The celebrated controversy between Drs. Channing and Worcester, occasioned by a pamphlet which appeared in Boston in 1815, under the title of American Unitarianism, led to the withdrawal of the Unitarians from the orthodox, and their formation into a distinct organization. Pursuing an aggressive policy, they organized congregations in various parts of New England, and in the cities of Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and Charleston. This was the heroic age of the Unitarian church of America.
Channing became immediately the leader of the new sect. He represents the best type of Unitarianism. Pure in life, ardent in his attachments, and heroic in spirit, he was well adapted to advance the cause which he had espoused. He had no taste for controversy, but the circumstances connected with the prevalent theology made such a deep impression on his mind that he felt it his duty to aid in the revival of what he deemed a more liberal faith. Not indorsing the extreme Unitarianism of Priestley and Belsham, he took a middle ground between it and New England Calvinism. He was attentively heard in his church at Boston, and was listened to by large audiences wherever he preached or lectured.
His writings embrace a variety of topics, the chief of which, apart from religious themes proper, are slavery, temperance, education, and war. Within a few years his views have attracted increased attention in Europe. In France, MM. Laboulaye, de Rémusat, and Renan have discussed them at length. Of his mental transitions, an admiring writer says: "From Kant's doctrine of the reason he derived deeper reverence for the essential powers of man; by Schelling's intimations of the Divine Life, everywhere manifested, he was made more devoutly conscious of the universal agency of God; and he was especially delighted with the heroic stoicism of Fichte and his assertion of the grandeur of the human will. But for his greatest pleasure and best discipline he was now indebted to Wordsworth, whom he esteemed next to Shakspeare, and whose 'Excursion' came to him like a revelation. With Wordsworth's mingled piety and heroism, humanity and earnest aspiration, with his all-vivifying imagination, recognizing greatness under lowliest disguises, and spreading sweet sanctions around every charity of social life, and with his longings to see reverence, loyalty, courtesy, and contentment established on the earth, he most closely sympathized. From this time he began to engage more actively in political and philanthropic movements."[238]
Channing believed that orthodoxy was incalculably mischievous in its estimate of Deity and of human depravity. "God, we are told," says he, "must not be limited; nor are his rights to be restrained by any rights in his creatures. These are made to minister to their Maker's glory, not to glorify themselves. They wholly depend on him, and have no power which they can call their own. His sovereignty, awful and omnipotent, is not to be kept in check, or turned from its purposes, by any claims of his subjects. Man's place is the dust. The entire prostration of his faculties is the true homage he is to offer to God. He is not to exalt his reason or his sense of right against the decrees of the Almighty. He has but one lesson to learn, that he is nothing, that God is All in All. Such is the common language of theology."[239]
Against these views he asserts man's free agency and moral dignity. His creed is the greatness of Human Nature; such greatness as is seen in the "intellectual energy which discerns absolute, universal truth in the idea of God, in freedom of will and moral power, in disinterestedness and self-sacrifice, in the boundlessness of love, in aspirations after perfection, in desires and affections which time and space cannot confine, and the world cannot fill. The soul, viewed in these lights, should fill us with awe. It is an immortal germ, which may be said to contain now within itself what endless ages are to unfold. It is truly an image of the infinity of God, and no words can do justice to its grandeur."[240] Instead of looking without for a basis of religion, we must commence at home, within ourselves. "We must start in religion from our own souls, for in them is the fountain of all divine truth. An outward revelation is only possible and intelligible on the ground of conceptions and principles previously furnished by the soul. Here is our primitive teacher and light. Let us not disparage it. There are, indeed, philosophical schools of the present day, which tell us that we are to start in all our speculations from the Absolute, the Infinite. But we rise to these conceptions from the contemplation of our own nature; and even if it were not so, of what avail would be the notion of an Absolute, Infinite existence, an Uncaused Unity, if stripped of all those intellectual and moral attributes which we learn only from our own souls? What but a vague shadow, a sounding name, is the metaphysical Deity, the substance without modes, the being without properties, the naked Unity which performs such a part in some of our philosophical systems. The only God whom our thoughts can rest on and our hearts can cling to, and our consciences can recognize is the God whose image dwells in our own souls. The grand ideas of Power, Reason, Wisdom, Love, Rectitude, Holiness, Blessedness, that is, of all God's attributes, come from within, from the action of our own spiritual nature. Many indeed think that they learn God from marks of design and skill in the outward world; but our ideas of design and skill, of a determining cause, of an end or purpose, are derived from consciousness, from our own souls. Thus the soul is the spring of our knowledge of God."[241]
The creed of the Unitarians must be studied as one would take soundings at sea. The measurement of one place is no guarantee of the depth in another. What was believed twenty years ago, may not be endorsed by the leaders of to-day. One writer of their fold says: "Unitarianism is loose, vague, general, indeterminate in its elements and formularies."[242] When George Putnam installed Mr. Fosdick over the Hollis Street Church, he said with commendable candor, "There is no other Christian body of which it is so impossible to tell where it begins and where it ends. We have no recognized principles by which any man who chooses to be a Christian disciple, and desires to be numbered with us, whatever he believes or denies, can be excluded."
But Unitarianism has ever remained true to a few points. One of them is antagonism to orthodoxy. It was an old cry of the German skeptics, "Away with orthodoxy. It fetters us to forms and creeds, makes us blind devotees to system, converts us into bigots, and dwarfs reason into an invisible pigmy." Yet we frequently meet with language of similar import in the present day. If we did not know its authorship we could easily tell the ecclesiastical fountain whence it flows. "The implications of false and shallow reasoning," says an American Unitarian divine, "partial observation, intellectual grouping, moral obliquity, spiritual ignorance,—in short, of puerility and superstition involved in a large part of the appeals, the preaching, the cant terms, the popular dogmas, the current conversation of Christendom,—are discouraging evidences how backward is the religious thought of our day, as compared with its general thought; how little harmony there is between our schools and our churches, our thinkers and our religious guides, our political and national institutions and our popular theology. It is not Christianity—the rational, thorough, all-embracing Gospel of Christ,—which throws its blessed sanctities over and around our whole humanity,—which owns and consecrates our whole nature and our whole life—which is thus taught. It is a system which is narrower than Judaism, and compared with which Romanism is a princely and magnificent theology. I say advisedly, that if Protestantism endorses the vulgar notions of a God-cursed world,—a fallen race,—a commercial atonement,—a doomed and hell-devoted humanity,—a mysterious conversion,—a Church which is a sort of a life-boat hanging round a wreck that may carry off a few women and selfishly-affrighted men, leaving the bolder, braver, larger portion to go down with the ship; if this be the sum and substance of religion,—if these notions be the grounds of the late religious excitement and the doctrines which gave it power,[243]—then it is not so true to human nature, its wants and woes, its various and manifold tastes, talents, and faculties, as the old Catholic system,—and that, instead of trembling at the growth and prospects of Romanism in this country, we should more reasonably rejoice in its triumphs, as the worthier occupant of the confidence and affection of the people. But this narrow system, with all its arrogant claims to be the only Evangelical faith, is not Protestantism; or, rather, is not mere Protestantism."[244]
But the indeterminateness of Unitarian theology does not warrant us in passing over its tenets, as stated by writers held in good repute in that Church. It would be unfair, however, to claim that these are doctrines to which each must inflexibly adhere. The Unitarians neither exact nor desire conformity to authority; in fact they have no authority. Reason is left to place its own construction upon the truths of revelation. What, then, is the general Unitarian sentiment on those subjects whose essential importance is acknowledged by all Evangelical Churches?
Inspiration and the Scriptures. Channing and Dewey have held loftier views of the Bible and its divine origin than their less devout brethren. The latter has said that, "The matter is divine, the miracles real, the promises glorious, the threatenings fearful; enough that all is gloriously and fearfully true to the divine will, true to human nature, true to its wants, anxieties, sorrows, sins, salvation, and destinies; enough that the seal of a divine and miraculous communication is set upon that holy Book."[245] But reverence for the Scriptures is rapidly on the decline among the Unitarians,—the direct result of the influence of the German and English Rationalists. They call all believers in orthodox opinions, "Bibliolaters." They spurn the thought of an infallible Bible. "No wonder," they say, "that the Bibliolaters quail before the iconoclasm of Bishop Colenso, and, in their rage, call aloud for his excision from the Church; for, if a single one of the difficulties he accumulates can be proved a reality, the whole edifice of their faith topples to its fall.... We believe that safety and sense can alone be found in our theory, which regards Scripture as credible though human, as inspired not in its form, but in its substance, of various and, in many cases, of unknown authorship, and representing different stages of culture. We cannot accept all its documents as of co-ordinate authority; nor in every one of its statements can we recognize a product of inspiration. We do not conceive ourselves bound, therefore, to defend the geology of Moses, or to admire the conduct of the Israelites in the extermination of the Canaanites; or to infuse a recondite spiritual meaning into the amatory descriptions and appeals of the Song of Solomon."[246]
God and Christ. God is the Universal Father. It must be forgotten that he is king; his paternal character alone must be borne in mind. He is a God of one person, not of three, and the doctrine of the Trinity is nowhere hinted at in the Bible, but is of Platonic origin. The Christian Fathers did not contend that it was contained therein. The view of three persons in one God is "self-contradictory, opposed to all right reason, positively absurd."[247] Christ is inferior and subordinate to God. He is God in the same sense as the angels, Moses, Samuel, the Kings and Judges of Israel. They were gods in one respect,—the word of God was spoken to them. Christ is the chief one "to whom the word of God came."[248] In the New Testament, Christ is uniformly kept distinct from the Father, and the attributes which he possessed, wisdom, knowledge, and power, were endowments from God.