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I was trained as a boy, and through all my youth and early manhood in the ministry, to look with aversion, suspicion, on Unitarianism, and to hate the name.
What, I suppose, will strike any reader of Scott's history and writings, is his bold unworldliness and vigorous independence of mind. He followed truth wherever it led him, beginning with Unitarianism, and ending in a zealous faith in the Holy Trinity. It was he who first planted deep in my mind that fundamental truth of religion. These papers I have still.
Though she was a Churchwoman by practice, her own religion was a kind of undefined Unitarianism. "The Immanence of God and the life of Christ are my treasures." "I am a heretic, you know, and it seems to me that all who call Christ Master with adoration of that life are of the same band." The ways of the Church of England did not please her.
I could understand it of Unitarianism, or Universalism, or the Episcopal Church, where nobody seems to have to believe particularly in anything except the beauty of its burial service, but I should think the very rigidity of the Catholic creed would make it impossible. There everything is hard and fast; nothing is elastic; there is no room for compromise."
Such a man could not but count for much; and though his radical views in theology greatly disturbed for many years the conservatives in the body for Unitarianism itself had by this time a well-defined conservative type they could not fail to permeate the minds of the masses.
Unitarianism was not a familiar subject of thought to him. He had never dreamt of joining the Unitarians, and was indeed long ago convinced that in the beliefs of a Channing no one once fairly started on the critical road could rationally stop. That common thinness and aridity, too, of the Unitarian temper had weighed with him.
On the contrary, in point of fact, Unitarianism seems to be resorted to, not merely by those who are disgusted with the peculiar doctrines of Christianity; but by those also who are seeking a refuge from the strictness of her practical precepts; and who, more particularly, would escape from the obligation which she imposes on her adherents, rather to incur the dreaded charge of singularity, than fall in with the declining manners of a dissipated age.
As before stated, most of the rebels were quickly caught, Moses rebelled from the religion of Egypt; Jesus rebelled from the religion of Moses; Paul rebelled from Judaism, adopted the name and led the little following of the martyred Savior; Constantine seized the name and good-will, and destroyed rebellion and competition by a master stroke of fusion when you can not successfully fight a thing, all is not lost, you can still embrace it; Savonarola was an unsuccessful rebel from Constantine's composite religion; Luther, Calvin and Knox successfully rebelled; Henry the Eighth defied the Catholic Church for reasons of his own and broke from it; Methodism and Congregationalism broke from both the canal of John Knox and that of Queen Elizabeth and her lamented father; Unitarianism in New England was a revolt from the rule of the Congregational Church, and Emerson and Theodore Parker were rebels from Unitarianism.
I admitted the fact. "Oh, Miss Spence," she went on, "how can you be so wicked as to deny the divinity of Christ?" I explained to her what Unitarianism was, but she held dubiously aloof for a time. Then we talked of other things.
Let us hope that he himself always knew what he was trying to explain. He discussed metaphysics, theology and politics, and very naturally got to treading on thin ice. In theology his reasoning led him into Unitarianism, then a very fearful thing; and in politics he dallied with Madame la Revolution.
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