over the HoUis-street Church, and Eckley preached 
 the sermon. The second Church in Dorchester 
 invited Codman, a young clergyman of very re- 
 spectable connexions and independent fortune in 
 Boston, to become their pastor. Conscious of the 
 nature of a ground which might soon crumble be- 
 neath his feet, he said that, " as Arian and Socin- 
 ian settlements had of late years crept into some 
 of our churches, he thought it his duty to declare 
 that he believed the Father, Son and Holy Ghost 
 to be the one living and true God," and asked that 
 the Psalms and Hymns of Watts might be restored, 
 instead of a collection which excluded the doxolo- 
 gies,. and contained expressions derogatory to the 
 Trinity. His conditions were accepted ; and with 
 this advantage he assumed a post at which he 
 could stand for the defence of his brethren. At his 
 ordination, he presented to the council an orthodox 
 confession of his faith; while the sermon was 
 preached by Channing, and Buckminster, Eckley, 
 Osgood, Harris and Lowell performed the other 
 portions of the service. 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 57 
 
 In the Convention sermon of 1808, Chaplin, of 
 Groton, preached " the Trinity in the Unity of the 
 Godhead." But an important movement was now 
 added, by the introduction of collections of hymns 
 at the First Church and the Church in Brattle- 
 street, prepared by Emerson and Buckminster. 
 The collection of Belknap had superseded the 
 Psalms and Hymns of Watts in the Boston 
 churches ; but it still acknowledged doctrines 
 which were heard no more from the pulpits. With 
 an unsparing hand, at whatever cost of taste or 
 sense, the sacrificial atonement, the deity of the 
 Redeemer, the personality of the Spirit, and the 
 more solemn allusions to future retribution, were 
 stricken from the new collection. The Panoplist 
 called on Emerson, it called on Buckminster, it 
 called on all the liberal divines, if they disbelieved 
 the doctrine of the Trinity, to oppose to it an open 
 denial. Its call was unanswered, or answered 
 with the reproach of uncharitableness. But within 
 the space of one or two years after the year 1808, 
 more Unitarian publications appeared than during 
 the whole previous period since the settlement of 
 New England. Even the venerable and forbear- 
 ing Lathrop, of West Springfield, was so much 
 moved that he pronounced " those who acknowl- 
 edge Christ as a teacher, but deny him as a Re- 
 deemer sent to deliver us from punishment by his 
 death," to be "justly ranked among those who 
 bring in damnable heresies." A few men of zeal 
 and of wealth determined to fix one more rallying 
 point for the strength of Orthodoxy in Boston, 
 5* 
 
68 
 
 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 where the Congregational churches were still less 
 numerous than when the population was feebler. 
 They organized, in 1809, the church in Park- 
 street ; and its tall spire soon rose in the heart of 
 the city, to tell the commonwealth that innovation 
 was to have no undisputed triumph in its capital. 
 Gary, the assistant of Freeman, in his first ser- 
 mon, suggesting the possibility that some might 
 ask his " speculative " opinions, declared that they 
 were " really of too little consequence " to be men- 
 tioned at such a moment of harmony. The Im- 
 proved New Testament) a gross attempt of some 
 English Socinians, was republished at Boston in 
 1809, probably under the patronage of Emerson ; 
 but discretion shrunk from espousing its intro- 
 duction. Spring, of Newburyport, preached the 
 Convention sermon. In the very midst of a throng 
 of apprehensions, the orthodox Congregationists 
 looked up to the eternal hills ; consecrated them- 
 selves, as it were, anew ; and founded, for the 
 universal propagation of the gospel, the American 
 Board of Foreign Missions. Two ministers of 
 New Hampshire, in the mean time, Thomas and 
 Noah Worcester, pushed before the community a 
 theory of their own. It appeared in several ser- 
 mons and pamphlets ; especially in one which had 
 the appropriate title of " Bible News." It taught 
 that the Saviour was the Son of God in the same 
 sense throughout in which men are the sons of 
 their fathers ; was constituted the Creator ; and is 
 the object of divine honors; but that the unity of 
 the Father is still absolute and supreme. With a 
 
HISTOEY OF ffEW ENpLAND. 59 
 
 doctrine like this, Noah Worcester, one f>i those 
 men whose abilities are just sufficient to produce 
 results which they neither design nor comprehend, 
 shook the faith of one of his eontempors^es ; pre- 
 pared the march of stronger and bolder thinkers ; 
 and then, year after year, bewailed the obduracy of 
 those who would not tranquilly extend to liim the 
 hand of fraternal fellowship. On the other side, 
 Abiel Abbot, minister of Coventry, in Connecticut, 
 had been observed by some of his hearers to omit 
 all mention of the divinity and atonement of Christ, 
 except in the language of Ihe Scriptures; and 
 when he had been questioned, had at .length 
 avowed his disbelief. After sorne delay, he was 
 displaced through the action of the neighboring 
 clergy ; and the General Association of Connec- 
 ticut published their opinion, that no clergyman 
 ought to exchange ministerial Ijabors with any man 
 claiming to be a minister of Christ, and denying 
 his divinity. Abbot was of Massachnsetts, and 
 his friends and counsellors were there; so that 
 his rejection was the theme of much and severe 
 comment. 
 
 But the Park-street meeting-house having been 
 opened at the beginning of 1810, wdth the avowal 
 of those principles which, a year after, began to 
 be proclaimed by the impassioned and sometimes 
 incautious eloquence of Griffin,, a very bold man, 
 placed himself in the front of the liberal party for a 
 moment, to perform an act of ^signal hardihood. 
 This was Porter, of Roxbury, the son of a minister 
 who had declared, when Whitefield hEjd Ipst his 
 
60 PAGES FEOM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 first renown, that he could never cease to honor 
 and bless him, since, through his words, he him- 
 self, although before a Christian preacher, had 
 been drawn to the true waters of salvation. The son 
 was appointed to preach the Convention sermon 
 of 1810 ; and he put the trumpet to his mouth, 
 and blew a blast of defiance, which startled many 
 an eye from its slumbers. His theme was " Chris- 
 tian Simplicity," and its exposure to injury. After 
 naming various doctrines, amonst which were 
 " Original Sin, a Trinity in Unity, the mere Hu- 
 manity, super-angelic Nature or absolute Deity of 
 Christ, and the absolute Eternity of Punishment," 
 be proceeded in this language : " My individual 
 belief in respect to the truth or error of these points, 
 can be of but little importance, and my subject no 
 way requires that it should be given. It rather 
 becomes me to follow the example which has been 
 sometimes set by learned judges on the bench, 
 when difficult questions suggested themselves, but 
 whose decision the main subject before them did 
 not require, and prudently say, ' Neque leneo, neque 
 refelh! But it is pertinent to the object of this 
 discourse, and consonant to my serious and 
 deliberate conviction, to observe, that I cannot 
 place my finger on any one article in the list of 
 doctrines just mentioned, the belief or rejection of 
 which I consider as essential to the Christian faith 
 or character. I believe that an innumerable com- 
 pany of Christians, who never heard of these arti- 
 cles, or who were divided in their opinion respect- 
 ing them, have fallen asleep in Jesus ; and that 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 61 
 
 innumerable persons of the same description are 
 following after." So deliberate an utterance of so 
 boundless an indifference was more welcome, per- 
 haps, to his opponents, than to many of his asso- 
 ciates. The Panoplist declared that " no man who 
 opened his eyes on the actual state of things, 
 doubted the efforts by a few in the heart of New 
 England to establish and extend Socinian views." 
 Pwight did not hesitate to say of Boston in ISIO, 
 that " Unitarianism seemed to be the predominating 
 system." It was distinctly lifted to the highest 
 place of dignity, when in that year, on the sudderj 
 death of Webber, the presidency of Harvard Coir 
 ^ge was given to Kirkland, a fine scholar, a,ffable 
 and graceful, but one who with a smile cpuld erase 
 whatever was mysterious or spiritual frprn his rer 
 ligion. He began his academic reign by attepding 
 a ball which was given by the studerits. Still it 
 was true, in the judgment of one of his friends of 
 the same belief, that " had he been an acjcnowl- 
 edged defender of Unitarianism, he could not have 
 been elected to that place." 
 
62 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 The people of the commonwealth had no incli- 
 nation to abandon substantially the religion of their 
 ancestors. Had it been at once renoanced, so far 
 as to the rejection of the divinity and alonement of 
 the Savioar, the mass would probably have arisen 
 and shaken off the new teachers. But the love of 
 union, quietness and good-will would permit no 
 such exertion, except the provocation should be 
 distinct and intolerable. Until the pastor had* 
 spoken, to charge him with heresy, was deemed 
 calumnious ; and few or none had yet spoken. 
 There was an extensive prejudice against the stern- 
 er features of Calvinism. Men were slow to mark 
 the omissions of the pulpit ; and when they drew 
 attention at last from some more zealous observer, 
 the rest, perhaps, would no longer regret the defect 
 to which they were completely accustomed. Both 
 parties even now might recoil from the gulf of di- 
 vision. So Puffer, of Berlin, in the Convention 
 sermon of 1811, while he praised the " eternal Son 
 of God," and insisted that godliness had flourished 
 or declined as evangelical principles had been 
 maintained or forsaken, yet mourned aloud over 
 the dissensions amongst the ministry. 
 
 On the last day of April, 1811, Eckley expired, 
 at the the age of threescore and one ; a fortnight 
 after died Emerson, twenty years younger ; and 
 
HISTOHY OF NEW ENGLAND. 63 
 
 on the third day after his death, Samuel Cooper 
 Thacher, the son of the late Brattle-street pastor, 
 was ordained as the successor of Kirkland. In 
 1812, after many attacks of epilepsy, the young 
 and winning Buckminster preceded his father by 
 a single day in his entrance within the vale where 
 truth can be mistaken no longer. At this period, 
 William Wells, a publisher of much respectability, 
 in Boston, and a correspondent of Belsharn, wrote 
 that " the tenets of Unitarianism had spread very 
 extensively in New England ; that most of the 
 Boston clergy and respectable laity were Unita- 
 rian ; but that at the same time there was but one 
 church professedly Unitarian ; the controversy was 
 seldom introduced into the pulpit; and the ma- 
 jority of those who were Unitarians were such 
 perhaps without consciousness." The letters of 
 Freeman and Wells were incorporated by Bel- 
 sham into his Life of Lindsay, which was pub- 
 lished in 1812 ; yet, almost three years went by 
 before a copy of that book found its way into 
 hands which were willing to give it publicity in 
 New England. In 1811, the Monthly Anthology 
 ceased to exist ; but in 1812, the General Reposi- 
 tory was begun in its place at Cambridge. It 
 was without the responsibility of clerical editor- 
 ship ; and it pronounced the doctrine of the Trin- 
 ity to be " the greatest corruption of modern 
 times." 
 
 Other bodies of Christians were not asleep ; and 
 Gardiner, of Trinity Church, and Baldwin, the 
 most eminent of Ihe Baptists, printed sermons 
 
64 PAGES FROM THE EGCLESIASLICAL 
 
 which were designed to be " Preservatives against 
 Unitarianism." The contest between churches and 
 parishes now began. Under the Congregational 
 practice, the Church, so far as it could act in a cor- 
 porate character, was composed only of the com- 
 municants ; who, on assenting to certain articles of 
 faith and agreement, and affording satisfactory evi- 
 dence of their sincerity, had each been received to 
 the highest ordinance of Christian fellowship. The 
 parish or town was empowered by the ancient laws 
 of Massachusetts, confirmed by the bill of rights, 
 to choose its own minister ; but the church also ex- 
 ercised the right of election. In both bodies, the 
 same person was commonly designated ; and when 
 they were thus in harmony, he was placed in office. 
 Where an accidental difference occurred, the neces- 
 sity of peace would admonish both to turn to 
 another candidate. The more devout portion of 
 the people would, of course, be found in the 
 church ; but it might still happen that persons of 
 worth and conscientiousness inight sometimes be 
 excluded by articles of faith, so minute and rigid, 
 as to clash with their convictions. Such, however, 
 would hardly be many ; and the controversies 
 which were commenced were not those of devout 
 men claiming the admission to the Lord's table, 
 which was denied them by men as devout but 
 riaore rigid in sentiment. They were rather strug- 
 gles of indifference to doctrine, on the side of men 
 too little in earnest to desire communion, against 
 that firmness with which the pastor and the more 
 pious of his congregation felt themselves called to 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 65 
 
 contend for a distinct faith, the faith of revelation 
 and of Christendom. Codman, of Dorchester, first 
 met this onset, on the high vantage-ground which 
 had been secured by his avowal at his settlement, 
 and which was still further strengthened by his pe- 
 cuniary independence. He had hardly been estab- 
 lished a year in his parish, when forty of his par- 
 ishioners expressed their disappointment that he 
 had not indiscriminately exchanged his ministerial 
 services with the Boston clergy. He refused all 
 pledges, and was at first sustained by a majority 
 of his parishioners ; but when the minority offered 
 their pews for sale, the desire for unity, and the 
 temporal interests of the society prevailed, and a 
 vote of the parish asked the exchanges. Again the 
 pastor refused to abandon his control, and a small 
 majority voted to extinguish the connection. But, 
 upheld by the affectionate attachment of a large 
 majority of the parish, and by almost all the church, 
 Codman yielded nothing. A council was held, 
 and equally divided, for the obvious reason that it 
 was drawn equally from the two parties ; another, 
 with an uneven number, and with Lathrop of 
 West Springfield at its head, was summoned ; and 
 the result was, that, while a large company of the 
 parishioners withdrew", the pastor maintained his 
 place. Ijcss happy was Burr, of Sandwich. For- 
 saking the less decided theology with which he 
 had begun his ministry, he preached the doctrines 
 of Calvinism with zeal ; and in 1811, was dismiss- 
 ed by a vote of the congregation. One sixth of 
 the whole number of his church concurred in the 
 6 
 
66 
 
 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 act, while the others separated with him, built a 
 house of worship, retained the name of the First 
 Church, and excluded those members who had op- 
 posed their doctrine. The parish invited Goodwin 
 to the ancient pulpit, a Unitarian and an advocate 
 of the restoration of all men; and the title and 
 rights of the original church remained in contest. 
 
 While these events were in progress, the charge 
 of Unitarianism was either repelled as unjustifia- 
 ble, or borne with more of the aspect of patience, 
 than with that of exulting illumination. A Sopin- 
 ian publication in London had ventured to give to 
 the world some statements of the prevalence of 
 Unitarian sentiments in Boston and in Massachu- 
 setts. Parkman, a young divine of the most re- 
 spectable connections in Boston^ happening to be 
 in London, replied to the article. He said that, 
 having excellent opportunities of cultivating the 
 acquaintance of the clergy, he had never heard 
 from more than one of them, in public or in pri- 
 vate, any thing for which he could have a right to 
 pronounce the speaker a Unitarian ; and that, ex- 
 cept " at most four or five heads of families, there 
 was scarcely a parishioner in Boston, who would 
 not be shocked at having his minister preach the 
 peculiarities of Unitarianism." He did not assert 
 that they worshipped the Trinity, but described 
 them as " holding high and exalted views of the 
 person and> mediation of Jesus Christ, resting on 
 the merits of his atonement, his cross and passion, 
 and zealous to pay the honor which they believed 
 due to his name." " We are not," he concluded, 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 67 
 
 " and permit me to add, as long as we study the 
 Scriptures, I believe we shall not become converts 
 to your new doctrine." Parkman returned home, 
 and on the death of Eliot, in 1813, became his suc- 
 cessor. For a single year. Abbot occupied the 
 place of Emerson, and then fell in the flower of his 
 days. The desk of Buckminster was held by one 
 who began as early, a race as brilliant, as that of 
 his predecessor ; but more various and longer. It 
 was only for a very short portion of that race, that 
 Edward Everett put oif the academic laurels, and 
 became the applauded orator of Brattle-street. 
 The Convention sermon of 1812 had been preach- 
 ed by Morse, of Charlestown, in a tone of modera- 
 tion; and in that of 1813, President Kirkland ex- 
 pressed " the whole pith and marrow of liberal 
 divinity ;" and in the judgment of- bis friends, 
 " without directly impugning any of the tenets of 
 tho opposite theology, examined them completely, 
 and brushed them away like cobwebs." The coun- 
 cil summoned by the ancient church of Deerfield, 
 was about to proceed to the ordination of Willard, 
 the chosen candidate. Its members, however, pro- 
 ceeded not so far without inquiry; and inquiry 
 surprised them by the disclosure of his Pelagian 
 and Arian opinions. The council paused and 
 withdrew, refusing their assistance ; but Willard 
 was ordained by another; a discussion in pam- 
 phlets ensued ; and a third council, summoned by 
 a minority of the church, advised them to with- 
 draw, and become members of other churches. 
 About the same time a council at Salisbury, in 
 
68 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 New-Hampshire, condemned the Unitarianism of 
 Thomas Worcester. As yet, however, not a single 
 sermon had been preached in Massachusetts 
 against the Trinity, except at King's Chapel. Not 
 a single person, except Willard, had been settled 
 after the avowal of his Unitarian doctrine. The 
 General Repository, the Christian Monitor, a col- 
 lection of tracts, which had been becoming more 
 and more liberal, and the Christian Disciple, which 
 had lately arisen with a tone of moderation, were 
 the organs of a party that still moved on with cau- 
 tious reserve, scarcely conscious of its own num- 
 bers. Already, the orthodox ministers of the State 
 met in their local and general associations ; but 
 when, in 1814, a few of them proposed a plan of 
 organization which, more than a century before, 
 had been originally suggested, the effect was proba- 
 bly unfortunate. It was interpreted by their oppo- 
 nents as an attack on private freedom of con- 
 science, and perhaps added something to the popu- 
 lar prejudice against all attempts to enforce, or 
 even to urge, uniformity ; and by a general con- 
 sent it was in the end relinquished. But these 
 were still the times which Greenwood has thus de- 
 scribed : " When, in our religious world, there was 
 nothing but distrust on the one side, and fear and 
 evasion on the other ; when the self-conceited the- 
 ologue looked awry on the suspected heretic, and 
 the object of his suspicion answered him with cir- 
 cumlocution and hesitation." 
 
HISTOHV OF NEW ENGLAND. 69 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 With the year 1815 came peace with Great 
 Britain ; and with the peace, came both the book 
 of Belsham and public leisure for reflection. Three 
 days before the commencement of the year, the 
 granite walls of the new church in Summer-street 
 were dedicated, in the words of Thacher, who 
 preached and published a startling sermon, "to 
 God, to the religion of his Son, who died for us, 
 to the spirit of evangelical piety, charity, and truth." 
 Before the echoes of this discourse had ceased, a 
 small pamphlet fell from the press, with the title, 
 " American Unitarianism." It was but a part of 
 the Memoir of Lindsey, containing the letters of 
 Wells and Freeman, without comment ; except that 
 extracts from the writings of Bel sham were pre- 
 fixed, illustrating his theology. The book had 
 been obtained by Morse, who thus turned upon 
 the Unitarian bands in America the artillery of 
 their own allies. Vigorously was the assault 
 pushed by the Panoplist, which, in a succession of 
 able articles, charged on the liberal clergy that long 
 suppression of their opinions, to which these letters 
 gave certainly every aspect of design. But if there 
 had been concealment, it was now at an end ; and 
 that can never be a bright page in the history of 
 their cause in New England, which records that it 
 was not their own hand that at last drew the veil 
 6* 
 
70 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 aside. Channing answered the Panoplist through 
 a leiter to Thacher, repelling with indignation the 
 charge of unworthy concealment, avowing that his 
 own worship and sentiments had been Unitarian, 
 and declaring that he never supposed that his 
 friends wished to be thought Trinitarians. While 
 he contended that a majority of the liberal clergy 
 " believed that Jesus Christ is more than man," he 
 yet affirmed it to be " no crime to believe with Mr. 
 Belsham." Samuel Worcester, of Salem, met the 
 reply of Channing, and said that " it seemed to 
 have been received as an established, uncontested 
 fact, that ministers of the liberal class were not ac- 
 customed to be unreserved and explicit in the pub- 
 lic avowal and declaration of their sentiments." 
 There were three publications on each side, and a 
 layman, the most active member of the corporation 
 of Harvard College, threw in a pamphlet of per- 
 sonal invective, entitled, " Are you a Christian, or 
 a Calvinist ? " The conti'oversy degenerated in its 
 progress ; but whether it were that — 
 
 "Thrice is he armed who hath his quarrel just," — 
 
 Worcester proved himself no unequal antagonist, 
 even to the great abilities of Channing. 
 
 It was a result of this discussion that the com- 
 plete separation, which was plainly inevitable, 
 came on without delay. The Unitarians avowed 
 their doctrine from the pulpit; the Trinitarians 
 drew together into a more compact phalanx. 
 Every pastor was compelled to choose his place on 
 one side or the other of the chasm. Whatever dis- 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 71 
 
 ruption of personal unanimity, or of patoehial 
 peace, might be the cost of an open decision, the 
 time had come ; except when, here and there, some 
 older divine, timid, or clinging to the ancient cus- 
 toms, preserved some forms of fellowship with the 
 teachers of an opposite doctrine, therei was an end 
 of mutual exchanges and councils. Some lingered 
 awhile upon the border, but the gulf was every day 
 widening ; and while they yet looked across, the 
 most moderate felt themselves borne backward. 
 
 There were, at that time, two hundred and 
 ninety-three townships in Massachusetts ; and the 
 Congregational parishes were somewhat more 
 numerous. The churches that now avowed Uni- 
 tarianism, or retained Unitarian pastors, often with 
 loud protests against the name, lay almost all in 
 the eastern part of the commonwealth. In Boston, 
 only the Old South and the Park-street chureh'ete, 
 adhered to the ortliodox standard ; and from the 
 latter. Griffin had just retired. The aged Lathrop, 
 who died within a year after the explosion ; Free- 
 man, whose colleague, Gary, died also in 1815, 
 abroad ; Frothinghani, just ordained over the First 
 Church ; the Brattle-street church, which the retire- 
 ment of Everett to a Cambridge professorship had 
 left without a pastor ; Parkman, so' lately the repu- 
 diator of the Unitarian name, and the Socinian 
 doctrine, at least ; Thacher, already in the van ; 
 Holley, brilliant, eloquent, once deemed an able 
 champion of truth and piety, now the mere victim 
 of a worldly and unprincipled vanity ; Lowell, who 
 rejected least, and who would never permit him- 
 
72 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 self to assume any other title than that of Christian, 
 nor to be numbered with the party with whom he 
 acted ; and Channing, whose ardent sensibilities, a 
 shining intellect, and a fluent pen, drew to the head 
 of all; — these, in one body, transferred, with a 
 single exception, the ancient churches of Boston to 
 a system of religion, which would once have shut 
 out every one of its professors from the communion 
 of those very churches. 
 
 In the populous county of Middlesex, few of the 
 older and more conspicuous congregations bowed 
 at once to this mighty revolution of opinions. 
 Three churches in Salem gave themselves up, after 
 long preparation, to the liberal theology of their 
 pastors. The separation in Salem was broad and 
 deep, and IJnitarianism had there a superiority 
 which it could not sustain through the county of 
 Essex. In Norfolk, several divines of influence 
 brought much weight to the new theology ; in 
 Bristol, a smaller number were its advocates. The 
 oldest church in New England, the very church of 
 the pilgrims, had become decidedly Unitarian, un- 
 der the ministry of Kendall. Of the Barnstable 
 ministers, not less than six had been, in the first 
 years of their ministry, of the liberal school, and 
 had afterwards, as they professed, been brought to 
 a nearer and more spiritual acquaintance w^ith the 
 gospel, and to a firm confession of the Trinity. 
 The only Unitarian minister in the county, seems 
 to have been Goodwin, of Sandwich; and there 
 was not a single minister of that belief in the coun- 
 ties of Hampden and Berkshire. In number, there- 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 73 
 
 fore, the orthodox ministers and churches far ex- 
 ceeded their adversaries. The Unitarian ministers 
 of Massachusetts, in 1815, can hardly have been 
 more than seventy-five ; the orthodox must have 
 been more than two hundred. But the strength of 
 the orthodox was less in their numbers than in the 
 language of the Scriptures, in the testimony of the 
 Christian church of all ages, in the consent of the 
 fathers of New England, in their own missionary 
 zeal, in the evident and transforming might of the 
 gospel as it was preached by themselves, and in 
 their appeal to the deepest hopes and fears of sin- 
 ful humanity; an appeal to which the souls of 
 men had always answered. Their wealcness lay 
 in those peculiar doctrines of Calvinism which, 
 whether truths or errors, have never commanded 
 the general assent of Christians, and have often 
 created an intense prejudice; in the still more un- 
 fortunate burden of an inclination, too widely 
 spread, for metaphysical subtleties, poor aliment of 
 the heart, and in too great a contempt for the mildr 
 er graces of style, of manner, and of character. 
 
 The strength of the Unitarian party was still 
 vast, and not at all confined to the parishes where 
 Unitarians ministered. They offered to man a re- 
 ligion which demanded from the understanding 
 but a slight submission, and imposed no grievous 
 task upon the army of the undecided. They 
 taught and practised, amongst much that was love- 
 ly and of good report, a gentleness and an indul- 
 gence, not inconsistent with moral strictness of 
 habit, yet exceedingly pleasing to the world. They 
 
74 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 placed in their front a company of men, whose 
 powers of mind were often distinguished, and 
 whose cultivated taste either chastened a native 
 eloquence, or else gave a graceful respectability to 
 lameness of intellect and effeminate reasoning. 
 They bad the university, the school which was 
 cherishing the future scholars and professional men 
 of the commonwealth. They had an immense 
 preponderance of the opulence and influence of 
 the capital. They had the patronage of many of 
 the ablest men in Massachusetts, whose judgment, 
 had they been theologians, or persons of profound 
 religious earnestness, might have wanted the au- 
 thority which it possessed, of Parsons, Story, Par- 
 ker, Dexter, Lowell, and Bowditcb, and names not 
 less distinguished, but not yet inscribed on sepul- 
 chral monuments. Their weakness was, that their 
 system, with all its simplicity, had plainly origi- 
 nated from some other source, not from the lan- 
 guage of the Scriptures, and did not meet the ob- 
 vious meaning of the Scriptures ; that it seldom 
 attracted the more serious minds ; that it bore little 
 fruit ; that it accustomed men to choose their reli- 
 gious belief by their feehngs, and then to support it 
 by irreverent, if not insincere interpretations ; that, 
 being in truth but the offspring of a spirit of doubt, 
 it had within itself the germ of an unbelief, whose 
 expansion could be checked by no determination 
 of the present hour, or the present age. 
 
 The Unitarians, however, satisfied themselves, 
 and assured mankind, that so resplendent a light 
 had never before adorned and illustrated Christian- 
 
HISTORY OP NEW ENGLAND. 75 
 
 ity* Perhaps it was a policy, that unconsciously 
 mingled itself with their admiration and affection 
 for their leaders. Perhaps it was because the chief 
 seats of Unitarianism were a rich and refined city, 
 somewhat proud of its refinemenl, and a neighbor- 
 ing university, the most ancient and the best en- 
 dowed in the land. Perhaps it was in that charm 
 which commonly plays around a novel and bold 
 doctrine, and which has always magnified the abil- 
 ities of those by whom established truth is dis- 
 carded. Perhaps the scheme of a different, a more 
 liberal, and a more cheerful religion did, indeed, 
 for a time, enlist on its side an unusual glow of 
 intellect. There was Channing, HoUey, Everett — 
 they lamented in Buckminster a mental and spir- 
 itual prodigy ; every humbler name had its own 
 honors. To accede to the cause of such wisdom, 
 rescued the meanest powers from the reproach of 
 blindness, of bigotry, and of lingering behind the 
 great progress of " the race." It seemed their opin- 
 ion that, so soon as light should but approach, and 
 fear depart, the theologians of all Christendom 
 would glide into the delightful current as easily as 
 the theologians of eastern Massachusetts. A higher 
 philosophy, and a nobler moral sentiment, had now 
 but to disclose themselves peacefully under the 
 pure beams of a religion which would impose no 
 intellectual restraint, and offend no intellectual pre- 
 judice. 
 
 In the midst of this opening scene, the Conven- 
 tion sermon of 1816, was preached by Channing. 
 His theme was international peace, for which he 
 
76 PAGES FROM THE KOCLESIASTICAL 
 
 asked the support of the clergy, while they yet 
 freshly felt the recent calamities of European and 
 American war. He turned aside from the field of 
 theological controversy, and seemed thus to plead 
 for union on the high table-land of moral reforma- 
 tion. But to reap the anticipated harvests, there 
 was need of many a sickle. The university pre- 
 pared to augment the means of theological educa- 
 tion. A society was formed, which became' the 
 foundation of the Faculty of Divinity. The 
 younger Ware, whose writings were marked be- 
 yond those of his brethren, by a spirit of devotion, 
 and of practical earnestness, now succeeded La- 
 throp at the Second church, while Griffin was fol- 
 lowed at Park-street by a son of President Dwight. 
 A second Universalist chapel arose, where the 
 Trinity was also denied. The Recorder, a weekly 
 newspaper of orthodox principles, was established 
 at Boston. In the convention sermon of 1817 
 Hyde of Lee, descending from the western hills, to 
 which Unitarianism had not penetrated, plainly 
 pronounced those to be heretics, who denied the 
 essential divinity of the Son of God and ranked 
 him among created beings, super-angelical or hu- 
 man. Thaeher, fleeing from clime to clime for 
 health, died among strangers. His successor was 
 GTeenwood, a beautiful writer, and Palfrey occu- 
 pied the pulpit of Brattle-street. 
 
 For a time, however, the two parties stood oppo- 
 site to each other, almost in silence, each somewhat 
 uncertain of the ground beneath its feet, and not 
 anxious to aggravate the schism, whose gentfest 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLANJJ. 77 
 
 progress and issue could not but bring a wide and 
 fearful distress. Only once, for several years, was 
 that scene witnessed which afterwards was to be 
 the familiar story of so many a village ; a church 
 and its parish torn asunder ; a pastor placed over 
 the fold from whom those sheep, who had promised 
 to hear the voice of the chief Shepherd, fled, as 
 from a hireling or a robber. 
 
 But in 1818, the fruitful question between 
 churches and parishes arose once more, and slept 
 not until the law of the land had pronounced a de- 
 cision, which had the effects of an earthquake, ex- 
 cept that they followed not at once from the gen- 
 eral shock. It was the decision of the highest 
 courts of law, that the majority of the parish, hav- 
 ing elected their own religious teacher, conferred 
 upon that portion of the communicants who re- 
 mained with them, the only legal character in 
 which a church could be recognized. The pro- 
 perty of the church, even to the sacred vessels, and 
 the records, was then at the disposal of the parish, 
 so long as even two or three communicants were 
 left behind ; and even though all should fail, the 
 right only remained in suspense till a new church 
 should be organized. 
 
 Sorrowful and indignant, and oppressed with a 
 sense of wrong, the orthodox body submitted to a 
 determination, which, however just and unavoida- 
 ble, yet sanctioned a boundless perversion of be- 
 quests from the sacred design of the givers.. If 
 they could not condemn the judges or the law, a^ 
 indeed both were condemned by many, they were 
 7 
 
78 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 ySt compelled to detest and scorn the more a sys- 
 tem of doctrine, or of deniaJ, which could employ 
 the votes of a mingled company, of whom scarcely 
 any were earnest enough in religion to approach 
 its distinguishing ordinances, and with these could 
 wrench away all but freedom of conscience from 
 those who only professed the belief of Christendom 
 and of their fathers. But the issues of this decis- 
 ion remained to be felt, when the principle of 
 doubt should have accomplished its riper devel- 
 opement. 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 PTarvard University-, "from turret to founda- 
 tion-stone," was illuminated by the calm blaze of 
 that rational religion, in whose light all distinctions 
 of Christian doctrine faded away, like phosphores- 
 cent objects in the sunshine. At its head was 
 Kirkland, affably benign, " stripping religion of its 
 stiff and formal costume, its gloomy and forbidding 
 looks, and its austere and repellant manners," the 
 "intimate friend of the EliotSj Gores, Smiths, 
 McLeans, Perkinses, Thorndikes, Lymans, Park- 
 maris, Boylstons, who poured out the treasures by 
 which he gathered around him a cluster of shining 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 79 
 
 scholars in the inferior offices of the University., 
 McKean, the professor of Rhetoric, who died in 
 1818, left no other among the instructors who could 
 be charged with orthodoxy, and it was said that 
 his place, although he could comply so far as to 
 preach the sermon at the ordination of Frothing- 
 ham, had not always been exempt from annoy- 
 ance. The fellows and the elective overseers, were 
 chiefly of the liberal churches of Boston and its 
 neighborhood. Crowned with its ancient renown, 
 enriched with princely magnificence, and adorned 
 by elegant scholarship, the college gave lustre to 
 the opinions which it now welcomed to its, bosom, 
 and over whose propagation it spread its maternal 
 care. But scarcely a seventh of the pupils dedi- 
 cated themselves to divinity, and scarcely a tenth 
 to the divinity that reigned at Cambridgp. In s^ch 
 a progress, centuries might be consumed beforp 
 even the whole commonwe^th should be enlight- 
 ened. The Divinity School arose, to attract, as 
 well as to interest ; and if its first firuits' were not 
 numerous, yet the flower of some of the clashes of 
 Harvard, went forth to oppose in the pulpits of 
 Massachusetts their free investigation, their philo- 
 sophy of religion, their rhetorical grace, their sooth- 
 ing or animated elocution, and the flowers which 
 they had culled from the fields of nature or of the 
 Scriptures, to the honest interpretations, the down- 
 right argument, the urgent zeal, and the rigid 
 sternness, now indeed learning to be less rigid, and 
 less stern, of ancient orthodoxy. A brilliant pro-^ 
 mise attended them as they went, but even mightier 
 
80 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 aid was given to the triumph of the principle in 
 which Unitarianism had its origin, by the army of- 
 educated men who passed from Cambridge to the 
 highest seats of life ; almost sure, whether they be- 
 lieved or not with their academic teachers, at least 
 with them to disbelieve. 
 
 Opposite to the front of this mass of power, 
 Holmes, who was the Convention preacher of 
 1819, maintained, with a modest steadfastness, the 
 creed to which the pastoral pulpit of Cambridge 
 had not yet proved itself untrue. But Ware, at 
 the ordination of Lamson, bad taught, with all the 
 authority of his chair, that while "we are to con- 
 sider !he doctrines delivered by the apostles and 
 primitive teachers, as given them by revelation, — 
 the arguments, illustrations, and topics of persua- 
 sion which they employed to enforce them, were 
 the suggestions of their own minds, in the exercise 
 of their respective talents, and the kinds and degree 
 of knowledge they possessed." To bear the same 
 standard, or a bolder, to the western valley of the 
 land, HoUey, the most eminent pulpit orator of his 
 day, now departed and lefl his place in Hollis- 
 street, to the independence and poetic fervor of 
 Pierpont. Soutlfward, a society was formed at 
 Baltimore, and placed itself under the charge of 
 Jared Sparks, one of the most distinguished of the 
 recent pupils of Cambridge. The sermon preached 
 at his ordination, by Channing, seemed to their as- 
 sociates in belief to make an epoch in the history 
 of Christianity. They affirmed, that except the 
 preaching of Whitefield, it had produced " a more 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 81 
 
 extensive and powerful effect on the religious pub- 
 lic than had ever been known in America." The 
 absence of doctrine had been a striking feature in 
 many of the earlier of the liberal preachers. A 
 placid gentleness of style wafted the mind of the 
 hearer along, without uneasiness or effort. Stu- 
 diously was every theme avoided which could 
 heavily task the intellect, or very deeply agitate the 
 heart. A shrewd divine of that day not inaptly 
 compared the mental state in which it reigned, 
 with that state of the corporeal system in which 
 the power of digesting strong and nutricious food 
 has been lost. The ambitious eloquence of Everett 
 or Holley might captivate the ear with any senti= 
 ment Men of profounder feelings loved better the 
 too chastised earnestness of Buckminster. The 
 mass remained like polished marble beneath the 
 gentle droppings of common Unitarianism. Chan- 
 ning had once perceived the appalling defect, and 
 longed for a more ancient fervor. But once yield- 
 ing to the tide of doubt, he not only dismissed the 
 doctrines of the Trinity, of human corruption, and 
 of the atonement, but seemed at length to be much 
 warned by a stern prejudice which beheld in them 
 the chief obstacles to the march of religious im- 
 provement All the energy of his active and glow- 
 ing intellect was thenceforth to be turned either to 
 their overthrow, or to the propagation of such virtue 
 and such piety, as could dispense with their sup- 
 port. Advancing in this path, he had seen him- 
 self compelled to assume the post of a foremost 
 champion. With an eye for moral beauty every- 
 7* 
 
92 
 
 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASLICAL 
 
 where, except where he was enslaved by one 
 mighty antipathy ; an engaging writer, but always 
 leaving the objections of his antagonist unsatisfied ; 
 skilful in offering that side of his theme which won 
 his own regard, while he threw a shadow over that 
 ■which had been repulsive ; egotistical, confident in 
 his own powers, ignorant of mankind, and trusting 
 to the most uncertain dreams of the future desti- 
 nies of man on earth, and to the most vague con- 
 ceptions of abstract goodness ; he surrendered for 
 these the impregnable rock of revelation. At 
 length, his aversion became a fixed, daring, impla- 
 cable hatred ; nothing was too bold for his pen, or 
 too relentless for his spirit, till, before the end of 
 his course, the Christian minister seemed lost in 
 the benevolent philosopher, in the teacher of high 
 morals, in the man who reserved to himself the 
 right of changing perpetually his decision on the 
 very meaning of that religion to whose service he 
 had been consecrated. When now he arose at 
 Baltimore to declare the principles which were to 
 be launched forth into a hostile community, he 
 strengthened himself indeed with some aspect of 
 scriptural argument. But he threw all hereditary 
 reverence aside, and openly and ardently disclaim- 
 ed, repelled, and almost ridiculed, what had ever 
 been dearest to the heart of Christendom. On his 
 journey, too, he preached at New York almost the 
 first Unitarian sermon which had been heard in 
 that great mart, and planted the seeds of a congre- 
 gation. 
 
 Stuart, of Andover, a name already honored 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 83 
 
 with some wreaths from the walks of sacred litera- 
 ture, published letters to Chaniiing, in reply to his 
 sermon at Baltimore. Disclaiming somewhat 
 ostentatiously all subjection to human authority, 
 morbidly jealous of the rights of individual opin- 
 ion, he rejected much of the language of the 
 ancient church, and was not quite content with 
 the creed of Nice. But solemnly, eloquently, 
 earnestly, and with deep fervency of soul, he 
 maintained the threefold distinction in the God- 
 head, the unequivocal deity of the Redeemer and 
 the Comforter. Fresh from the writings of Ger- 
 man neologists, he declared aloud that here, as 
 there, the simple question between the parties 
 must soon be, "whether natural or revealed re- 
 ligion is our guide and hope." The letters of 
 Woods of Andover to Unitarians, of Ware to 
 Trinitarians and Calvinists, and of Woods in re- 
 ply, were the next chapter in the controversy. 
 They appeared in 1820 and 1821, and embraced 
 the whole lield, but touched slightly the question 
 of the divine nature, and more extensively the doc- 
 trines of depravity and redemption. The argu- 
 ment of Woods was cogent and skilful ; the whole 
 Unitarian system had a faithful representative, and 
 was displayed in its most popular form ; and the 
 discussion was distinguished by its mildness and 
 courtesy. Yet Woods forbore not to pronounce 
 the system of UnitEu:ianism to be another gospel. 
 
 The growth of Unitarianism, in the Middle 
 States, was now repelled by a shield that had been 
 often tried in polemic warfare. In the works of 
 
84 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 Miller, the chief blemish is, that in his desire to 
 perfect the triumph of his cause, he frames asser- 
 tions that require, but do not receive, some qualify- 
 ing limits. He is a general who sweeps across the 
 field and claims an exterminating victory, while he 
 fails to notice that at different points the hostile 
 bands are rallying in the rear of his too confident 
 pursuit. But his " Letters on Unitarianism," ad- 
 dressed to a Presbyterian Church ia Baltimore, 
 were a manly, energetic volume, which unspar- 
 ingly overthrew and trampled down the system, 
 and which must much and justly have moved the 
 men of common intelligence and active habits, for 
 whom especially it was written. A reply was 
 published by Sparks, and Stuart also thought it 
 needful to publish in 1822 his letters to Miller, in 
 his own defence ; for the Princeton professor had 
 condemned his rash rejection of the ancient lan- 
 guage and doctrine concerning the eternal genera- 
 tion of the Son. 
 
 So completely was the ancient college of Mas- 
 sachusetts wrested from the hands of those who 
 inherited the principles of its founders, that they 
 felt themselves compelled to lay new foundations- 
 Williams College, though not abroad, was on a 
 distant frontier, and therefore, under a kind of ne- 
 cessity, the institution at Amherst arose. It was 
 a feature of the schism which was now entire, that 
 it entered into the heart of almost all intelligent 
 communities, at least on the eastern side of the 
 Connecticut, and did not merely place parish 
 against parish, but left no primitive parish without 
 
HISTORY OP NEW ENGLAND. 85 
 
 an admixture of opposite elements. Where the 
 pastor and a majority of the people had espoused 
 the new doctrine, individuals were still found, 
 whom education, family ties, or conscientious con- 
 viction, bound to that which it supplanted. Where 
 the pastor and the church adhered to their faith, 
 the unity of the neighborhood was still broken. 
 Some clergymen at no great distance, was known 
 to give a milder and broader interpretation of his 
 message. The liberal publications made their way 
 to many households. Here and there one of those 
 peculiar minds that delight in being wiser and 
 bolder than the rest; here and there a subtle 
 thinker, or a man who held it praise enough to 
 believe with the great men of the courts and cap- 
 ital ; here and there a representative, who, linger- 
 ing through his winter weeks at Boston, had drunk 
 in the accents of Channing or of Greenwood ; here 
 and there a recent son of Harvard, with his aca- 
 demic sense of superiority to superstition; here 
 and there a speaker, skilled to declaim against the 
 mental slavery of creeds and confessions ; scattered 
 throughout the country, and planted in almost 
 every parish, were these nuclei of resistance to or- 
 thodoxy. Around them gathered such as could not 
 endure the severity of a doctrine by which they 
 were condemned ; such as believed themselves in 
 no need of serious repentance ; such as only turned 
 aside from the world on Sundays to keep the cus- 
 toms of their fathers ; and such as, doubting the 
 whole religion, would naturally prefer to listen to a 
 system which had the least to be doubted. Thus 
 
86 
 
 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 it was that in the councils of the State the liberal 
 doctrine had far more than its proportion of repre- 
 sentatives, and for four years the college of Amherst 
 acted without incorporation. , The Convention ser- 
 mon of 1822 was preached, however, by Moore, its 
 first president, and contained an acknowledgment 
 of the Trinity. But more disastrous by far was 
 the disunion of parishes, when an aged pastor slept 
 with his predecessors, or when some imprudence 
 had given offence, or finally, when the doubters felt 
 their own strength toibe sufficient for a revolution. 
 Occasions could not be wanting ; and while the 
 Unitarians courted, and the orthodox refused, the 
 offices of brotherly fellowship, it was easy to estab- 
 lish a prepossession in favor of the more liberal 
 side. Few were the believers in the system of the 
 Unitarian theologians. But many were there whose 
 belief in any, system was but the most indistinct 
 and general. Few loved, or cared to hear the 
 Unitarian arguments from the pulpit, but many 
 disliked yet more the orthodox anathema. When 
 the hour of choice came on, and previous strife had 
 added a hundred incidental irritations, it is not 
 strange that neighbors and brethren so often broke 
 away, and that the village street that divided two 
 houses of Congregational worship became, for all 
 the ends of religious separation, a gulf as wide and 
 as deep as the ocean. 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 87 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 A SERMON preached at Worcester, by Beechier, 
 whose I'obust, unpolished strength now towered 
 upward arriong the orthodox clergy of New Eng- 
 land, carried on the thread of discussion till the 
 establishment, in 1824, of the " Christian Exam- 
 iner;" on the grave of the less fitly designated 
 " Christian Disciple." The Examiner became the 
 chief and the able organ of those doctrines for 
 whose promulgation it was destined and designed 
 to labor with the spirit that beseemed its title. It 
 leaned upon the Baltiinore sermon of Channing, 
 and reproached the orthodox for- the separation 
 which eight years had now decided. But its first 
 volume contained a report of the " Massachusetts 
 Evangelical Society," a Unitarian body ; a report 
 which was plainly intended to be a landmark, 
 which might eith«r bound encroachment, or ''de- 
 monstrate the falsehood of the charge of encroach- 
 ment. It thus protected against the progress of 
 that mode of thinking wliich delights to represent 
 "a God all mercy." * 
 
 " The prevalence," it said, " of the modern sect 
 of Universalists, who deny the doctrine of a future 
 retribution, and who do not consider a pious and 
 holy life essential to happiness hereafter, is piartic- 
 larly alarming, and calls for the special notice of 
 
88 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 all serious Christians. We think this system to be 
 most injnrious to the interests of gooti morals, and 
 to the welfare of civil society, as well as fatally 
 dangerous to the souls of rnen, and we believe it 
 directly contrary to the plainest declarations of the 
 holy gospel." The clerical trustees, whose signa- 
 tures were affixed to this document, were Bancroft, 
 Thayer, Foster, Lowell, Pierce, Kendall, Parkman, 
 Ripley and Ware. It had the fate of many other 
 landmarks, and remains to denote the period and 
 the men. 
 
 In 1825, the American Unitarian Association 
 was formed for the concentration of Unitarian 
 elForts and the propagation of Unitarian sentiments 
 through books, and tracts, and missionaries. There 
 were, indeed, grave questions which might have 
 been expected to divide those effoirts, as they cer- 
 tainly separated those sentiments. There was a 
 higher and a lower class of Unitarians, and still 
 beyond these a highest and a lowest. But it was 
 calmly announced that, concerning these lowest 
 doctrines, " those who agreed in the great point of 
 the simple unity of God, differed, and should differ 
 in peace." Only the phrase "the eternal Son of 
 God," was unscriptural and absurd: everything 
 else might claim an undisturbed tolerance. In its 
 first year, the Christian Examiner announced to 
 the world that he believed enough who believed 
 no more than the humanity of Jesus Christ, who 
 denied the existence of the devil, and who deemed 
 the allusions of the New Testament to evil spirits 
 to be a mere indulgence of the language of popu- 
 lar superstition. 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 89 
 
 But in the next year, a new editor lifted his 
 anchor and boldly swung forth into a sea of per- 
 petual uncertainty. He declared that the publica- 
 tion, in its several shapes, had " advocated no 
 doctrines and been conducted on no principles, 
 w^hich forbade mailing a change^ whenever a 
 change should appear to be an improvement." Its 
 religion was henceforth to be known, not merely 
 as " liberal," but pre-eminently as " rational." The 
 sacraments were carefully stripped of all sanctity 
 beyond that which belongs to common worship. 
 It gave to the Scriptures " their own station, which 
 was a high one among the oracles of sacred in- 
 struction." It is said that "the Comforter that 
 Jesus promised, and God sent down, is Truth." It 
 calmly stated that "the character of Jesus has 
 many traits of surpassing excellence ; " it also felt 
 no particular friendship or partiality for Socinian- 
 ism, and even thought it " an unscriptural doctrine." 
 More loud and earnest was its warning against all 
 claims of ministerial authority, which might bar the 
 progress of free inquiry. 
 
 " To all beside, indifferent, easy, cold, 
 Here the fire kindled, and the wo was told." 
 
 At this period the Unitarian congregations in the 
 United States, apart from Massachusetts, were said 
 by a writer in the Examiner, to be no more'than 
 one flourishing congregation at Portland, and two 
 or three others, small and unimportant, in Maine ; 
 one large society at Portsmouth, and here and 
 8 
 
90 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 there a small one, as at Keene, and Amherst, in 
 New Hampshire ; one at Burlington, in Vermont ; 
 one in Rhode Island ; a small one in Connecticut ; 
 one in New York ; five or six small ones in Penn- 
 sylvania ; one at Baltimore, only able by borrow- 
 ing money to save its church from the hammer ; 
 one in the District of Columbia, and one in South 
 CEtrohna. The same writer avowed that in Massa- 
 chusetts " Unitarianism was not heartily and intel- 
 ligently embraced by one half of the Unitarian 
 societies, nor by one third of the members of the 
 other half;" that "the ministers must seldom 
 preach to them liberal doctrine," as they were 
 "resolved not to be Trinitarians," but were not 
 resolved what they were, nor what they ought to 
 be in the way of doctrine." In such a survey he 
 found a defence against the charge of coldness to 
 missionary labors. 
 
 The conversion of an East Indian missionary to 
 Unitarianism, and of the celebrated Ramohun 
 Roy to something that could be mistaken for Uni- 
 tarianism, had lighted up a glimmer of interest 
 which issued in a correspondence. 
 
 Divinity Hall, at Cambridge, was erected in 
 1826, and dedicated, as it was expressed in the 
 discourse of Channing, " to free inquiry, to the 
 love of truth, to religious feeling, to faith in the 
 glorious issues of Christianity, to the improvement 
 of the ministry, to Christian independence, and to 
 the spirit of martyrdom." It was time, indeed, that 
 the ancient phraseology on such occasions should 
 give place to a more abstract language. The chief 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 91 
 
 professor in that seminary had expressly assumed 
 the Unitarian name, and disclaimed the atonement, 
 except through the regenerating power of the 
 gospel, and the influence of the instruction and 
 example of Jesus. Channing himself, in a dis- 
 course which he pronounced also in 1826, at the 
 dedication of a second place of worship for his 
 brethren in New York, had poured out his whole 
 power of invective and ridicule against doctrines 
 which were the dearest treasures of almost every 
 worshipper in the great metropolis. 
 
 In 1827, the Convention sermon on ecclesias- 
 tical peace, was preached by Ablaot of Beverly, a 
 conciliating divine of the liberal opinions. Till 
 now the two parties in the convention had tacitly 
 permitted to each other the alternate selection of 
 the preacher. The Trinitarians now determined 
 to assert the right of the majority, and to follow the 
 manly and obvious rule of voting for none, and of 
 voting against all, except such as would preach the 
 doctrines in which they recognized " the power of 
 God unto salvation." 
 
 The Christian Examiner of 1827, was content to 
 acknowledge that its editors " thought they should 
 prefer to the speculations of the infidel theologians 
 of Germany, even Calvinism itself, in a mitigated 
 state, though they might hesitate about some of the 
 more odious and mischievous forms, in which it 
 had lately appeared." It acquiesced in the reason- 
 ing that " to worship Christ as God, was to deny 
 him," one of the shameless absurdities of Whitman 
 of Waltham ; and in the statement which the life 
 
92 FAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 of Norton was given to sustain, that the New 
 Testament was not a revelation, but the history of 
 a revelation. The most powerful and popular ar- 
 guments, however, were still aimed at distorted 
 pictures of Calvinism, for which the most grim 
 of ancient Calvinists hardly furnished an outline. 
 If the resemblance was denied, it was said that 
 orthodoxy had changed its features, and was pre- 
 paring to attach itself to the triumph of rational 
 religion. But not the less was the picture assailed 
 with triumphant indignation. 
 
 Channing in the noonday of his renown, Pier- 
 pont with his air of undaunted frankness, and 
 Dewey with that eloquence which could invest 
 with " a glory and a glow " sentiments the most 
 earthly and frivolous ; all denounced the Calvin- 
 istic system as ascribing to the Maker of mankind 
 acts which would dishonor the throne of a human 
 tyrant. It was no preference for abstract TJnita- 
 rianism, that reconciled men to the surrender of all 
 which it denied. But one writer thus clothed the 
 opposite doctrine with the most revolting and ter- 
 rific aspect. Another spread out a charming land- 
 scape in contrast, embracing all which is lovely 
 and of good report, without one stern passage of 
 the pilgrimage. Another hastened to allow the 
 claims of all worldly business, and the innocence 
 of all worldly pleasures within the limits imposed 
 by a moderate temper, and a wise regard to per- 
 sonal interest. Another had not a severe word for 
 any opinion, and owned that he might himself be 
 in error on any topic, however momentous might 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 93 
 
 seem the necessity of truth. It would have been 
 ■Wonderful if the undecided, the indifferent, the 
 inexperienced, the prosperous, the light-hearted, all 
 who were as far as possible from being weary and 
 heavy laden, had not been swayed like the trees 
 in the wind. To such, and to those who honestly 
 abhorred the Calvinistic creed, and knew no other, 
 were now added a company of speculative minds, 
 that went forth, like the raven from the ark, over 
 the ocean of free inquiry, and too often, Like the 
 raven, returned no more. 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 IJnitarianism, viewed as !he doctrine of a Chris- 
 tian sect, had now uttered its voice. Men had heard 
 that it mattered not to their hope or love, whether 
 JeS-ufi were but the son of Joseph, or one higher 
 than archangels; that the ancient belief in the 
 Tririity was absurd and polytheistic ; that the pop- 
 ular conception of the atonement was to be boldly 
 compared with all things horrid, detestable, and 
 degrading ; that human nature needed nothing but 
 encouragement for the developement within itself 
 of all which is noble and divine; that "the Holy 
 Spirit is a divine assistance accordant with the 
 8* 
 
94 
 
 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 fundamental tmth that virtue is the mind's own 
 work," and that the word " hell," by a perverted 
 and exaggerated use, had done unspeakahie injury 
 to Christianity. 
 
 The bonds of fellowship with the body of Chris- 
 tians of the present age, as well as of all former 
 days, were sundered. There was no respeet for 
 modern creeds ; no reverence for the belief or ex- 
 ample of antiquity. The terror of authority was 
 now at an end. All were free, and Calvinism 
 could no longer embitter the enjoyments of life, 
 except for those who chose to put on its fetters. 
 Then the merits of the substitute began to claim 
 attention. When the negative warfare had been 
 pushed as far as could consist with any possible 
 construction of the Scriptures, it remained to be 
 seen whether the spirit of doubt would acknowl- 
 edge such a limit, and on.the other side^ whether 
 the human heart, craving " the substance of things 
 hoped for, the evidence of things unseen," could be 
 also satisfied. 
 
 For some local or accidental cause, the parish of 
 Charlton, in 1827 or 3828, fixed their eyes upon 
 Edward Turner, who was engaged in the propa- 
 gation of Universalism in another region of New 
 Englferid. He accepted their summons to become 
 their minister; the attending council, composed of 
 eight Unitarian ministers, Bancroft, Allen of North- 
 borough, Walker, Huntoon, Thompson, May, and 
 Osgood of Sterling, proposed no question con- 
 cerning his faith; and as the Universalists had 
 generally discarded the sacraments, he received 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 95 
 
 baptism from the hands of Bancroft on the very- 
 day of his installation. Through the Universalist 
 journals he announced that no change had oc- 
 curred in his opinions ; and that he still labored 
 for the same ends in the same spirit.' At the same 
 time, a not unmeaning union of two journals of the 
 more popular class, fusnished a wider token of 
 progress. The " Christian Inquirer" was a Uni- 
 tarian paper, published by Barnabas Bates, who 
 had been a Baptist minister, and afterwards achiev- 
 some notoriety in politics. The " Olive Branch " 
 was a Universalist paper of Abner Kneeland, who 
 was, a few years later, a convicted blasphemer and 
 an avowed Atheist. These two journals became 
 one in ] 828 ; and the first number after their 
 their union declared that " the great mass of Uni- 
 tarians, both in this country and in Europe, boldly 
 avowed their disbelief of eternal misery, and their 
 firm persuasion of the restoration of manlrind to 
 holiness and happiness." There was no longer a 
 bulwark between the Unitarians of Massachusetts 
 and that portion, at least of the Universalist body, 
 who denied only the eternity of retribution ; and 
 these were not known to the world as distinct from 
 that great mass who refused all thoughts of an ac- 
 count hereafter. 
 
 But this vicinity was perilous ; and there were 
 Unitarians who had not consented that Bates or 
 Turner should be their representative. To such 
 the more adventurous answered that the common 
 cause was not pledged by the language or the in- 
 quiries of individuals. A meeting-house had been 
 
96 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 built in Boston by some of the admirers of Hol- 
 ley ; and he was on his return from the south west, 
 when a tropical fever smote him, and he was buried 
 in the deep, Motte, a graduate of Cambridge, who 
 had received Episcopal orders, but afterwards em- 
 braced the Unitarian system, became their pastor ; 
 and the sermon at his ordination was preached by 
 Channing. But he spoke not now as at Balti- 
 more. " I am no organ of a sect," he said, "but 
 speak for myself alone ; " " what other men be- 
 lieve, is to me of little moment; " and, " were the 
 name of Unitarian more honored, I should be glad 
 to throw it off." In another ordination sermon of 
 his, preached also in 1828, the first person singular 
 of the personal pronoun was employed about a 
 hundred and forty limes ; and this little trait of 
 many Unitarian discourses disclosed the character 
 which they now . assumed ; the character of indi- 
 vidual speculations on man, on virtue, on religion, 
 and on the prospects of " the race." Lowell, whose 
 attitude, indeed, had always been the same, avowed 
 that he " neither took the name, nor belonged to 
 the party of those who designated themselves as 
 Unitarians f he preached of the Saviour as " an 
 inconceivably exalted Being," who " humbled him- 
 self, that by his obedience and death he might 
 make propitiation for the sins of mankind ; " and 
 he admitted, it was said, the eternity of punish- 
 ment.- But the " Unitarian Advocate" was estab- 
 lished by Sewall, in the Humanitarian cause ; and 
 the Socinian exposition of Kenrick was repub- 
 lished. Pierpont regarded the resurrection of the 
 
HISTORY OP NEW ENGLAND. 97 
 
 body as a a doctrine never taught by Christ, and 
 not at all demonstrated by his own resurrection ; 
 and would not oppose prayers for the intercession 
 of saints, nor for the departed, good or evil. The 
 correspondents of the Christian Examiner inter- 
 preted the judgment as entirely internal ; the last 
 day as the close of life ; and the resurrection as 
 " the instant event, by which man, as soon as he 
 passes from the body, enters the undisguised pres- 
 ence of God." They contended against the abuses 
 of attributing too much to the prayers of ministers, 
 or to public prayers and preaching at all ; and 
 against all superstitious and mystical conceptions 
 of the value of the Lord's supper. " As often," 
 said they, whether intending a paraphrase or an 
 improvement of the words of St. Paul, " as often 
 as we eat the bread and drink the cup, let us show 
 forth, with all affection and humility, the remem- 
 brance of Christ; and let us ever show forth the 
 same remembrance, by the imitation of his virtues." 
 The reasoning of the Epistle to the Hebrews, 
 which was denied to Paul, " could not," it was said, 
 in the same pages, "be regarded as of any force by 
 an intelligent reader of the present day ; " even the 
 reasoning of Paul would " not always bear a phi- 
 losophical scrutiny ; " the evangelists were " them- 
 selves allegorists," and had but " reported the words 
 of Christ from memory, and that not always with 
 perfect accuracy." 
 
 In 1827, Gilman had ventured to say of the 
 United States, that " for every single individual who 
 abandoned LTnitarianism, it was an undeniable fact 
 
98 
 
 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 that more than one whole congregation acceded to 
 the system ; and which," he added, " I see and feel, 
 will be the proportion of its progress to that of its 
 decline, for centuries to come." Many a parish, 
 indeed, was distracted by long and successful 
 measures, designed to wring irom the orthodox 
 pastors the relinquishment of their pulpits. But 
 scenes like these could only purify the orthodox 
 cause, and give intensity, clearness and directness 
 to its resistance. The " Spirit of the Pilgrims " 
 was a monthly journal, which arose, armed for the 
 conteist ; and so vigorous and timely were its blows, 
 that the joints in the armor of Unitarianism were 
 exposed, and every vulnerable part lay bare and 
 
 bleeding. 
 
 The Unitarians were not unwilling that the ardor 
 of the last few years should abate ; Frothingham 
 published in a sermon " A Plea against Religious 
 Controversy ; " Lowell, in another, insisted that 
 " The Clergy, and not Religion, was the Source of 
 Division and Strife in the Christian Church;" 
 even Dewey printed a discourse on sectarianism; 
 and a writer with the title of " Old Experience" 
 prefixed to a pamphlet, on " The Final Tendency 
 of the Religious Disputes of the Present Day," the 
 quaint motto, " There came a Viper out of the 
 Heat." An unsuccessful attempt was made by 
 Palfrey to introduce an English Bible corrected by 
 the text of Griesbach ; which would have ex- 
 cluded from the popular ear the disputed passage 
 in the first epistle of St. John. The annotations of 
 Dabney removed the pre-existence of the Saviour ; 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 99 
 
 the separate existence of the soul ; its life between 
 death and the resurrection ; the devil, " an allegori- 
 cal personage, the supposed cause of all evil ; " 
 the punishment of the wicked; the angels; and 
 the great judgment. Norton distinctly stated that 
 if a philosopher like Cicero had been convinced 
 that Christ was a messenger from God, and had 
 carefully collected and committed to writing all the 
 information which he could procure concerning 
 him subjoining his own explanations and remarks, 
 " the work, of such a writer would, as far as we can 
 judge, have been of at least equal value with any 
 book which remains to us of the New Testament." 
 The Christian Examiner denied that the epistle to 
 the Hebrews was in any sense canonical, affirming 
 that the author, unable to " distinguish clearly be- 
 tween realities and figures," had quite mistaken 
 the manner in which Jesus " sacrificed himself in 
 the cause of God and mankind." It described the 
 Apocalypse as a kind of glorious poem, expressing 
 " the approaching advent of Christ, and the triumph 
 of his religion," and " not prophetic of any particu- 
 lar transaction ; " and regarded the question, wheth- 
 er it was the work of the apostle John as " one of 
 the nicest in sacred criticism." On behalf of the 
 body of Unitarians, it disclaimed Universalism ; 
 yet supposed that future punishments "must be 
 corrective incentives to repentance and reform ; " 
 " every one receiving as much enjoyment or pain, 
 and for such a length of time, as he deserves and 
 needs for his moral improvement." It gloried in 
 the belief that religious truth could not be station- 
 
100 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 ary, and wished that the orthodox might but with- 
 hold the disputed doctrines from their children till 
 the age of mature judgment. For, "it looked 
 upon the Ca,lvinistic doctrine of hell • torments," 
 especially, « as, beyond all question, the most hor- 
 rible dogma ever conceived or uttered by man ; " 
 and, in a like spirit, Upham of Salem, alluding to 
 the fathers of New England, said, that " there was 
 a purity and sublimity in the religion of the un- 
 taught Indian, which could not but have exerted a 
 corrective and restraining influence upon the com- 
 plicated and gloomy doctrines towards which 
 Christians were then inclined." 
 
 When the younger Ware was called, in 1830, to 
 the chair of pastoral theology at Cambridge, he 
 was succeeded in the Second Church by Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson, the son of that Emerson, who, at 
 the head of the First Church, bad heralded the 
 dawn of Unitarianisra. In genius and splendor of 
 thought, the son outstripped the father ; and as far 
 as the father had advanced before his orthodox 
 progenitors, so far his simple denial of orthodoxy 
 was succeeded by the audacious speculations of 
 his son. The Christian Examiner of 1830 lament- 
 ed the injudicious use of the Old Testament; 
 "did not hesitate to say that many professed 
 Christians have nothing but the Hebrew re- 
 ligion ; " and would have it read as containing 
 the record of the Hebrew, not the Christian 
 faith, and fix the reverence of men as strongly 
 as possible upon the gospels, as the great treasury 
 of our religion." The energy with which the 
 
HISTORY OF NEAV ENGLAND. 101 
 
 champions of orthodoxy had charged upon the 
 Unitarians their departure from the faith of their 
 fathers, had struggled as for religion itself against 
 its adversaries, had questioned the legal decision 
 which deprived many of their churches of corpofate 
 rights, and had at length alluded to the political 
 claim which their numbers might urge, was the 
 occasion of fresh alarm. Year after year, the 
 learned and lucid, but too ardent Story, had ap- 
 peared at the meetings of the Unitarian Associa- 
 tion, and had a little tarnished the dignity of his 
 ermine, while he contended there for religious lib- 
 erty, as if it were menaced by a giant enemy. 
 The chief-justice of Massachusetts, too, had sus- 
 tained, as was believed, his own decision through 
 the pages of a Unitarian publication. Stung by 
 such opposition, Cooke, an orthodox ministe^of 
 some fire, ventured to draw the eyes of the com- 
 munity to the immense influence in political affairs 
 which had been yielded to the Unitarian minority ; 
 and his words were not. uttered in heedless ears. 
 A more commanding advocate appeared, when 
 Stuart addressed to Channing an indignant letter 
 on religious liberty, throwing back the flood of 
 popular innovation and invective. Whitman was 
 forward to present an answer, into which he had 
 gathered the scandal of villages and towns, with 
 little discrimination or delicacy. It could not be 
 hoped, however, that the liberal conception of re- 
 ligious freedom could be satisfied, till the orthodox 
 should yield their consent to a fraternal intercourse, 
 which would have been but a falsehood in action. 
 9 
 
102 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 The Divinity School at Cambridge was, in 1830, 
 Reorganized ; for the Society for the Promotion of 
 Theological Education resigned all its authority to 
 the coi-poration. Codman and a few others op- 
 posed the statutes which so effectually engrafted a 
 faculty of Unitarian divinity upon the university, 
 but they prevailed by a vote of thirty-four to 
 twelve. 
 
 It was a perfectly consistent reference, and yet it 
 was startling to hear from the Christian Examiner 
 in 1831, that if the Trinitarian doxology were " not 
 used by sincere and pious men, it would seem to 
 Unitarian ears very like blasphemy and polythe- 
 ism. Against the argument of Joanna Baillie, 
 herself an Arian, it maintained the slightness of the 
 difference between the Arian and the Humanita- 
 riai; At this time, Gannett began to edit the 
 " Scriptural Interpreter," and would gladly have 
 stayed that boldness in which the spirit of doubt 
 now walked abroad. Leaning as far towards the 
 substance of the orthodex hope as his hereditary 
 belief would permit, and often employing the lan- 
 guage which was most familiar to serious minds, 
 the 'younger Ware published a Work on the Chris- 
 tian Character, which ran rapidly through several 
 editions. It was reviewed by Adams, in " Remarks 
 on the Unitarian Belief;" but the wide welcome 
 by which it was met was a token of the deep long- 
 ing of many hearts for something more real than 
 negations, and more inward than an undistinguish- 
 ing liberality. All over the land, not seldom amidst 
 sti-ange and revolting scenes of fanaticism, the fires 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 103 
 
 of spiritual religion had been rekindled upon thou- 
 sands of altars. Men asked for a faith wjiich might 
 relieve the guilty conscience, and aflFord, the sub- 
 stantial assurance of peace beyond the grave. The 
 old Christianity, if it had its wonders, had tUem 
 because it spoke of such things as without it would 
 never have become the possession of the intellect. 
 The new Christianity, which labored to throw aside 
 all wonders, issued in the profoundest poverty, ex- 
 acting little from faith, but bestowing less ill return. 
 Its arguments had more often fixed an impression 
 that the opposite doctrines were unreasonable, than 
 a conviction that they were unscriptural. Minds 
 aroused to a solemn earnestness, and turning to the 
 word of God, often shook off at once the prejudices of 
 years, and submitted without hesitation to a system 
 which, at a more heedless period, they had been 
 willing to disclaim. Common sense revolted at 
 the manner in which the Scriptures were now com- 
 pelled to speak or to be silept. The imagination 
 felt itself imprisoned within a religion of cold and 
 ban-en generalities. The heart panted to see once 
 more the reconciling cross, and the incarnate God. 
 Gannett and Ware, and other virtuous men, en- 
 deavored to answer to these wants as well as they 
 might ; but the internal power of Unitariapism was 
 found to be insufficient to bind those together 
 whom chance,, rather than choice, had made its 
 adherents. The Trinitarian congregations swelled 
 while the Unitarian congregations decayed ; and 
 those whom they lost were commonly amongst the 
 more earnest of their members. There remained a 
 
104 PAGES 'from the ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 diminished number of devout persons, who had 
 never embraced the system, but were not persuaded 
 nor were not able, to leave the ancestral temples ; 
 a company of such as conscientiously doubted the 
 exact truth of orthodoxy, but wished to cling to the 
 Scriptures ; a few who delighted in bold and fanci- 
 ful speculations, and had little reverence for the 
 written word ; a multitude whose minds were 
 afloat on the billows of conjecture ; and a mass of 
 quiet worldliness, which moved on without desir- 
 ing any other faith than that which tasked least 
 the mind and the life, and yet promised " denique 
 coslumP 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 A NOBLE victim was he upon whom the genius 
 of doubt now alighted, bearing him aloft as with 
 the talons of an eagle. Ralph Waldo Emerson 
 was the lover of nature, of thought, of beauty, and 
 of all life. His style is the pellucid brook that 
 glides and ripples and smiles 
 
 " Through wood and mead, through shade and sun." 
 
 The doctrines of revelation had long since been 
 degraded from their supremacy ; the revelation it- 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 105 
 
 self had of late been cast forth as a prey to insin- 
 cere criticism or to eclectic speculation. Great 
 doctors of Unitarianisra had sought in the human 
 heart the standard by which all scriptural disclo- 
 sures should be tried ; had taught that it was biit 
 needful to educate and develope the greatness of 
 that inborn image of divinity in man, which is 
 truth ; that he could be essentially what Jesus was ; 
 and that this divine image, in every human being, 
 good or evil, was worthy of infinite reverence, of 
 such reverence in kind, if not in degree, as Unita- 
 rianism paid to the Son of God. Emerson, a Pla- 
 tonist, gave himself to this inward religion, and 
 cherished this divinity of humanity ; till the out- 
 ward gospel, with its doctrines and its ordinances, 
 seemed a perishing tabernacle, rfeady to fall around 
 the rising spirit. It had been the endeavor of 
 others to abrOagte all the special honor and impor- 
 tance of the sacraments. They were represented 
 as no more than other acts of public worship ; the 
 gate to the sanctuary was thrown open as wide as 
 the gate of the outer court ; they were but signifi- 
 cant rites, and indeed had now parted w^ith most of 
 their significance ; and still the people came not. 
 Beyond a doubt, in the judgment of Emerson, 
 their purpose had ceased; and he now proposed 
 to his congregation to drop the celebration of the 
 Lord's b upper. The* Second Church in Boston 
 was unprepared for this ; and its pastor, abandon- 
 ing his office, preserved his integrity. He relin- 
 quished Christianity for his world of dreams ; made 
 the transcendental philosophy undeservedly odious 
 9* 
 
106 PAGES FHOM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 by his unbelief, as it was made unjustly ridiculous 
 by a company of idle, half-thinking followers ; and 
 after a few years was the brilliant teacher of a vast 
 and wicked pantheism. 
 
 The Unitarian pastors were alarmed; and the 
 Unitarian publications strove to rebuild, and ral- 
 lied to what remained of scriptural belief. In the 
 pages of the Christian Examiner, Priestly and Bel- 
 sham were sacrificed, as having accomplished their 
 mission, and not at all representing the present 
 Unitarianism of America or of England. The 
 Universalist denial of all retribution was again at- 
 tacked, even by Whitman, and disclaimed by the 
 Examiner, w^hich even threw out a few words to 
 tell that the religion of the Old Testament was not 
 wholly without authority. Orthodoxy, in the mean- 
 while, was in peril from its old disease, the "incli- 
 nation to hard and captious metaphysics. Like a 
 millstone or a palsy, the strife between Taylor of 
 New Haven, and his opponents, weighed down 
 their common cause ; and while grave theologians 
 disputed on the philosophy of a revival, men slept, 
 as sleep they must, amidst such discussions. " The 
 Spirit of the Pilgrims " died ; the division took a 
 corporeal shape in Connecticut; clouds gathered 
 in the south, and around the head of Beecher at 
 Cincinnati; and Unitarianism pursued its way. 
 Norton published, in 1833, his " Statement of rea- 
 sons for not believing the doctrines of Trinitarians." 
 " It would no doubt occur;" he said, " to thinking 
 men as an objection to a publication of this sort, 
 that the doctrine of the Trinity was now to be 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 107 
 
 numbered among exploded errors ; that it was, in 
 truth, altogether an obsolete doctrine." But in 
 offering so amazing a statement, he as plainly- 
 severed himself from the society of theologians, 
 from the fellowship of Christians, and from the 
 tribunal of the Scriptures. For, it was "to the 
 great body of enlightened individuals in all coun- 
 tries, to the generality of those who on every sub- 
 ject but theology are the guides of public opinions," 
 that he deemed it so " incongruous to address an 
 argument against the Trinity ; " it was, he owned, 
 " still the professed faith of every established 
 church, and of every sect which made a creed its 
 bond of communion ; " and he maintained that as 
 the facts were essentially incredible, no evidence 
 could be sufficient. Evidence, indeed, would have 
 been idle with one who supposed that the apostles 
 had mistaken the very promise of the second 
 coming of their Lord ; who allowed no supernat- 
 ural influence, preserving them from error ; who 
 said that " supposing that Thomas had believed 
 and asserted that his' Master was God himself," in 
 the presence and with the approving benediction 
 of that Master, " there would be little reason for re- 
 lying upon his opinion as infallible." A writer in 
 the Christian Examiner of 1834, as if in mockery 
 of all confidence in the scriptural nan-ative, at- 
 tempted to exclude angels from the history of the 
 resurrection. He made his conjectures, that the 
 soldiers saw "the illustrious Author of our religion," 
 clathed in the white habiliments of the tomb, after 
 his resun-ection, and reported that they had seen an 
 
108 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 angel ; that he was also the person seen by the 
 women, and that they, imagined the white cloth 
 which he had thrown aside, to be another ; that the 
 two angels, at the head and the feet, where the 
 body had lain, were the two parts of the dress ; and 
 that Jesus found and put on the clothes of the 
 gardener, which caused the error of Mary Magda- 
 lene. Another succession of articles assailed the 
 authority of Moses and the prophets, Of the fall 
 they said, " it may be that facts were the materials 
 out of which Moses formed his pictures ; " " a ser- 
 pent may have eaten of the apple ; " but the con- 
 demnation of the serpent was deemed but " an em- 
 bellishment of the style." They relinquished all 
 prophecies of a Messiah, and held the interpreta- 
 tions of the apostles to be erroneous. " That Jesus 
 was the Messiah," they calmly said, " in the sense 
 in which he claimed, to be so, we are far from dis- 
 puting;" but "the language of the prophets, in 
 the sense which we have reason to suppose that 
 they assigned to it, gives us no intimations of a 
 suffering, dying Messiah, or one who should rise 
 from the dead, and no clear and proper predic- 
 tions, which were fulfilled in Jesus personally." 
 With a confidence which seemed as if it would 
 build a tower to heaven, they said, " we deny not 
 only that there are three persons in the Godhead, 
 and but one God, but we deny entirely the possi- 
 bility of such a thing." For such antagonists it 
 was in vain that Winslow should write his dis- 
 courses on the Trinity, and it would have been in 
 vain that an apostie or an angel should have 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 109 
 
 written. Cheever wrote also, and with a pen of 
 fire; with bold directness and solemn denuncia- 
 tion ; and Withington, in the Literary and Theo- 
 logical Review, with admirable keenness exposed 
 the religious barrenness and vacancy, left by all the 
 speculative eloquence of Channing. 
 
 Amidst all the progress of the liberal doctrine, 
 its more earnest adherents could not but feel that it 
 was neither becoming the religion of the mass, nor 
 even securing for itself a lasting establishment ; 
 that neither for the many nor for the few had it 
 reared that structure of enlightened and practical 
 Christianity, whose foundations it had long since 
 laid with anticipations so triumphant. The ortho- 
 dox parishes were still far more numerous, and far 
 more zealous. Sects had penetrated to all the 
 more populous spots ; and, when the attachment 
 to the hereditary place of worship was once sup- 
 planted, the cool and refined Unitarian could not 
 well maintain the contest, among plain men, 
 against the glowing Methodist on one side, or the 
 downright Universalist on the other. The suspi- 
 cion, too, which once, when it withheld the Chris- 
 tian name, or spoke of secret infidelity, had been 
 thrown back with an indignation which the public 
 mind might have approved, now had but too ap- 
 parent a sanction from the writings and career of 
 individuals. It was well remembered that Unita- 
 rianism had found entrance, not by open attacks 
 on the doctrine of the Trinity, but silently, after the 
 authority of creeds and confessions had been 
 shaken. It was now asked whether Deism might 
 
110 
 
 PAGES FEOM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 not enter by the same path, not openly attacking 
 the divine mission of Christ, but gliding quietly 
 even into the pulpit, and into the chair of the pro- 
 fessor, after the authority of the Scriptures had 
 been overthrown. There was no libel in the ques- 
 tion ; such had been the victory of doubt in other 
 lands ; and no man could deny that it was,a natural 
 and easy issue. Amongst the Unitarians there 
 were those who perceived that they could not long 
 preserve the character of a Christian sect, except 
 they should rally firmly around some positive 
 truths, and either recall or renounce their more ad- 
 venturous companions. The Christian Examiner 
 of 1835, steove to resume the tone of the believer ; 
 and some of its writers delineated the Unitarian 
 doctrine as only what no doubt it was in the minds 
 of many of the Unitarian congregations, a refusal 
 to acquiesce in the orthodox assertions of the ab- 
 solute deity of the Son, the personality of the Holy 
 Ghost, the inborn corruption of nature, and the 
 substitution in the atonement. But all who united 
 in denying the Trinity were still but one body ; 
 and the principle of doubt was the moving impulse 
 from the begining. A strong swimmer may resist 
 the current, and even gain the land, but the river 
 sweeps on. 
 
 More and more clearly, in the sight of the watch- 
 ful observer, the Unitarian party mingled within 
 itself three classes, bound together only by the lie 
 of a common unbelief; and the continuance of 
 their union was a proof that this unbelief was no 
 less than the original soul of the party.' The first 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. Ill 
 
 class was composed of men who seriously relied 
 on the facts of the gospel^ on the genered authority 
 of the Bible, and on the full reality of a divine re- 
 velation ; but so interpreted all as to escape the 
 doctrines which their reason persuaded them to re- 
 ject The second class denied the orthodox doc- 
 trines, but leaned firmly on nothing: the abler, 
 opening their minds to light from every side, the 
 feebler following the abler ; while no book of the 
 Scriptures, no conception of inspiration, no truth 
 of the Apostles' Creed, was deemed secure amidst 
 the progress of unchecked inquiry. The third 
 class only adhered to Unitarian Christianity, as it 
 was that Christianity which demanded least; and 
 adhered to Christianity at all, only as to the holiest 
 of all the forms, in which "the divinity within " 
 had clothed itself ; a milder Judaism, a purer Ma- 
 hometanism, a more religious Platonism. The 
 third cjass now relinquished the miracles of the 
 Scriptures ; many of the second knew not Which 
 to sustain, and which to abandon ; while the first 
 frowned, but frowned gently and fraternally. Dew- 
 ey, who seemed to hover where the first lost 
 itself in the second, directed the Dudleian Lecture. 
 which he preached in 1S36, against the opinion of 
 those who supposed a presumption against mii'a- 
 cles. The articles in the Christian Examiner now 
 bore the initials of their writers; and Ripley con- 
 tended through its pages that miracles, which he 
 did not deny, were yet not a support on which re- 
 ligion could rely ; affirming that the miracles' re- 
 corded in the Bible were not wrought as testimo- 
 
112 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 nies to truth, but as incentives to action. His 
 conception of the apostles, too, was that they only 
 possessed in a larger measure, " the spontaneous 
 inspiration of the Spirit." 
 
 The Unitarian doctrine shut out its professors 
 from fellowship with other religious bodies in the 
 propagation of the gospel. They were too few to 
 attempt alone any extended missions ; and their 
 view of the natural state of mankind was not such 
 as to awaken zealous efforts and sacrifices for the 
 heathen. Even in their pulpit discourses, the al- 
 most entire absence of doctrine, and the want of 
 confidence in the statements of the Scriptures, left 
 a barrenness which fine writing, or eloquence, or 
 sensibility, could hardly malce fruitful. To vary 
 the tediousness of the desk, more animating topics, 
 even though somewhat secular, were presented; 
 and the age produced an order of philanthropic 
 movements, in which the ardor for good deeds 
 could be satisfied, without the assertion of one or 
 another religious sentiment. Channing was the 
 philosopher of peace, and the prophetic arbiter in 
 the great moral question which agitated the repub- 
 lic. Pierpont threw himself into the forlorn hope 
 of the onset for temperance; and w^ith a gallant 
 rashness inflamed against himself half of a congre- 
 gation, whose craft was supposed to be in danger. 
 May was a leader in that host of many banners, 
 which marched against southern slavery. Unita- 
 rians gave their patronage to the improvement of 
 the long neglected mariner ; Unitarians were fore- 
 most in lectures and lyceums ; Unitarians planted 
 
HistoRY OP New ENGLAtib. 113 
 
 elegant cetiieteries; UnitariattS pitied the blind, the 
 deaf, the maniac, and the prisoner, not mol-e in- 
 deed than they were pitied by Christians -vvho had 
 creeds, but with a compassion which, because it 
 ■was confined to temporal sufferings, seemed there 
 the more radiant and generolis. 
 
 Tn 1837, the translation of the Prophets, by 
 Noyes of Petersham, was completed, a work of 
 more ambition thati ability ; discussing the style of 
 the Old Testament with the irreverence of an un- 
 believing critic, and so explaining the predictions 
 that the testimony of Jesus should not be the spirit 
 of prophecy. The treatise of Norton on the Gen- 
 uineness of the Gospels, the fruit of many years 
 and great learning, began also to appear, volume 
 by volume. It threw aside the first twb chapters 
 of Matthew ; yet seerned to admit the miraculous 
 conception, but not the pre-existence of Christ; 
 described the first two chapters of Luke as having 
 " a fabulous hue ; " spolce of miracles and fictibhs 
 as blended in the narrative, of the errors of Mark 
 and the mistakes of Luke ; rejected the accounts 
 of the repentance and suicide of Judas, of the res- 
 urrection of the saints at Jerusalem, and of the 
 woman taken in adultery ; stispected the taention 
 of the angel that strengthened Christ in his agony, 
 and the conclusion of the gospel of John ; and then 
 ably maintained the genuineness of the residue, as 
 the narratives of just, honest, and credible, but by 
 no means inspired writers. Furness also of Phila- 
 delphia produced a book on the Four Gospels, 
 which he chose afterwards to name " Jesus and his 
 10 
 
114 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 Biographers." Ripley addressed to doubters, ]>is- 
 courses on the Philosophy of Religion. Follen, 
 too, that admirable German, who adorned his 
 adopted land by his genius and his benevolence, 
 wrote on religion and the church ; and a very re- 
 markable st£ir shot up the horizon of letters. This 
 was Orestes A. Brownson, who, having once been 
 a minister, had become an unbeliever ; had been 
 recalled by the writings of Channing, and re- 
 entered the pulpit, with scarcely any other doc- 
 trine, as he declared at a later period, than those of 
 " the divinity of humanity, and the brotherhood of 
 the race ; " and had now commenced that strange 
 succession of transitions in which he passed, al- 
 ways startling mankind, always complaining that 
 he was misunderstood, always bold, logical, inde- 
 fatigable, down to the surrender of his office, and 
 even to a fierce assault upon the church and the 
 priesthood, and then upward, step by step, to a 
 kind of orthodoxy and to the bosom of the Church 
 of Rome. He now issued his New Views of 
 Christianity, Society and the Church, which were 
 followed, from time to time, by other new views, 
 till he required a quarterly publication of his own, 
 to be the chronicle of his progress. 
 
HISTORY OP NEW ENGLAND. 115 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 So proudly pantheistic was the transcendentalism 
 of which Emerson was the head, and Ripley no 
 timid representative, that the younger Ware pre- 
 pared a sermon for the College Chapel, on the 
 Personality of the Deity; which was printed by 
 the request of the students in divinityl It was 
 probably the first occasion since the apostles sepa- 
 rated at Jerusalem, on which an argument on such 
 a topic had been offered as a Christian sermon. 
 The school, with its rhysticism, was not daunted ; 
 and in 1839, Norton appeared as its opponent ; 
 appeared, with a distinctness and a vehemence 
 w^hich told how one may be w^illing to die in the 
 last ditch who has himself abandoned every other 
 defence, and there or nowhere must fight valiantly. 
 The title of his discourse was " The Latest Form 
 of Infidelity." It drew from Ripley a copious re- 
 ply, to which Norton added a rejoinder. The Uni- 
 tarian cause could not, without seeming injustice, 
 disown the offspring which it had borne and nour- 
 ished ; nor could the zeal of Norton convince man- 
 kind that his opinions and those of his adversary 
 were as widely separated as infidelity and the be- 
 lief of a Christian. The exegetical learning of 
 Cambridge was upheld by Palfrey, through his 
 works on the Old Testament; but none, except 
 Norton, rivalled the laborious studies of Stuart and 
 
116 PAaBS FEOM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 his associates at Andover. Gannett, in a sermon 
 entitled " Unitarian Christianity, what it is, and 
 what is not," claimed to be its faithful representa- 
 tive ; and accordingly Adams addressed to him a 
 letter on his Tract on the Atonement. Of the posi- 
 tive creed of Unitarians, as it was ejsevfhere given 
 ty Qfipnett, the only parts which are peculiarly 
 ChrisJiaiT, are these t " We believe in the divine 
 mission pf Jesus Christ, in Ipis, miracles, his perfect 
 character, his authoritative teaching, his -w^lpntary 
 d>eath and his ^ijaniphant resurre;ctiq!i." " "We be- 
 lieve in the 3izth|0rity 3^96^ sufficiency of the Scrip- 
 tuires ii% respect tp Jfaith p^p4 practice" A "-spirit- 
 ual judgment,", ;£^i;id" the importance of a deep and 
 pie?roa,nent change in tbein wbp lead vipipus or 
 carelp.9^ lives," were also all^weiij- and professed ; 
 and UTOtariajaigipa would hind itself to nothing 
 more, 
 
 ^or something more, ho\vever, and something 
 
 Riore kindling, the humEin soul would long with a 
 
 desir? which at times was irrepressible. The noble 
 
 fruitft of faith were not ^een springing up beneath 
 
 the dews of a doctrine so indefinite. Transcendr 
 
 entalisro, with all its weakness and excess, was in 
 
 part the eiRjrt of more thonghtful minds to breathe 
 
 into their system a more inward and unworfdly 
 
 nature, Ita Writjersj with a peculiar independence, 
 
 described the barrenness of the public belief, and 
 
 emphatically the barrenness of Unitarianism. The 
 
 rural church, with its few worshippers; the sJppder 
 
 and often diminishing company at the sacramental 
 
 table ; the absorbing love of wealth and pf the 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 117 
 
 world, which reigned amongst the busy ; the indif- 
 ference to religion and its institutions amongst the 
 more educated ; the want of power to penetrate, 
 and of fire to enkindle the mass ; were adduced 
 even in testimony that the day for these forms had 
 passed, and that religion must seelc new life from 
 the realm of transcendental truth, the resplendent 
 sun within. At such a time, Channing was called 
 to write on " the Power of Unitarian Christianity 
 to produce an enlightened and fervent Piety." His 
 light was now sinking towards the west ; and as 
 he approached the eternal world, it seemed as if he 
 would grasp more firmly what remained to him of 
 the faith, and vindicate the claim of Unitarianism 
 to those Christian honors which were menaced 
 alike by its adversaries and its children. 
 
 Ripley, in the meantime, had withdrawn him- 
 self so far into the inner circle of speculation, that 
 a Christian parish and pulpit could no longer satisfy 
 or be satisfied. He retired to a kind of half coeno- 
 bite, half socialist community, which attempted to 
 form its spiritual paradise, not in some " deep soli- 
 tudes and awful cells," but in the pleasant town of 
 Roxbury, fast by the metropolis. A bolder and 
 more successful spirit stood there at their side, and 
 shrunk not from the forms of the parish and the 
 pulpit. Theodore Parker was the minister of the 
 Second Society in Roxbury. At the ordination of 
 Shackford at South Boston, he was the preacher; 
 and his theme was the Transient and the Perma- 
 nent in Christianity. He feared not to reject, re- 
 vile, and blaspheme whatever is supernatural in 
 10* 
 
118 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 the scriptural history; regarding the Olcl Testa- 
 ment as a pile of gorgeous pictures, the Nevy as 
 filled with mistaken legends and opinions which 
 time had washed away ; and Jesus Christ as only 
 such a person as others might be and yet may be 
 if the divinity within them be but enough revealed . 
 The congregation listened with awe ; the elder 
 Unitarian pastors lookfed one another in the face ; 
 but the earth opened not, and the ordination went 
 on. Boston, however, was moved ; the public 
 voice demanded from Unitarianism the disavowal 
 of results like these. But freedom and progress 
 had been from the beginning the watchwords of 
 the liberal party; and Parker had but advanced 
 beyond his brethren, and uttered his thoughts with 
 the boldest liberty. They bad ever abhorred and 
 utterly rejected the restraint of a creed.; and only 
 by a creed, however general it were, could any bar- 
 rier be placed between themselves and the una- 
 bashed scorner. They had performed with him 
 the solemn and sacred act by which a human be- 
 ing had been separated for the ministration of the 
 word and sacraments ; and they were fettered by 
 their own custom of asking no questions at such a 
 season. Some members of the ordaining council 
 disclaimed through the press all fellowship with 
 the doctrine of the preacher. But the lustre which 
 surrounds the daring of unbelief at once enveloped 
 the head of Parker ; and, before a cultivated au- 
 dience in Boston, he unfolded, more at length, in 
 a succession of lectures, his sentiments on " mat- 
 ters pertaining to religion." The vastest charity, 
 
HISTORY OP NEW ENGLAND. 119 
 
 the wildest indifference, could not bestow the Christ- 
 tian name upon his Theism ; and at length the as- 
 sociation of the Unitarian clergy of Boston directly 
 refused him the usual token of fellowship, admis- 
 sion to their pulpijs. They were denounced by 
 Parker for their honorable inconsistency ; and one 
 of them who was employed as a minister at large, 
 relinquished his place, because he could xiot acqui- 
 esce in the justice of the exclusion; while another, 
 who had gathered a peculiar congregation for a pe- 
 culiar worship, as if men who were seeking a deep- 
 er and more spiritual life, still welcomed the mar- 
 tyrs of free thought to his assembly. 
 
 In 1843, a letter was addressed by Brownson to 
 Channing as his spiritual father, in which he de- 
 clared the insufficiency, for the heart and for the 
 truth, of a religion without a mediation, and plung- 
 ed, in his own manner indeed, into the depths of 
 the ancient doctrine. It was almost the last voice 
 which came to the ear of Channing. He visited 
 the valleys of Berkshire, and it was at Lenox, on 
 the anniversary of West Indian emancipation, that 
 he spoke for the last time to an assembly of his 
 fellow-men. As if through all his. negations, a 
 gleam from the heaven of truth had shot in at sun- 
 set, he said that '* the doctrine of the Word made 
 flesh, shows us God uniting himself most intimate- 
 ly with our nature, manifesting himself in a human 
 form, for the very end of making us partakers of 
 his own perfection." " The doctrine of grace, as it 
 is termed," he said, " reveals the Infinite Father im- 
 parting his Holy Spirit, the best gift he can impart, 
 
120 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 to the humblest human being who implores it" In 
 the concluding paragraph, he uttered what, as a 
 rhetorical apostrophe, would be almost profane, and 
 as a prayer, would be at variance with the efforts 
 of his life, " Come, Friend and Saviour of the race, 
 who didst shed thy blood on the cross, to reconcile 
 man to man, and earth to heaven ! " A few days 
 after, he died at Bennington. 
 
 In 1843, followed the death of the younger Ware 
 and of Greenwood. These jewels that had glitter- 
 ed in the crown of liberal religion had mostly fallen 
 from their places. The Bancrofts, Thayers, and 
 Freemans of an earlier day slept with their fathers. 
 Buckminster and Thacher passed away in their 
 youth ; Kirkland and Cbanning and the elder 
 Ware, after lives of honored service. FoUen 
 perished on that fearful night, when the frozen 
 waters of Long Island gave back the blaze of the 
 Lexington. Holley, Greenwood, the younger 
 Ware, names that once spoke enchantment or con- 
 solation, were now but memorials of eloquence, 
 taste, and pastoral earnestness. The brilliant 
 scholar, the accomplished orator, the successful 
 statesman, the dignified chief magistrate, the am- 
 . bassador whom princes and universities delighted 
 to honor, had almost erased the recollection that 
 Everett had once been a Unitarian pastor. Sparks 
 had occupied his best years in raising monuments 
 to the worthies of his country. Palfrey, too, had 
 withdrawn from the pulpit to a secular office. 
 Colman became a popular writer and lecturer on 
 agriculture. After a desolating contest with an 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGJiAND. 121 
 
 imbittqred people, Pierpont retired from the capital. 
 Emerson had relinquised even the forins and lan- 
 guage of Christianity, Brownson was a member 
 of the Roman Ca,tholic communion. Parke? was 
 a mere unbeliever. The faith of NortpiJ seemed to 
 embrace nothing beyond the substanti,al genuine- 
 ness of the four gospels, as uninspired biographies 
 of a holy man whoiri no prophej; had foretold and 
 no angel had attended. But Unitarian pulpits 
 were still occupied by men of scholarship and taste ; 
 and it was not easy to find elsewhere the gorgeous 
 diction of Dewey, or the , sustained manliness and 
 feeling of Putnam. The Christian Examiner stiU 
 pursued its way, reconciling, with ability, the ip- 
 ternal contrasts that could not be disguised ; and 
 pushipg the practical efforts whicli somewhat balr 
 anced the former excess of negation, and gave to 
 Unitarianism more than ever an air pf religipus re- 
 ality. 
 
 About one hundred and thirty Unitarian congre - 
 gations now existed in Massachusetts. "VYhen the 
 few which were found in the. larger tpwns of the 
 neighboring States were added to these, the whole 
 number might rise to two hundred. Of ninety-one 
 religious assemblies in Boston, seveiiteeri weye 
 Unitarian, four were UniversaUst, one was com- 
 posed of Swedcnbprgians, and one of that sect 
 which refuses any other name than that of Chris- 
 tian. In all the others, the Father, Son and Holy 
 Ghost, three persons and one God, were worship- 
 ed and glorified. The orthodox; churches of the 
 Congregational body in Boston were eleven ; in 
 
122 
 
 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 the Commonwealth, more than two hundred and 
 fifty. But hardly twenty of the Unitarian congre- 
 gations in Massachusetts were Unitarian in their 
 origin. In all the rest, the founders and fathers 
 had adored that very Trinity, whose Godhead the 
 children denied. 
 
 The University at Cambridge had chiefly Unita- 
 rian professors, fellows, trustees and patrons. It 
 was no more the high school of the Common- 
 wealth ; it had pierced the very bosom of that 
 church which gave it life, and which so long had 
 nourished it in the hope offilial gratitude and ser- 
 vice. The Divinity School, which hung to it like 
 an adopted child with the features of a stranger, was 
 feeble and flighty; but sufficient to replenish the 
 narrow domain of liberal Christianity with its an- 
 nual refreshment. Signs were not wanting of the 
 near or remote approach of a revolution which the 
 will of the people could at any election of their 
 magistrates, effect with ease ; and the stately uni- 
 versity bowed her head to more than one sect to 
 propitiate hands which were able to strike the blow- 
 It was now a common saying that the doctrinal 
 system of Unitarianism was indefinable and form- 
 less, because it prescribed no standard of agree- 
 ment amongst its adherents. The besieger might 
 batter down the common wall ; but within, as at 
 Sarragossa, every square and house could sustain 
 the contest with its own private defences. Time, 
 however, which levels all things, had smoothed the 
 peculiarities of individual belief, and the outline of 
 ideal Unitarianism, of that Unilarianism which com- 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 123 
 
 manded the assent of the liberal ministry, was not 
 indistinctly visible. Peirker had said, and said in 
 friendship and as a Unitarian, and without reply, 
 that it differed from the Christianity of some earlier 
 ages, more than Mahomet from the Messiah. It 
 was indeed, if it were viewed as a form of Christi- 
 tianity, a form which acknowledged itself to be 
 without a precedent. It abhorred the doctrines of 
 Luther and Calvin, and could hardly find common 
 sense in five of the Thirty-nine Articles. It had no 
 fellowship wiih the catholicity of the middle ages, 
 when the centre of all rites and formularies was still 
 a cross that had a meaning. Except in a single de- 
 nial, it could as little bear the society of Arius as 
 of Athanasius. It could not deign to seek its 
 kindred amongst the obscurer sects of the earlier 
 times ; with Cerinthus or the Ebionites. It ac- 
 knowledged no authority, and found no pleasure, 
 in the theology of the apostolic epistles. It confid- 
 ed in no predictions of the prophets. It rejected 
 the primeval history. Its honors were almost con- 
 fined to the chief events in the life of Jesus, ahd to 
 his discourses ; and as it doubted all the narrative 
 of his birth, the agency of angels, the existence of 
 evil spirits, and the accuracy of the recollection of 
 the writers wherever it could have desired that they 
 might have erred, even this inmost oracle retvurned 
 an uncertain answer. But the sole standard, the 
 tribunal of appeal, to which the faith of the Unitari- 
 an body promised allegiance, was the record of the 
 example and instructions of Jesus of Nazareth, so 
 far as these had been correctly understood, remem- 
 
124 PAGES FROM THE ECCLESIASTICAL 
 
 bered and Reported by the evafigelists and their in- 
 forttiers. 
 
 Thedoctfiiie of the Unitarian ministry affirmed 
 that Jesus was a teacher divinely appointed ; that 
 he wielded a conirol over external nature ; that, at 
 the close of a sJDOtlesg life, he sealed his mission 
 with his blood ; and that he re-appeared on the third 
 day after his crucifixion, as a pledge of human im- 
 mortality. It afflfmed no more. It denied nfit, 
 indeed, a,ll Which its followers neithet taught nor be- 
 lieved. Such of them as cared to ptfeserVe one, or 
 another, or even a considerable mass of the ancient 
 doctrine of the universal church, were left to their 
 private liberty, with even more indulgence than 
 such as denied the miracles themselves, or doubt- 
 ed the perfection of the character of Jesus. The 
 one bond of union amongst the liberal teachers 
 was the denial of a threefold distinction in the God- 
 head. But as a body of men, they believed neither 
 the personal existence of the Son of God before 
 his incarnation, nor, of tiOlirse, his persbnal incarna- 
 tion itself ; neither that the prophets had predicted 
 a Messiah, nor, of course, that he was the predicted 
 Messiah ; neither the fall of man through the temp- 
 tation of the serpent; nor that he Was that seed of 
 the woman who was to bruise the head of the ser- 
 pent. They derided the hereditary corruption of 
 nature. They denied the necessity of a Mediator. 
 They could nbt find words to titter their detestation 
 of the thought of a Redeemer, who should be a 
 substitute and a propitiation. Thejr rejected every 
 mysterious dependence of the forgiveness of siris on 
 
HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. 125 
 
 the blood of the atonement They knew of no 
 Holy Spirit, beyond a stronger and fflore suatained 
 action of the universal power which dwells in in- 
 tellectual beings, and is divinity in mara. They as- 
 cribed no inspiration and no decisive authority to 
 the writers of the Old or the New Testanaent. They 
 acknowledged in the sacraments no special sacred- 
 ness, significance or efficacy. They snarled at the 
 transmitted claims of any or every church and min- 
 istry. They doubted the assistance and the exis- 
 tence of angels; they disbelierved the hostility and 
 the existence of devils. They relinquished the in- 
 termediate state of the soul, and the resurrection of 
 the body. They deemed the second advent and 
 the judgment, figures of rhetoric. They extended 
 the grasp of cordial fellowship to the sect which de- 
 clares the just and the unjust, blessed alike in death ; 
 and they expressly denied all infliction in the life to 
 come, except such as a gracious Father may em- 
 ploy for the recovery of his erring children. Of all 
 the doctrines which distinguish the Christian reli- 
 gion, there remained only the divine mission of 
 Jesus. His exercise of miraculous power, and his 
 resurrection were facts of history. About these two 
 facts and this one doctrine men lingered, as if 
 around two majestic columns, sustaining a broken 
 architrave, the only fragments of some once perfect 
 and resplendent temple. At length the spirit of 
 improvement prompted the question, whether the 
 ground should not be cleared, that it might be the 
 site of a new and nobler edifice. The answer was 
 11 
 
126 PAGES, &C. -i'i..c 
 
 heard from the spade and the pickaxe of transcen- 
 dental impiety. 
 
 So, through the passage of a century, doubt had 
 struggled, and conquered, and prevailed. It began 
 with silence on some of the more mysterious doc- 
 trines of Christianity ; it ended with a denial of all 
 its doctrines save one. It began \^th an appeal 
 frOm human creeds to the simple language of inspi- 
 ration; it ended with denying the inspiration, and 
 discarding ihe language. At first, infusing itself 
 into upright minds, with the air of scriptural in- 
 quiry, it caused a theological mistake ; then, spread- 
 ing the shining mist of liberality over the cold, the 
 vain, the worldly, the timid, the presumptuous, it 
 nourished a stupendous heresy ; and finally, forcing 
 a bolder order of thinkers back upon themselves, it 
 issued in a wilderness of popular unbelief. But 
 the spirit which loves to doubt can but depart, by 
 its very nature, farther and farther from the high re- 
 gions of celestial faith. He who sees the flakes of 
 snow gathering along the tide of the humblest Al- 
 pine brook, well knows that, though kingdoms lie 
 between, they must descend till they reach the sea. 
 
Cornell University Library 
 BR530 .B95 
 
 olln 
 
 3 1924 029 254 426