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Updated: June 10, 2025
During this Reformation period there are many names of light and power, among them being Servetus, whom Calvin burned because he was a Unitarian; Laelius and Faustus Socinus, Bernardino Ochino, Blandrata, and Francis David; and, more noted in some ways than any of them, Giordano Bruno, the man who represents the dawn of the modern world more significantly than any other man of his age, not entirely a Unitarian, but fighting a battle out of which Unitarianism sprung, freedom of thought, the right of private judgment, the scientific study of the universe, the attempt, unhampered by the Church's dogma or power, to understand the world in which we live.
So there is, as I said, greater unanimity of opinion in regard to the great essential points among Unitarians than among any other body in Christendom. Now, as briefly as I can, I want to analyze what I regard as the fundamental principles of Unitarianism.
As usually happens, his dogmas were more easily repeated by others than his reasoning; violent excitement ran through the colonies, and it was this that gave a decisive turn to the liberalism which ultimately developed into a very memorable phase of Unitarianism. The preceding steps may be briefly indicated.
It is only the extraordinary person who can say, with Emerson: "I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic . . . . I embrace the common; I sit at the feet of the familiar and the low . . . . Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote . . . . The perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries . . . . The foolish man wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual . . . . To-day always looks mean to the thoughtless; but to-day is a king in disguise . . . . Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphos."
The Martineaus came of old Huguenot stock, which in England belonged to the liberal Presbyterianism out of which much of British Unitarianism came. The righteousness of a persecuted race had left an austere impress upon their domestic and social life. Intellectually they inherited the advanced liberalism of their day. Harriet Martineau's earlier piety had been of the most fervent sort.
Down this inclined plane I gradually slid, till I reached at length the land of doubt and unbelief. My descent was very slow. It took me several years to pass from the more moderate to the more extravagant forms of Unitarianism. When I first read the works of Dr.
The situation that confronted him in Boston rather inflamed than subdued his spirit. Let Mrs. Stowe tell the story herself. "Calvinism or orthodoxy," she says, "was the despised and persecuted form of faith. It was the dethroned royal family wandering like a permitted mendicant in the city where it once held high court, and Unitarianism reigned in its stead.
And out of this the Renaissance came, the new birth of science, on the one hand, and on the other, issuing in the Reformation's assertion of the right of thought and of private judgment in matters of religion; and along with this latter the rebirth of Unitarianism, its reappearance again as a force in the history of the world.
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.
He inherited on his father's side the sober rationalism and the humane and secular interest of the earlier Unitarianism, on his mother's side the intensity of evangelical pietism with the Calvinistic form of thought. The conflict of these opposing tendencies in New England was at that time so great that Brooks's parents sought refuge with the low-church element in the Episcopal Church.
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