Unitarianism

by W. G. Tarrant

ENGLISH UNITARIANISM RECOGNIZED BY LAW

By a mere coincidence the British and Foreign Unitarian Association was founded almost on the same day in 1825 as the American Unitarian Association. This step evidently implies a great change in Unitarian affairs since the times of that early Dissent towards which attention has been previously directed. We must now endeavour to trace the change in detail.

It will be remembered that tendencies to Anti-trinitarian thought—using that term to cover all the varieties of heretical opinion on the subject—were manifested both within the established Church and without. As regards the latter phase, the evidence is clear that, whatever the doctrinal 'subscription' was worth which Dissenting preachers had to make, there was a decided lapse from the orthodox standard on the part of a considerable number. This lapse, however, was for the most part left obscure while the pulpits resounded with 'plain, moral discourses.' Now and again, one bolder than the rest ventured to discuss controverted points of doctrine. Such a man was Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), whose career is interesting as an illustration of the growth of opinion, and especially important in regard to the denominational advance of Unitarianism. He began life as a Calvinistic Independent, and became Arminian, Arian, and Humanitarian in turn. His devotion to science is well known, and he ranks with Lavoisier as an original discoverer of oxygen. He was an indefatigable student, a voluminous writer, a ready controversialist; and though his speaking was marred by imperfect utterance he attained to considerable influence in public address. No Unitarian leader hitherto has displayed more activity, and few, if any, have possessed greater controversial ability than he. His opinions, indeed, were in some respects peculiar to himself; he called himself a Socinian, but it was with a difference, and no Unitarian to-day would endorse some of his main positions. But his work for the cause was invaluable, and his personal character is held in the highest esteem. Originally he would have preferred that the Unitarians should remain as a 'liberal leaven' in the churches; eventually he became the chief organizer of Unitarian worship and propaganda.

The first 'Unitarian Church,' however, was due to a clergyman, Theophilus Lindsey (1723-1808). After long and arduous efforts to secure relaxation from the doctrinal subscription imposed on the clergy, Lindsey resigned his living at Catterick, in 1773, facing poverty and hardship with a courage that elicited warm commendations, though few were found to imitate the example. In spite of the terrors of the law, now becoming a dead letter, he opened a Unitarian chapel in Essex Street, London, in 1774. The service was on the episcopal model, but with a liturgy adapted to 'the worship of the Father only.' This feature has been claimed to be the distinctive characteristic of modern Unitarianism. It will be remembered that Socinus inculcated a sort of subordinate worship of Christ, and the Arians of course held to the same practice, Humanitarianism, the view that Jesus Christ was truly a man and in no sense a deity, obviously made it impossible to offer him the adoration due to God alone. This view had been slowly spreading since the days of Lardner; Priestley, Lindsey, and the active men of the party generally shared it. There were exceptions still, however. Dr. Richard Price (1723-91), a London Presbyterian divine of great eminence, remembered as one of the founders of actuarial science, held by his Arianism to the last; this did not prevent him from lending a hand in the organization of the Unitarian forces, but there was for a time some difficulty on the subject. The more ardent professors of the new doctrine of 'the sole worship of the Father' were for excluding the Arians from fellowship, and one of the societies then formed actually adhered to a rather offensive formula on the subject till about 1830.

A considerable number of liberal Churchmen of the laity, including some of rank, supported Lindsey's movement. An indication of changing moods is given in the fact that in 1770 an Act was passed permitting the Dissenting ministers to preach provided that they made a declaration of belief in the Scriptures as containing the revealed will of God. This was considered by many a welcome relief from the requirement of the Toleration Act that the minister must subscribe to the doctrinal articles of the established Church, and it was certainly a much less definite test. Priestley, for his part, however, regretted the change; the old subscription was in reality ceasing to be enforced, and he was afraid lest persecuting vigilance would set in again. As a matter of fact, the Act of 1779, long obsolete, has never been repealed, but very few people are aware of its existence. Priestley's many controversies tended to excite a good deal of interest, some of it more than unfriendly, in the new movement. In 1791, when a party of Unitarians dined at Birmingham in celebration of the French Revolution, serious riots broke out, and Priestley, who was then minister of the New Meeting there, was made a principal victim though he was not one of the diners. His house and library were burned, and he barely escaped the violence of the mob. Other residences were also destroyed, and the Old and New Meetings were burnt down. Ultimately, in 1794, Priestley sought asylum in America from the ill-will that pursued him even in London. Bishop Horsley, one of his sturdiest opponents in controversy, said, 'the patriarch of the sect is fled.'

It was earlier in the same year that the first organized Unitarian propaganda took shape in a Unitarian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. District unions were soon formed, and in 1806 a Unitarian Fund was raised by means of which the first itinerant missionary of the body, Richard Wright (1764-1836), was sent literally from end to end of Great Britain. In 1813, Unitarians were set free from legal penalties by the repeal, so far as they were concerned, of the exceptive clauses of the Toleration Act, this relief coming twenty years after Charles James Fox had tried to secure it for them. The member who was successful was Mr. William Smith, who sat for Norwich, and whose granddaughter was Florence Nightingale. In 1819 an Association was founded to protect and extend the Civil Rights of Unitarians. It was by combining the three societies—the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the Fund, and Civil Rights Society, that the British and Foreign Unitarian Association was formed, as has been said, in 1825.

In order to understand fairly the scope and spirit of that earlier Unitarian period, thus at last organized in full legal recognition, though still suffering from the prejudice inevitably created by more than a century of legal condemnation, a few salient points should be kept in view. First, the heterogeneous elements in the 'body,' if it could be called such, were a source of weakness in regard to united action. Instead of belonging, as their American brethren did, to one ecclesiastical group, and that the dominant one, the English Unitarians included Dissenters of different tendencies and traditions, with a few recruits from the State Church. The 'Presbyterian' congregations, as they were not very strictly called, were the backbone of the 'body'; many of these, however, were very weak, and in the course of a few decades some were destined to follow those which had died out in the eighteenth century. Converts not infrequently lent new force in the pulpit, but at the risk of substituting an eager missionary spirit for the usual staid decorum of the old families. In these the ideals of breadth, simplicity, and moral excellence were stronger than the desire, natural in a convert, to win the world to one's opinion.

Again, it must be borne in mind that then, as generally, there were men whose thoughts ran ahead of those of the majority. Priestley, for example, while adhering to the idea that the Christian revelation had been guaranteed by miracles, had abandoned belief in the Virgin birth as early as 1784, and went so far as to maintain that Jesus was not impeccable and had certainly entertained erroneous ideas about demoniacal possession. Probably there were very few who had arrived at these conclusions even thirty years later; some Unitarians repudiated them at a much later period. The miraculous element, however, was formerly accepted by all. So was the authority of Scripture, though here again men like Priestley were ahead of the rest in bringing to the study of the Bible the principles of historical criticism. Thomas Belsham (1750-1829), a typical Unitarian scholar and divine at this period, was one of several who carried forward the science of Biblical interpretation, and by the use of a vigorous and fearless intellect anticipated views of Genesis and the Pentateuch which did not find general acceptance till much later.

It is customary for Unitarians themselves to-day to look back on these years of early zeal and controversy with but a qualified sympathy, so much was still cherished in the body as a whole that is no longer tenable, and again so much that was undreamed then is indispensable to modern thought. One of the greatest of Unitarians, Dr. Martineau, whose important share in the development of their ideas and life must be considered farther on, referred in a discourse of about forty years ago to three distinct stages in Unitarian theology. First, he pointed to the significance of the struggle for the principle of 'Unity in the Divine causation,' as against a doctrine which, as Unitarians maintain, endeavours in vain by words to prevent a triplicity of 'Persons' from sliding into a group of three Divine Beings. This struggle marks in great part the whole track by which the reader has come thus far in the present story. The second stage, according to Dr. Martineau, is that in which the Conscience of Man is emphasized, in virtue of the belief in a real responsibility and an actual power to choose the right or the wrong. This 'Religion of Conscience' he sees especially illustrated in the principles enunciated and the work accomplished by Channing; perhaps it would be fair to say that many who had preceded the American leader were imbued with a measure of his wisdom when they insisted, as we have seen, on the adaptability of the pure Gospel message to the needs and understanding of men everywhere, and declared that its aim was 'to make men good and keep them so.' The third stage, which Dr. Martineau considered to be fully begun at the time of his sermon (1869), is that of the 'Religion of the Spirit,' in which the ideas of the Divine Sovereignty and the Human Duty are rounded into vital beauty and completeness by the idea of the actual relation of Man to God as a Son to a Father.

We have referred in advance to this compendious view in order to show whither the sequel is to lead us, but before this all-important development can be traced there remains one more piece of external history to be supplied. Happily it may be dealt with summarily.