Our Unitarian Gospel

by Minot J. Savage

Then the leading historians, Bancroft, Motley, Prescott, Sparks, Palfrey, Parkman, and John Fiske, are Unitarians. Educators, like Horace Mann, like the last seven presidents of Harvard University, Unitarians. Great scientists, like Agassiz, Peirce, Bowditch, Professor Draper, Unitarians. Statesmen and public men, like Webster, Calhoun, the Adamses, the Hoars, Curtis. Two of our great chief justices, Marshall and Parsons. Supreme Court Judges, Story and Miller. Literary men, like Whipple, Hawthorne, Ripley, and Bayard Taylor; and eminent women, such as Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, Helen Hunt Jackson, Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe.

I mention these, that you may know the kind of men, ethical, scientific, judicial, political, literary, who have been distinguished, as we think from our point of view, by being followers of this grand faith of ours.

And now I wish you to note again, what I hinted at a moment ago, that it is not an accident that Unitarianism should spring into being in the modern world coincidently with the great movements of liberty in France and England, and the outburst that culminated in our own Revolution and the establishment here of a State without a king as well as of a church without a bishop.

Wherever you have liberty and education, there you have the raw materials out of which to make the free, forward looker in religious thought and life.

Now what are the three principles out of which Unitarianism is born? First, I have already intimated it, but I wish to emphasize it again for a moment with an addition, Liberty. Humanity at last had come to a time in its history when it had asserted its right to be free; not only to cast off fetters that hampered the body, not only to dethrone the despots that made liberty impossible in the State, but to think in the realm of religion, to believe it more honorable to God to think than to cringe and be afraid in his presence.

Second, coincident with the birth of Unitarianism is an enlargement and a reassertion of the conscience of mankind. A demand for justice. Just think for a moment, and take it home to your hearts, that up to the time when this free religious life was born, according to the teaching of all the old creeds, justice and right had been one thing here among men and another thing enthroned in the heavens. The idea has always been that might made right, that God, because he was God, had a right to do anything, though it controverted and contradicted all the ideas of human righteousness; and that we still must bow in the dust, and accept it as true.

If I could be absolutely sure that God had done something which contradicted my conscience, I should say that probably my conscience was wrong. I should wait at any rate, and try to find out. But, when I find that the condition of things is simply this, that certain fallible, unjust, uneducated, barbaric people have said that God has done certain things, then it is another matter. I have no direct word from God: I have only the report of men whose authority I have no adequate reason to accept.

At any rate, the world came to the point where it demanded that goodness on earth should be goodness up in heaven, too; that God should at least be as just and fair as we expect men to be. And that, if you will think it out a little carefully, is enough to revolutionize the theology of the world; for the picture of the character of God as contained in the old theologies is even horribly unjust, as judged by any human standard.

In the third place, Unitarianism sprang out of a new elevation of love and tenderness. As men became more and more civilized, they became more tender-hearted; and they found it impossible to believe that the Father in, heaven should not be as kind and loving as the best father on earth.

And here, again, if you think it out, you will find that this is enough to compel a revolution of all the old theological ideas of the world.