On the English side other sweet singers have appeared: 'Nearer, my God, to Thee,' by Sarah Flower Adams, is a world-renowned hymn; and if the names of Channing, Emerson, and Parker cannot be equally matched here in their several spheres, there has been no lack of able and scholarly representatives, and one name at least is of universal reputation. That name, of course, is Martineau. The effective changes from the old Unitarianism to the modern type are best displayed in the story of his long life and the monumental books which bear his name. Reference has been made to his early brilliance; its promise was amply fulfilled in the course of a career more than usually prolonged. The note of original thought sounded in the Rationale (see p. 63[*]) was to be heard again and again in other and more permanent utterances, and not seldom to the perplexity and dismay of many of his Unitarian brethren. Alike in religious philosophy, in attitude to the Scriptures, and in matters of church organization, he found himself from time to time at variance with most of those close around him. His philosophical and critical influence was in large measure victorious; in regard to organization the results were less satisfactory to himself. It will be instructive to observe his progress.
[*: third paragraph of Modern Unitarianism: II. Ideas and Tendencies.]
As regards philosophy, it is necessary to remember the influence of Priestley and Belsham. These Unitarian leaders, following Hartley's psychology, stood for a determinism which was complete. God was the Great Cause of all; not the 'First Cause' of the deistic conception, operative only at the beginning of the chain of events and now remote from man and the world, but present and immediate, exhibiting his divine purposes in all the beings created by him. Christianity, in the view of this school, was the means by which God had been pleased to make known the grand consummation of this life in a perfected life to come; Jesus, the Messiah, was the chosen revealer of the divine will, and his resurrection was the supreme and necessary guarantee that his message was true. Martineau, like the rest of his generation, was brought up in this necessarianism; but its tendency, as he reviewed and tested it, was to do violence to certain irrepressible factors of the spiritual life. It is only fair to say, there was even in this Priestleyan school room for a mystical mood; but on the whole it appeared dry and intellectual, lacking the warm and operative forces of a deeper devotion.
It is interesting to find that Martineau himself confessed that the freshening touch upon his own inner life came in a closer contact with evangelical piety. His mind was to the end of his many years readily responsive to congenial impulses, let them come whence they would, and no small part of his service to Unitarianism consists in the broader sympathies which he generated in its circles. To Channing, also, he expressed gratitude for helping to wake in him a new sense of the meaning of life and religion. It was Channing's characteristic to insist on the significance of personality. The worth, the depth, and also the rights of the Human made so vivid an appeal to his mind as to react on his conceptions of the Divine. Within, a few years after the Rationale was published, Martineau is found making an obvious change of base. He has realized that the externally communicated religion of the old school, however sublime in its proportions, fails to meet the needs or, indeed, to fit the facts of the inner life. Man's personality rises, in his thought, into touch with God's; the revelation from without can only be recognized as such by the aid of a revelation within; a real activity, a genuine moral choice, and a resulting character, the marks of a truly living Soul, these are indispensable to an adequate view of the religious life. But all this involves two significant positions, each far asunder from those hitherto put forth—there must be Freedom, at least in the moral world; and the Divine assurances of moral values and of loving aid to win them are no longer confined to an outer record. Such a record may yield invaluable service as a heightener and interpreter of individual experience; to the last we find Martineau attaching a profound and quite special significance to the revelation in Jesus of the life of sonship to God, and retaining tenaciously the Christian attitude in preference to one of simple theism. But his system is based on the internal; all the rest, the Church, the Bible, Nature, however august and charged with meaning, is supplementary to that.
In the American field, under the influence of Emerson and the German philosophy, what is called 'Transcendentalism' flourished midway in the century, and there as well as in England its extravagances were deplored. Martineau himself, while approaching so nearly to the egoistic centre, was safeguarded from all such vagaries by an all-pervading sense of duty. In his volumes of sermon the Endeavours after the Christian Life, and Hours of Thought on Sacred Things, which remain among the choicest of their kind in our language, his austerity of moral tone is only relieved by an elevation of poetic mysticism till then unknown in Unitarian literature. It was, indeed, his conviction that the body would not write poetry for a generation or two, so dry and prosaic did he find it; but at that very time his own efforts in hymnody on one side and on the other his lyric prose, almost too richly ornate for general wear, were touching new springs of feeling. By and by, he issued in conjunction with others a set of liturgical services, which did much to lend dignity to congregational worship. And what gave unique influence to his ideas was his intimate connection from 1840 to 1885 with 'Manchester College,' London, one of the successors to the old 'Academies' (now after its several migrations handsomely housed at Oxford). At this college, as professor of mental and moral philosophy and for many years as Principal, he made a deep and lasting impression on the minds of most of the leading scholars and preachers. His great works. Types of Ethical Theory and A Study of Religion, gathered up the harvest of long study and exposition in these subjects, and are the most important of their kind given by Unitarians to the world.
In accordance with what has been indicated, the later attitude of Martineau, and naturally of his pupils—though the principle of free and independent judgment is and always has been insisted upon—has been radical in respect to Biblical, and especially to New Testament, studies. An influence in this department more direct than his own was formerly found in the writings and lectures of John James Tayler (1797-1869), his predecessor as Principal. This ripe and fearless scholar brought home to Unitarians the wealth of continental literature on the subject. The 'old school' stood aghast as the tide of 'German criticism' overflowed the old landmarks of thought; and when Tayler himself issued a work strongly adverse to the apostolic authorship of the Fourth Gospel distress was extreme. In these matters, however, the tide proved irresistible, and the next generation of preachers and students were among the most ardent translators and popularizers of the new views of Jewish and Christian origins. The 'free' character of the pulpits has made the way easier than in most other denominations for the incoming of modern thought in this and other directions.
The influence of natural science upon the trend of Unitarian opinion has hardly been second to that of Biblical criticism. Some names in the list of prominent Unitarians are celebrated in this connection—Louis Agassiz (1807-73), for example, on the American side, Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875) and Dr. W.B. Carpenter (1813-85) on the English side. A son of the last named, Dr. J. Estlin Carpenter, a man of wide and varied scholarship, is now Principal of Manchester College. A field in which he is specially expert is that of comparative religion, and here also is a source of many considerations that have transformed Unitarianism into one of the most liberal types of thought in the modern religious world.
It is not to be inferred, however, that the 'radical' tendencies, while predominant, have everywhere prevailed among Unitarians. The 'conservative' side continued in the third quarter of the nineteenth century to yield important signs of its existence and fruitfulness, and its vitality is far from exhausted still. The miraculous element has even here been reduced to a minimum, but it has left a tinge on the picture of Jesus which fills the imagination and kindles the reverent affection of many. Among the more gifted representatives of this school we may name the Americans Dr. H.W. Furness (1802-96) and Dr. J. Freeman Clarke (1810-88), and the English John Hamilton Thom (1808-94). Thom's sermons are ranked among the highest for spirituality and penetration; they certainly had profound effect in stimulating the wise and generous philanthropy of William Rathbone and Sir Henry Tate. A celebrated representative of this side of Unitarianism is Dr. James Drummond, still living, the author of several works of European repute among New Testament scholars, one being a defence of the Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel. He succeeded Martineau as Principal of Manchester College. His volume. Studies of Christian Doctrine, is the most important statement of the Unitarian view published in recent years.
As time went on, it fell to Martineau and other leading Unitarians to take up a defensive attitude against the extreme forces of negation. In particular, he came to be recognized as a champion of theism against materialist evolution. Four volumes of 'Essays' contain some of his acutest writings on the subject. An address presented to him on his eighty-third birthday celebrated his eminence in this and other ways; it bore the signatures of six hundred and fifty of the most brilliant of his contemporaries, at their head being Tennyson and Browning.
All this strenuous progress, however, was for Martineau dogged by a shadow of peculiar disappointment. In youth he was as ardent a 'Unitarian' as any; but, about the time of the Dissenters' Chapels Act (1844), he and Tayler and some others felt increasing dissatisfaction with the tendency of the more active Unitarians to degenerate into a sect. As we have seen, the same divergence of feeling arose in America, and Channing always strove to keep Unitarianism there from succumbing to denominationalism. The ardour of those especially who had newly espoused the Unitarian view and found it precious to themselves may be easily understood, and they might be forgiven some impatience with the apparent apathy of those who had no great desire to multiply proselytes. Some of these eager spirits strove to rescue the body from what they evidently regarded as a paralysing indefiniteness. From time to time it was argued that Unitarianism must be 'defined' authoritatively; then, and then only, might a triumphant progress be secured. Mixed with such notions was apparently a desire to keep the imprudent and 'advanced' men from going 'too far.' In one form or other this opposition has persisted till the present; but its acrimony has sensibly lessened as, on the one hand, the 'denominational' workers have more fully accepted the principle of unfettered inquiry, and on the other, the lessons of experience have shown that, however eager the Unitarians may be for the widest possible religious fellowship, they are, in fact, steadily left to themselves by most of the other religious bodies, especially in this country. Martineau himself about forty years ago tried to form, along with Tayler, a 'Free Christian Union' which should ignore dogmatic considerations; but Tayler died, and so little encouragement was met with outside the Unitarian circle that the thing dropped after two years. Nearly twenty years later, at the Triennial Conference (held in 1888 at Leeds), a remarkable address was given by the now venerable 'leader' (whom, as he mournfully said, no one would follow), in favour of setting up again an English Presbyterian system which should swallow up all the many designations and varieties of association hitherto prevailing among Unitarians. The proposal was considered impracticable, and the dream of a 'Catholicity' which should embrace all who espoused the free religious position, whatever their doctrines, seemed farther than ever from fulfilment. In later years the idea has, however, continued to be mooted, and some Unitarians hope still to see the development of a 'Free Catholicism' in which the traditional distinction between Unitarian and Trinitarian will be lost.