The Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost is not a person, but is merely sent from the Father, or proceeds from him. The apparent presence of the Holy Ghost in Christ's farewell discourse is only a personification resulting from the peculiar nature of the Greek language, and the necessity of its syntax. Not being a person, the Holy Ghost cannot be God, and is, therefore, not self-existent, underived, and unoriginated. Wherever it is described as a person it is only the writer's striking form of speech; it is solely personification, just as we often find the case with the Law, Wisdom, Scripture, Sin, and Charity.[249]
Human Depravity. The Unitarians have no place in their creed for man's natural sinfulness. It is, they say, a doctrinal innovation, having been propagated by Augustine in the fifth century. That God should create men who are naturally sinners is inconsistent with his parental character. "The doctrine is itself repulsive. The human mind revolts at it. If God our Creator has implanted within us a natural sense of right and wrong, that sense arraigns his character and conduct in creating us thus corrupt."[250] There is no such thing, the Unitarians contend, as the fall of man. Adam was what we are. "Had he not sinned," one of their writers affirms, "our race would have continued perfect and happy without the necessity for progress, or the need of any of those educational and recuperative processes to which Providence has resorted. Let those who can believe this! Let those also who can, call the unfallen Adam and Eve satisfactory patterns and types of our complete humanity. Imagine a world of Adams and Eves, living in a garden, on spontaneous fruits, ignorant of the distinction between good and evil, and without any capacity of moral change or improvement! Can any amount of credulity enable an enlightened and candid mind of the present day to think this world originally made to be occupied by such a race; that unfallen Adams and Eves could ever have developed its resources, or their own powers, and capacities of moral and spiritual happiness? Can any subtlety perceive a true distinction between their condition and that of the innocent but feeble islanders of some few spots in the Pacific?[251] Can any degree of superstition regard a state of unfallen holiness, which allowed our first parents to succumb in the midst of perfect bliss, and under God's own direct care and instructions, before the first temptation, as superior to our present moral condition? If Adam fell, the race rose by his fall; he fell up, and nothing happier for our final fortunes ever occurred than when the innocents of the garden learned their shame, and fled into the hardships and experiences of a disciplinary and growing humanity.... The radical vice of the popular way of thinking about moral evil lies in the supposition that ... a state of spotless innocency is better than a state of moral exposure and moral struggle; and that all our humanity is not entitled to use development and play, in its grand career of being. On the other hand, the true theory of humanity presents us with a race brought into this world for its education, starting with moral and intellectual infancy, and liable to all the mistakes, weaknesses, and follies, which an ungrown and inexperienced nature begets."[252] There is far more virtue in the world than there is vice. We grossly mistake when we make notoriously vicious characters the type of humanity at large. "Man by nature, as born and brought into this world, is innocent, pure; guiltless because sinless; fitted for just that religion which Christ revealed to operate successfully and gloriously upon; not indeed holy, but capable of becoming so."
The Atonement. The orthodox view of the atonement is denied by the Unitarians. Sacrifices are of human origin, those of the Mosaic religion being solely ritual, and symbolical acts of faith and worship. Christ's death did not appease the wrath of God in any sense, nor is anything said in the Scriptures concerning Christ's sufferings as causing or exciting the grace or mercy of God. It is not stated that God is reconciled to us, but we to him. Christ suffered as an example. A writer already quoted says: "Especially were the anguish and patience of his final sufferings and his awful death upon the cross appointed and powerful means of affecting the mind of man."[253] Another author affirms: "Christ saves us, so far as his sufferings and death are concerned, through their moral influence and power upon man; the great appeal which they make being not to God, but to the sinner's conscience and heart; thus aiding in the great work of bringing him into reconciliation with or reconciling him to his Father in heaven.... Reconciliation is accomplished by Christ; by all that he was and is; all that he taught, did, and is doing; and by all that he suffered for our sake. Not by one but by all of these are we saved."[254] Christ's sacrifice was not made to God, for he did not need to be propitiated or rendered merciful, but simply with reference to man alone,—for his good; God's justice needed no pacification. "There can be no greater or more blinding heresy than that which would teach that Christ's sufferings, or any sufferings in behalf of virtue and human sins and sorrows, are strictly substitutional, or literally vicarious. The old theologies, perplexed and darkened with metaphysics and scholastic logic—the fruit of academic pride and the love of ecclesiastical dominion—labored to prove and to teach that Christ, in his short agony upon the cross, really suffered the pains of sin and bore the actual sum of all the anguish from remorse and guilt due to myriads of sinners, through the ages of eternity.... Our sense of justice and goodness so far as God himself is concerned, is vastly more shocked by the proper penalties of sin being placed upon the innocent than had they been left upon the guilty, where they belong.... The truth is, literal substitution of moral penalties is a thing absolutely impossible! Vicarious punishment, in its technical and theological sense, is forbidden by the very laws of our nature and moral constitution."[255]
Regeneration. This is a universal want, but it is entirely consistent with the purity of human nature. The natural birth gives no moral character; it is to be formed, and when formed, is called the "new birth." This is all that Christ meant when he said to Nicodemus, "Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." Regeneration must not, therefore, be considered a consequence of human depravity, but a result of human purity. It is the development of that which is already good within us.
Future Punishment. The Unitarians of America have, for the most part, adopted the Restitutional theories of Hartley and Priestley. Mr. Ballou claims "the whole body of Unitarians as Universalists." Punishment may be inflicted after death, but it will be temporary. "The punishments of hell are disciplinarian, and do not forbid the hope of remission and relief."[256]
The best method of determining the present spirit of Unitarianism is to observe the reception which it gives to the Rationalism that has grown up luxuriantly of late in England. The welcome has been most cordial. A Unitarian clergyman has become the American editor of the Essays and Reviews;[257] and hails the appearance of such a book as representing a new and better era in modern theology. He holds that the real "life of Anglican theology is now represented by such men as Powell and Williams and Maurice and Jowett and Stanley;" that the Broad Church is the only one which fully embodies true progress and conservatism; that Rationalism is the only alternative of Romanism; and that, as a matter of course, the former should be adopted. He expresses the hope that the spirit of Rationalistic criticism, "which is now leavening the Church of England, may find abundant entrance into all the churches of our land," and that the Essays and Reviews, "its genuine product, may contribute somewhat thereto."[258]
The quarterly organ of the Unitarians, The Christian Examiner, has passed an encomium on the same exponent of English Rationalism, in which it manifests no tempered gladness at skepticism within the pale of the church. It says, with undisguised satisfaction, that "either these seven essayists must have been in very close and intimate confidential relations as friends or fellow-students, and have held many precious conferences together in which they were mutually each other's confessors; or, there must be quite a large number of very able and very heretical sinners in the Church of England, within easy hail of each other, and so thick in some neighborhoods that it is the readiest thing in the world to pick out a set of them who, 'without concert or comparison,' will contribute all the parts of a fresh and unhackneyed system of opinion."
One of the most direct and outspoken of all the organized attacks of American Rationalism upon evangelical Christianity occurred at the first public anniversary of the Young Men's Christian Union, of New York. Its importance was due to the diversity of unevangelical bodies there represented, and to the celebrity of several of the speakers. Unitarianism, Swedenborgianism, and Universalism mingled in happy fraternity. The speakers were Drs. Osgood, Bellows, Sawyer, and Chapin; Rev. Messrs. Barrett, Peters, Mayo, Higginson, Miel, Blanchard, and Frothingham; and Richard Warren and Horace Greeley, Esquires.
The Union seems to have been designed as a counterpoise to the large and flourishing Young Men's Christian Association, which is comprised of earnest and active members of all orthodox denominations. The platform of the former may be determined from the following significant language: "The Anniversary of the Young Men's Christian Union was the first instance in which so many of the leading minds in the various branches of the liberal and progressive portion of the Christian church have met on one common platform, for the purpose of discussing the practical bearings of that higher type of Christianity which refuses to be limited by any dogma, or fettered by any creed."[259] One of the speakers, in explaining the relations of the Union to the church, said: "We maintain, then, that we are in the church, are the church—not a part of it, but the whole church,—having in us the heart and soul of orthodoxy itself, the essence of all that gave life to its creed, the utmost significance and vital force of what it taught and still teaches, in what we conceive to be a stuttering and stammering way, in a cumbrous and outworn language, with a circuitous and wearisome phraseology; but meaning really what we mean, and doing for men essentially what we are doing. All that we claim is a better statement of the old and changeless truth, a disembarrassed account of the ever true and identical story.... We have not separated ourselves from the brethren [orthodox]; we hold them in our enclosure; we are always ready to receive them, to welcome them. We are not expecting they will receive us, on account of their providential position. We have an intellectual perception of what the times demand and what the future is to be. We can see clearer than they. We can see why they are wrong; they cannot see why we are right—but they will presently.... The actual presence of God in the world, in all his love and mercy, supplying our deficiencies, helping our infirmities, consecrating and transforming matter, giving sanctity and beauty to life—this is what the renewing of the old faith offers to humanity.
"The indistinct perception of this faith and the divine craving to see it clearly, and bring it to the sight of others, has led to the existence and organization of the Liberal churches, and indirectly to the formation of the Young Men's Christian Union. Faith in man as the child of God, his word and residence, authorizing the freest use of thought, the profoundest respect for individual convictions, the firmest confidence in progress and in the triumph of truth; inspiring good will, humane affections, philanthropic activity, and personal holiness; faith in God as the Father of man—man's universal Saviour and inspirer—man's merit consists wholly in being his child and the pupil of his grace in nature, life, the church, and the unseen world—these are the permanent articles of Christian faith, which is not so much faith in Christ, as Christ's faith."[260]