The International Unitarian Journal

The International Unitarian Journal

Rev. Dr. William Ellery Channing (April 7, 1780 – October 2, 1842)

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Volume 1, Number 1, January 2015

The International Unitarian Journal Volume 1, Number 1. January, 2015

Executive Editor: Rev. Dr. Ronald Ryan

Communications: tiunitarianj@gmail.com

Declaration and disclaimer: The International Unitarian Journal is an independent on-line journal which has no institutional or other organizational sponsorship. The journal is free. It can be downloaded and printed provided that it is not sold for profit.

The International Unitarian Journal would, however, welcome and accept donations.

Moreover, The IUJ would welcome volunteers with skills to work on layout and associated tasks.

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Contents P. 4:

Introductory information

p. 7: Editorial: What is Unitarianism P. 11: Discourse: William Ellery Channing – Unitarian Christianity P. 33: Book Review: The Mythmaker P. 36: Discourse Theodore Parker: The True Idea of a Christian Church P. 52: Pages from a Unitarian's Notebook: A Unitarian Perspective on Salvation P. 58: Hymn : I Sing to the Rocks.

P. 59: Unitarian History: W. G. Tarrant: Unitarianism P. 83: Unitarian Theology: J. W. Chadwick: New and Old Unitarian belief P. 94: Book Review: Belief in the Age of Science P. 100 Short Story: Mariam

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The purpose of The International Unitarian Journal The International Unitarian Journal 1 exist for the express purpose of providing understanding of the contemporary “liberal” wing of “traditional” Unitarianism, that is Unitarian belief that is based, maybe loosely (sometimes more, sometimes less), on the teachings of Jesus as understood from the New Testament, The Gospel of Thomas, the so-called Dead Sea / Nag Hammadi Scrolls, the ancient Jerusalem Church, the ancient Nazarene Church, the ancient Ebonite Church and some of the varieties of Gnosticism, particularly the notions of the necessity of coming to know the self which is the essence of the notion of Sophia. Much of the foundational understandings arise from ancient Jewish and other ancient writings, the Gnostic writings (including those in some of the Nag Hammadi scrolls), as well as from the efforts of the European Unitarians of the 16th and 17th centuries, now perhaps best exemplified by the contemporary Hungarian Unitarian Church.

was released by Pilate while Jesus the Zealot was crucified (Matthew 27: 11 – 26: New revised Standard Version); other men with the same name. Such is the confusion between what may have been the original writings that found its way into the New Testament, and all of the changes, deceptions and massaging of information that has taken place over the centuries, that many scholars and theologians are acknowledging that there is probably not a single line of the Bible that one can take as authentic or at face value.

In particular, the postresurrection Jesus was not the crucified Jesus but either Jesus Barabbas or some other man by the same name.

The contents of TIUJ will be a miscellany of historical and contemporary theological discourses, historical materials, commentary, biography and other related materials, and news of developments within the larger Unitarian community. The intent is to provide a month's reading in each issue with the ultimate objective of providing a comprehensive understanding of contemporary Unitarianism, its theological and historical roots, its philosophy, belief structure and practice. In as little as a year, if read thoroughly, the reader will develop a comprehensive understanding of the magnificence of this manner of religious and spiritual life.

However, Unitarians also acknowledge that the stories of Jesus in the New testament may be a conflation of several men called Jesus: Jesus the Zealot who saw himself as the saviour of the Jewish state in its running battle for autonomy against the Romans and who, apparently, was crucified as King of the Jews and who was expected by the Zealots such as the Nazarines, to return from death, eventually, and free the Jews from the Roman yoke; Jesus the preacher, that is to say Jesus Barabbas who

Much of the material that will appear in This journal, while not reflecting contemporary Unitarian belief, is considered to be essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand exactly what

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Unitarianism is. It is important to realize that many of authors who will be presented in this journal were writing well before the discovery of the ancient scrolls that the early church tried to destroy and before the advent of post-Newtonian science.

These authors (e.g., William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, James Martineau) made an effort to respond rationally to the information that was available to them. We respect them and bear strong affection for them. We perceive them as neither wrong nor misguided, but view them in much the same manner in which contemporary scientists view their forebearers. None of us can do other than make sense of the information available to us. If relevant information is destroyed or deliberately withheld, then any perceived errors must be laid at the door of those who destroyed the information.

For many, Unitarianism is still Protestant Christian, even at the extreme “left” or “liberal” wing.

For others, Unitarianism is an independent system of thought with ancient roots.

TIUJ will readily respond to questions of Unitarian belief and theology.

It is anticipated that TIUJ will also carry information and advertising from contemporary Unitarian organizations, churches and institutions.

Although TIUJ is not intended as a forum for dialogue, there being many other such venues, related discourses are welcomed. Room will be made for any reader who wishes to comment responsibly, but diatribe and malicious argument will not be entertained.

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The Unitarian Church that proclaims traditional Unitarian belief and practice.

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We hold no dogma.

Our only doctrine is acceptance in fellowship according to Matthew 7:12; 22:36-40; Luke 6:31; 10: 27; Micah 6:8; Mark 12: 30-31; Deuteronomy 6:5.

As our Unitarian forebears practised, so we practice and advocate unfettered exploration of religious and theological issues.

We have no fear of the truth.

Indeed, we welcome and embrace the truth wherever it is found.

Like God, all Truth is One. Truth is God. You are cordially invited to visit us at

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What is a Unitarian?

Aw, aw ..... there's the rub! quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1:

Let's

writings, ancient and modern.

Unitarians express no dogma but advocates and affirms the absolute right of the individual to consider sources of inspiration and to be fully persuaded in his or her own mind (Romans 14:5).

To be or not to be—that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And, by opposing, end them.

Unitarians declare a belief in one God (Galatians 3:20) as the totality of all that was, is or will be, but does not otherwise define God in recognition of the fact that every individual will formulate his or her own conception of a deity.

Unitarians do not engage in hyperbole about their concept of a deity and do not engage in argument about such issues (e.g., 2 Timothy 2:14; Philippians 2:14).

Unitarians are roundly criticized because of Unitarian audacity. Unitarians do not read the Bible, or any other book (such as the Gospel of Thomas or the Koran) through the eyes of dogma nor even through the eyes of faith. Indeed, Unitarians insist on bringing rationality to everything. If we are creatures of a divinity then our intelligence and powers of cognition are from that self-same divinity. If we have been “given” these powers then it must be because we are meant to use them. Unitarians have no compunction about using their powers of reasoning and, in this sense, there is nothing “sacred,” nothing than cannot be explored openly and honestly.

This is within the belief that Truth is one; Truth is of God; Truth is God. There can be no inconsistency. If we conclude, from an examination of the Bible, that a truth exists, then no amount of searching of the Bible can ever find another truth that is inconsistent with the first. If there are inconsistencies, then one or the other or both of the supposed “truths” must be incorrect. How can we say, for example, that the Bible declares a Trinity, on the one hand, when

To die, to sleep- No more and by a sleep to say we end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to—'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep— To sleep, perchance to dream.

Aye, there's the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.

One might say that there are as many different styles of Unitarianism as there are Unitarians.

There may be hundreds of Unitarian religious organizations and thousands of churches, only some of which have Unitarian in their names. The range of Unitarian belief and polity, in general, ranges all the way from groups which are almost indistinguishable from Pentecostal to the UUA which seems no longer to consider itself Christian.

The primary source of inspiration to the Unitarians of the type represented by TIUJ is The Bible, despite all of its weaknesses. Inspiration is also found in The Gospel of Thomas and other religious 7

no less than Paul declared that there was/is one God (Galations 3: 20)?

Although sometimes difficult to sustain in practice, Unitarians try assiduously not to engage in theological argument or debate to the extent that tempers flare. It happens, maybe unfortunately (who can say?) as, for example, when no less personages that William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker came under the censure of the church when the church lost sight of the objective of courageously pursuing truth wherever it may lead. But, at least, (for what it's worth!) Unitarians have not gone to the extremes of killing each other over theological differences, as happened in some of the theological debates of “Mother Church” where one distinguished prelate stomped another distinguished prelate to death on the floor of the holy chamber of theological discourse. And, Unitarians have never advocated someone be executed, by burning at the stake or otherwise, simply because of theological differences. Indeed, Unitarians avow that there is no such thing as heresy, that every person has to fully make up his or her own mind, be fully persuaded, in other words, as scripture declares (Romans 14: 5).

Sometimes, Unitarians are asked why their creed is so difficult; why Unitarianism does not attract people of limited education and why can we not water down our beliefs so that more people can understand it.

The fact is, Unitarian have no creed! And, as for attracting people of limited education, maybe the problem – if, indeed, it is a problem – lies in the fact that Unitarians do not tell people what to believe, and have too much respect for people than to attempt to impose a dogma on them. Unitarians accept each other without asking what each believes, assuming that each has given the matter much thought and consideration, based on their own study.

Maybe the problem is that Unitarians expect each other to be diligent in their study as the Bible charges us: “Study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman that need not be

ashamed, rightly divining the word of truth. (2 Timothy 2: 15) When that is juxtaposed with the charge to be fully persuaded in our own minds (Romans 14) and with the charge of Jesus to his disciples to decide for themselves (“Why don't you judge for yourself what is right?” Luke 12:57), then the answer to the question is clear.

Unitarians, without rejecting anyone and without making any demands of people, at least implicitly expect, and have always expected, that their compatriots be, at the very minimum, students of the Bible. Otherwise, how can we engage in dialogue?

The lack of study cannot be because there is any lack or reading and study materials.

In fact, there are thousands of books and maybe tens of thousands of sermons and discourses available. Maybe, one of the difficulties is deciding on which to focus. Well, that is one of the purposes of this journal. Having read much of the available literature, the editor(s) will be making a judicious selection and providing about a hundred pages of related literature in this journal on a regular basis. That is to say that this journal will be doing much of the spade work and footwork for those who wish to engage in the pursuit of wisdom and to be able to make up their own minds with integrity intact.

The problem, if it, indeed, exists must be that Unitarians are too “simple.” There are no complexities, here! No supernaturalism! No magic! Just humanity at its best. That simplicity must be difficult to accept for those steeped in complexity and fear of Hell and of an avenging God. Unitarians have no such fear! There is no avenging God. There is no Hell! It is the childish boggyman. (Sometimes, we might wish there were a Hell because we can all propose worthy candidates. But, alas! Hitler and Stalin and their likes are safely dead and, distressingly, others are rising to take their places.

But Unitarians share a certain arrogance.

“If there should be a Hell,” they might very well say, “and if a savage God send us there, then 8

God will be a bigger loser than we are.”

Unitarians have been told that if we continue on this course we will always be a small insignificant marginal religious group. The Unitarians respond, “We may be small and marginal, but insignificant, never. And if small, it will be small with integrity intact! We will never swell our ranks with the titillation of magic (miracles, call it what you will), with false threats of a devil and Hell, or with false promises of a Heaven up there in the clouds, somewhere or overwhelm the gullible with the charlatanry of fake healings.

Unitarians do not put anything in the way of anyone who wishes to associate. But, having said that, Unitarians do not engage in persuasion, never has. Debate, yes! Persuasion against one's will? Never!

The fact is, of course, that Christian typically, even though proudly declaring to be people of the book, do not read the book! They leave it to their clergy to tell them what is there.

Unitarians tend to be individualistic. They permit no-one to tell them what is in the Bible! They look for themselves!

Having said all of that, occasionally the issue is debated among us: Should we have some kind of meaningful creed? The efforts to formulate such have always resulted in meaningless statements. The question, however, remains extant. It is not dormant. Maybe, one of these days, we will decide that some minimum creed is, in fact desirable, if for no other reason than to have dialogue coalescing around.

Another question that has, sometimes, gone begging but which occasionally arises is “Can a person who is not Christian be a Unitarian?” Although, at one time, this was a burning question, it is no longer so. Because Unitarians do not ask each other what they believe, the issue need not arise. The answer is, “If one is comfortable in associating with us as we struggle with our religious and spiritual metaphors, then we extend the hand of fellowship without reservation and without qualification. Our

intent is to build up a fellowship of righteousness, truth and love based, however loosely, on the teachings of Jesus and on universal principles of ethics and maybe on some kind of concept, however inexpertly constructed, of a Universal Soul or Universal essence or energy. It really doesn't matter. Unitarians have no need to have everything all figured out. We are comfortable with ambiguity. All differences are, thus, cast into the sea of forgetfulness while each retains his or her own integrity. There is no way that it can be otherwise, those who claim adherence to creeds of other faiths doing no more than deluding themselves as a false bargain for some childish sense of security and handing their integrity over to someone else, a psychological phenomenon well described by Erich Fromm.

In a real sense, because Unitarians avow the dignity of the human and human nature while decrying any suggestion of depravity as per the Calvinists and Catholics, we Unitarians would be hypocrites, otherwise … and maybe exhibiting the depravity that we deny. Unitarians do make an effort to be consistent.

In a very real sense, we are united by our diversity and are egos are not so needy and our identities not so fragile that we have to have others agreeing with us in every jot and tittle. This goes along with an acknowledgment that all religious principles can never be more than metaphors for the Great Mystery. All else is arrogance.

Many people have dropped the term “Christian” and call themselves, simply, Unitarian.

Others, primarily for historical and emotional reasons, are attached to the term Christian although they bear no allegiance to Paul's Christ but acknowledge only Jesus as exemplar, and as the first Unitarian of our tradition regardless whether or not Jesus really existed as a historical person, and further acknowledging that Jesus, although the expected political Messiah of the Nazarine and maybe Saducee Jewish sects, Jesus was not the Christian Christ as presented in Pauls Christian mythology.

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But, to be “Christian” does is not necessarily an exclusivity. One can easily be Christian, Hindu and Taoist all at the same time. It is only those of limited intelligence who are unable to accommodate such a notion. They are all no more than, and can be no more than, metaphors for one's search for integrity in the face of the cosmic.

Clearly, Unitarianism remains a work in progress. We all want to “get it right” and,

eventually, we will!

The history, philosophy, doctrine and belief of Unitarianism is intensely interesting and engaging.

More detailed explanation of general Unitarian belief will be provided in numerous ways in this and future volumes of The International Unitarian Journal.

theunitarianchristian.com is a companion website with a miscellany of Unitarian writings.

You are cordially invited to visit.

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Unitarian Christianity William Ellery Channing

William Ellery Channing (April 7, 1780 – October 2, 1842) was the foremost Unitarian minister in the United States in the early eighteenth century。He was known not only for his articulate and impassioned sermons and public speeches but also as a prominent thinker in the liberal theology of his era. Maybe more than anyone else, he articulated the principles and tenets of the founding philosophy and theology of Unitarianism.

Channing was born in Newport, RI, a grandson of William Ellery, (1727-1827) a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Channing became a theological liberal, rejecting the Catholic and Calvinist doctrines of total depravity and divine election, and revolted at the prevalent angry God theology of the likes of Johnathan Edwards. Channing believed that a gentle, loving relationship with God was most consistent with his understanding of the scriptures. He opposed both Catholicism and Calvinism for “ ...

proclaiming a God who is to be dreaded. We are told to love and imitate God, but also that God does things we would consider most cruel in any human parent, were he to bring his children into life totally depraved and then to pursue them with endless punishment" Channing enrolled at Harvard College at a particularly troubled time, particularly because of political upheaval. He later wrote of these years: “ Society was passing through a most critical stage. The French Revolution had diseased the imagination and unsettled the understanding of men everywhere. The old foundations of social order, loyalty, tradition, habit, reverence for antiquity, were everywhere shaken, if not subverted. The authority of the past was gone."

He graduated first in his class in 1798, and although was elected class validictorian, Harvard College administrators, knowing his radical political and theological views, prohibited him from mentioning anything in the least political.

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****************** Oration Delivered at the Ordination of Rev. Jared Sparks in The First Independent Church of Baltimore on May 5, 1819.

William Ellery Channing 1 Thes. v. 21: "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good."

The peculiar circumstances of this occasion not only justify, but seem to demand a departure from the course generally followed by preachers at the introduction of a brother into the sacred office. It is usual to speak of the nature, design, duties, and advantages of the Christian ministry; and on these topics I should now be happy to insist, did I not remember that a minister is to be given this day to a religious society, whose peculiarities of opinion have drawn upon them much remark, and may I not add, much reproach.

Many good minds, many sincere Christians, I am aware, are apprehensive that the solemnities of this day are to give a degree of influence to principles which they deem false and injurious. The fears and anxieties of such men I respect; and, believing that they are grounded in part on mistake, I have thought it my duty to lay before you, as clearly as I can, some of the distinguishing opinions of that class of Christians in our country, who are known to sympathize with this religious society. I must ask your patience, for such a subject is not to be despatched in a narrow compass. I must also ask you to remember, that it is impossible to exhibit, in a single discourse, our views of every doctrine of Revelation,

much less the differences of opinion which are known to subsist among ourselves. I shall confine myself to topics, on which our sentiments have been misrepresented, or which distinguish us most widely from others.

May I not hope to be heard with candor?

God deliver us all from prejudice and unkindness, and fill us with the love of truth and virtue.

There are two natural divisions under which my thoughts will be arranged. I shall endeavour to unfold, 1st, The principles which we adopt in interpreting the Scriptures.

And 2dly, Some of the doctrines, which the Scriptures, so interpreted, seem to us clearly to express. we regard the Scriptures as the records of God's successive revelations to mankind, and particularly of the last and most perfect revelation of his will by Jesus Christ. Whatever doctrines seem to us to be clearly taught in the Scriptures; we receive without reserve or exception. We do not, however, attach equal importance to all the books in this collection. Our religion, we believe, lies chiefly in the New Testament.

The dispensation of Moses, compared with that of Jesus, we consider as adapted to the childhood of the human race, a preparation 12

for a nobler system, and chiefly useful now as serving to confirm and illustrate the Christian Scriptures. Jesus Christ is the only master of Christians, and whatever he taught, either during his personal ministry, or by his inspired Apostles, we regard as of divine authority, and profess to make the rule of our lives.

purposes, feelings, circumstances, and principles of the writer, and according to the genius and idioms of the language which he uses. These are acknowledged principles in the interpretation of human writings; and a man, whose words we should explain without reference to these principles, would reproach us justly with a criminal want of candor, and an intention of obscuring or distorting his meaning.

This authority, which we give to the Scriptures, is a reason, we conceive, for studying them with peculiar care, and for inquiring anxiously into the principles of interpretation, by which their true meaning may be ascertained. The principles adopted by the class of Christians in whose name I speak, need to be explained, because they are often misunderstood. We are particularly accused of making an unwarrantable use of reason in the interpretation of Scripture. We are said to exalt reason above revelation, to prefer our own wisdom to God's. Loose and undefined charges of this kind are circulated so freely, that we think it due to ourselves, and to the cause of truth, to express our views with some particularity.

Were the Bible written in a language and style of its own, did it consist of words, which admit but a single sense, and of sentences wholly detached from each other, there would be no place for the principles now laid down. We could not reason about it, as about other writings. But such a book would be of little worth; and perhaps, of all books, the Scriptures correspond least to this description. The Word of God hears the stamp of the same hand, which we see in his works. It has infinite connexions and dependences. Every proposition is linked with others, and is to be compared with others; that its full and precise import may he understood. Nothing stands alone. The New Testament is built on the Old. The Christian dispensation is a continuation of the Jewish, the completion of a vast scheme of providence, requiring great extent of view in the reader. Still more, the Bible treats of subjects on which we receive ideas from other sources besides itself; such subjects as the nature, passions, relations, and duties of man; and it expects us to restrain and modify its language by the known truths, which observation and experience furnish on these topics.

Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture is this, that the Bible is a book written for men, in the language of men, and that its meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books. We believe that God, when he speaks to the human race, conforms, if we may so say, to the established rules of speaking and writing.

How else would the Scriptures avail us more, than if communicated in an unknown tongue?

Now all books, and all conversation, require in the reader or hearer the constant exercise of reason; or their true import is only to be obtained by continual comparison and inference. Human language, you well know, admits various interpretations; and every word and every sentence must be modified and explained according to the subject which is discussed, according to the

We profess not to know a book, which demands a more frequent exercise of reason than the Bible. In addition to the remarks now made on its infinite connexions, we may observe, that its style nowhere affects the precision of science, or the accuracy of definition. Its language is singularly glowing, 13

bold, and figurative, demanding more frequent departures from the literal sense, than that of our own age and country, and consequently demanding more continual exercise of judgment. -- We find, too, that the different portions of this book, instead of being confined to general truths, refer perpetually to the times when they were written, to states of society, to modes of thinking, to controversies in the church, to feelings and usages which have passed away, and without the knowledge of which we are constantly in danger of extending to all times, and places, what was of temporary and local application. -- We find, too, that some of these books are strongly marked by the genius and character of their respective writers, that the Holy Spirit did not so guide the Apostles as to suspend the peculiarities of their minds, and that a knowledge of their feelings, and of the influences under which they were placed, is one of the preparations for understanding their writings. With these views of the Bible, we feel it our bounden duty to exercise our reason upon it perpetually, to compare, to infer, to look beyond the letter to the spirit, to seek in the nature of the subject, and the aim of the writer, his true meaning; and, in general, to make use of what is known, for explaining what is difficult, and for discovering new truths.

possess all things, know all things, and can do all things. Recollect the verbal contradiction between Paul and James, and the apparent clashing of some parts of Paul's writings with the general doctrines and end of Christianity. I might extend the enumeration indefinitely; and who does not see, that we must limit all these passages by the known attributes of God, of Jesus Christ, and of human nature, and by the circumstances under which they were written, so as to give the language a quite different import from what it would require, had it been applied to different beings, or used in different connexions.

Enough has been said to show, in what sense we make use of reason in interpreting Scripture. From a variety of possible interpretations, we select that which accords with the nature of the subject and the state of the writer, with the connection of the passage, with the general strain of Scripture, with the known character and will of God, and with the obvious and acknowledged laws of nature. In other words, we believe that God never contradicts, in one part of scripture, what he teaches in another; and never contradicts, in revelation, what he teaches in his works and providence. And we therefore distrust every interpretation, which, after deliberate attention, seems repugnant to any established truth. We reason about the Bible precisely as civilians do about the constitution under which we live; who, you know, are accustomed to limit one provision of that venerable instrument by others, and to fix the precise import of its parts, by inquiring into its general spirit, into the intentions of its authors, and into the prevalent feelings, impressions, and circumstances of the time when it was framed. Without these principles of interpretation, we frankly acknowledge, that we cannot defend the divine authority of the Scriptures. Deny us this latitude, and we must abandon this book to its enemies.

Need I descend to particulars, to prove that the Scriptures demand the exercise of reason? Take, for example, the style in which they generally speak of God, and observe how habitually they apply to him human passions and organs. Recollect the declarations of Christ, that he came not to send peace, but a sword; that unless we eat his flesh, and drink his blood, we have no life in us; that we must hate father and mother, and pluck out the right eye; and a vast number of passages equally bold and unlimited. Recollect the unqualified manner in which it is said of Christians, that they 14

We do not announce these principles as original, or peculiar to ourselves. All Christians occasionally adopt them, not excepting those who most vehemently decry them, when they happen to menace some favorite article of their creed. All Christians are compelled to use them in their controversies with infidels. All sects employ them in their warfare with one another. All willingly avail themselves of reason, when it can be pressed into the service of their own party, and only complain of it, when its weapons wound themselves. None reason more frequently than those from whom we differ. It is astonishing what a fabric they rear from a few slight hints about the fall of our first parents; and how ingeniously they extract, from detached passages, mysterious doctrines about the divine nature. We do not blame them for reasoning so abundantly, but for violating the fundamental rules of reasoning, for sacrificing the plain to the obscure, and the general strain of Scripture to a scanty number of insulated texts.

We object strongly to the contemptuous manner in which human reason is often spoken of by our adversaries, because it leads, we believe, to universal skepticism. If reason be so dreadfully darkened by the fall, that its most decisive judgements on religion are unworthy of trust, then Christianity, and even natural theology, must be abandoned; for the existence and veracity of God, and the divine original of Christianity, are conclusions of reason, and must stand or fall with it. If revelation be at war with this faculty, it subverts itself, for the great question of its truth is left by God to be decided at the bar of reason. It is worthy of remark, how nearly the bigot and the skeptic approach. Both would annihilate our confidence in our faculties, and both throw doubt and confusion over every truth. We honor revelation too highly to make it the antagonist of reason, or to believe that it calls us to renounce our highest powers.

We indeed grant, that the use of reason in religion is accompanied with danger. But we ask any honest man to look back on the history of the church, and say, whether the renunciation of it be not still more dangerous.

Besides, it is a plain fact, that men reason as erroneously on all subjects, as on religion.

Who does not know the wild and groundless theories, which have been framed in physical and political science? But who ever supposed, that we must cease to exercise reason on nature and society, because men have erred for ages in explaining them? We grant, that the passions continually, and sometimes fatally, disturb the rational faculty in its inquiries into revelation. The ambitious contrive to find doctrines in the Bible, which favor their love of dominion. The timid and dejected discover there a gloomy system, and the mystical and fanatical, a visionary theology. The vicious can find examples or assertions on which to build the hope of a late repentance, or of acceptance on easy terms.

The falsely refined contrive to light on doctrines which have not been soiled by vulgar handling. But the passions do not distract the reason in religious, any more than in other inquiries, which excite strong and general interest; and this faculty, of consequence, is not to be renounced in religion, unless we are prepared to discard it universally. The true inference from the almost endless errors, which have darkened theology, is, not that we are to neglect and disparage our powers, but to exert them more patiently, circumspectly, uprightly. The worst errors, after all, having sprung up in that church, which proscribes reason, and demands from its members implicit faith. The most pernicious doctrines have been the growth of the darkest times, when the general credulity encouraged bad men and enthusiasts to broach their dreams and inventions, and to stifle the faint remonstrances of reasons, by the menaces of everlasting perdition. Say what we may, God has given us a rational nature, and will call us 15

to account for it. We may let it sleep, but we do so at our peril. Revelation is addressed to us as rational beings. We may wish, in our to sloth, that God had given us a system, demand of comparing, limiting, and inferring.

But such a system would be at variance with the whole character of our present existence; and it is the part of wisdom to take revelation as it is given to us, and to interpret it by the help of the faculties, which it everywhere supposes, and on which founded.

To the views now given, an objection is commonly urged from the character of God. We are told, that God being infinitely wiser than men, his discoveries will surpass human reason. In a revelation from such a teacher, we ought to expect propositions, which we cannot reconcile with one another, and which may seem to contradict established truths ; and it becomes us not to question or explain them away, but to believe, and adore, and to submit our weak and carnal reason to the Divine Word. To this objection, we have two short answers. We say, first, that it is impossible that a teacher of infinite wisdom should expose those, whom he would teach, to infinite error. But if once we admit, that propositions, which in their literal sense appear plainly repugnant to one another, or to any known truth, are still to be literally understood and received, what possible limit can we set to the belief of contradictions?

What shelter have we from the wildest fanaticism, which can always quote passages, that, in their literal and obvious sense, give support to its extravagances?

How can the Protestant escape from transubstantiation, a doctrine most clearly taught us, if the submission of reason, now contended for, be a duty? How can we even hold fast the truth of revelation, for if one apparent contradiction may be true, so may another, and the proposition, that Christianity is false, though involving inconsistency, may still be a verity?

We answer again, that, if God be infinitely wise, he cannot sport with the understandings of his creatures. A wise teacher discovers his wisdom in adapting himself to the capacities of his pupils, not in perplexing them with what is unintelligible, not in distressing them with apparent contradictions, not in filling them with a skeptical distrust of their own powers. An infinitely wise teacher, who knows the precise extent of our minds, and the best method of enlightening them, will surpass all other instructors in bringing down truth to our apprehension, and in showing its loveliness and harmony. We ought, indeed, to expect occasional obscurity in such a book as the Bible, which was written for past and future ages, as well as for the present. But God's wisdom is a pledge, that whatever is necessary for US, and necessary for salvation, is revealed too plainly to be mistaken, and too consistently to be questioned, by a sound and upright mind. It is not the mark of wisdom, to use an unintelligible phraseology, to communicate what is above our capacities, to confuse and unsettle the intellect by appearances of contradiction. We honor our Heavenly Teacher too much to ascribe to him such a revelation. A revelation is a gift of light. It cannot thicken our darkness, and multiply our perplexities.

Having thus stated the principles according to which we interpret Scripture, I now proceed to the second great head of this discourse, which is, to state some of the views which we derive from that sacred book, particularly those which distinguish us from other Christians.

In the first place, we believe in the doctrine of God's UNITY, or that there is one God, and one only. To this truth we give infinite importance, and we feel ourselves bound to take heed, lest any man spoil us of it by vain philosophy. The proposition, that there 16

is one God, seems to us exceedingly plain.

We understand by it, that there is one being, one mind, one person, one intelligent agent, and one only, to whom underived and infinite perfection and dominion belong. We conceive, that these words could have conveyed no other meaning to the simple and uncultivated people who were set apart to be the depositories of this great truth, and who were utterly incapable of understanding those hair- breadth distinctions between being and person, which the sagacity of later ages has discovered. We find no intimation, that this language was to be taken in an unusual sense, or that God's unity was a quite different thing from the oneness of other intelligent beings.

We object to the doctrine of the Trinity, that, whilst acknowledging in words, it subverts in effect, the unity of God. According to this doctrine, there are three infinite and equal persons, possessing supreme divinity, called the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Each of these persons, as described by theologians, has his own particular consciousness, will, and perceptions. They love each other, converse with each other, and delight in each other's society. They perform different parts in man's redemption, each having his appropriate office, and neither doing the work of the other. The Son is mediator and not the Father. The Father sends the Son, and is not himself sent; nor is he conscious, like the Son, of taking flesh.

Here, then, we have three intelligent agents, possessed of different consciousness, different wills, and different perceptions, performing different acts, and sustaining different relations; and if these things do not imply and constitute three minds or beings, we are utterly at a loss to know how three minds or beings are to be formed. It is difference of properties, and acts, and consciousness, which leads us to the belief of different intelligent beings, and, if this mark fails us, our whole knowledge fall; we have

no proof, that all the agents and persons in the universe are not one and the same mind.

When we attempt to conceive of three Gods, we can do nothing more than represent to ourselves three agents, distinguished from each other by similar marks and peculiarities to those which separate the persons of the Trinity; and when common Christians hear these persons spoken of as conversing with each other, loving each other, and performing different acts, how can they help regarding them as different beings, different minds?

We do, then, with all earnestness, though without reproaching our brethren, protest against the irrational and unscriptural doctrine of the Trinity. "To us," as to the Apostle and the primitive Christians, "there is one God, even the Father." With Jesus, we worship the Father, as the only living and true God. We are astonished, that any man can read the New Testament, and avoid the conviction, that the Father alone is God. We hear our Saviour continually appropriating this character to the Father. We find the Father continually distinguished from Jesus by this title. "God sent his Son." "God anointed Jesus." Now, how singular and inexplicable is this phraseology, which fills the New Testament, if this title belong equally to Jesus, and if a principal object of this book is to reveal him as God, as partaking equally with the Father in supreme divinity! We challenge our opponents to adduce one passage in the New Testament, where the word God means three persons, where it is not limited to one person, and where, unless turned from its usual sense by the connection, it does not mean the Father. Can stronger proof be given, that the doctrine of three persons in the Godhead is not a fundamental doctrine of Christianity?

This doctrine, were it true, must, from its difficulty, singularity, and importance, have been laid down with great clearness, guarded with great care, and stated with all possible 17

precision. But where does this statement appear? From the many passages which treat of God, we ask for one, one only, in which we are told, that he is a threefold being, or that he is three persons, or that he is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. On the contrary, in the New Testament, where, at least, we might expect many express assertions of this nature, God is declared to be one, without the least attempt to prevent the acceptation of the words in their common sense; and he is always spoken of and addressed in the singular number, that is, in language which was universally understood to intend a single person, and to which no other idea could have been attached, without an express admonition. So entirely do the Scriptures abstain from stating the Trinity, that when our opponents would insert it into their creeds and doxologies, they are compelled to leave the Bible, and to invent forms of words altogether unsanctioned by Scriptural phraseology. That a doctrine so strange, so liable to misapprehension, so fundamental as this is said to be, and requiring such careful exposition, should be left so undefined and unprotected, to be made out by inference, and to be hunted through distant and detached parts of Scripture, this is a difficulty, which, we think, no ingenuity can explain.

We have another difficulty. Christianity, it must be remembered, was planted and grew up amidst sharp-sighted enemies, who overlooked no objectionable part of the system, and who must have fastened with great earnestness on a doctrine involving such apparent contradictions as the Trinity.

We cannot conceive an opinion, against which the Jews, who prided themselves on an adherence to God's unity, would have raised an equal clamor. Now, how happens it, that in the apostolic writings, which relate so much to objections against Christianity, and to the controversies which grew out of this religion, not one word is said, implying that objections were brought against the Gospel from the

doctrine of the Trinity, not one word is uttered in its defence and explanation, not a word to rescue it from reproach and mistake? This argument has almost the force of demonstration. We are persuaded, that had three divine persons been announced by the first preachers of Christianity, all equal, and all infinite, one of whom was the very Jesus who had lately died on a cross, this peculiarity of Christianity would have almost absorbed every other, and the great labor of the Apostles would have been to repel the continual assaults, which it would have awakened. But the fact is, that not a whisper of objection to Christianity, on that account, reaches our ears from the apostolic age. In the Epistles we see not a trace of controversy called forth by the Trinity.

We have further objections to this doctrine, drawn from its practical influence. We regard it as unfavorable to devotion, by dividing and distracting the mind in its communion with God. It is a great excellence of the doctrine of God's unity, that it offers to us ONE OBJECT of supreme homage, adoration, and love, One Infinite Father, one Being of beings, one original and fountain, to whom we may refer all good, in whom all our powers and affections may be concentrated, and whose lovely and venerable nature may pervade all our thoughts. True piety, when directed to an undivided Deity, has a chasteness, a singleness, most favorable to religious awe and love. Now, the Trinity sets before us three distinct objects of supreme adoration; three infinite persons, having equal claims on our hearts; three divine agents, performing different offices, and to be acknowledged and worshipped in different relations. And is it possible, we ask, that the weak and limited mind of man can attach itself to these with the same power and joy, as to One Infinite Father, the only First Cause, in whom all the blessings of nature and redemption meet as their centre and source? Must not devotion be distracted by the equal and rival claims of 18

three equal persons, and must not the worship of the conscientious, consistent Christian, be disturbed by an apprehension, lest he withhold from one or another of these, his due proportion of homage?

We also think, that the doctrine of the Trinity injures devotion, not only by joining to the Father other objects of worship, but by taking from the Father the supreme affection, which is his due, and transferring it to the Son. This is a most important view. That Jesus Christ, if exalted into the infinite Divinity, should be more interesting than the Father, is precisely what might be expected from history, and from the principles of human nature. Men want an object of worship like themselves, and the great secret of idolatry lies in this propensity. A God, clothed in our form, and feeling our wants and sorrows, speaks to our weak nature more strongly, than a Father in heaven, a pure spirit, invisible and unapproachable, save by the reflecting and purified mind. -- We think, too, that the peculiar offices ascribed to Jesus by the popular theology, make him the most attractive person in the Godhead. The Father is the depositary of the justice, the vindicator of the rights, the avenger of the laws of the Divinity. On the other hand, the Son, the brightness of the divine mercy, stands between the incensed Deity and guilty humanity, exposes his meek head to the storms, and his compassionate breast to the sword of the divine justice, bears our whole load of punishment, and purchases with his blood every blessing which descends from heaven. Need we state the effect of these representations, especially on common minds, for whom Christianity was chiefly designed, and whom it seeks to bring to the Father as the loveliest being? We do believe, that the worship of a bleeding, suffering God, tends strongly to absorb the mind and to draw it from other objects, just as the human tenderness of the Virgin Mary has given her so conspicuous a place in the devotions of

the Church of Rome. We believe, too, that this worship, though attractive, is not most fitted to spiritualize the mind, that it awakens human transport, rather than that deep veneration of the moral perfections of God, which is the essence of piety.

Having thus given our views of the unity of God, I proceed in the second place to observe, that we believe in the unity of Jesus Christ. We believe that Jesus is one mind, one soul, one being, as truly one as we are, and equally distinct from the one God. We complain of the doctrine of the Trinity, that, not satisfied with making God three beings, it makes; Jesus Christ two beings, and thus introduces infinite confusion into our conceptions of his character. This corruption of Christianity, alike repugnant to common sense and to the general strain of Scripture, is a remarkable proof of the power of a false philosophy in disfiguring the simple truth of Jesus.

According to this doctrine, Jesus Christ, instead of being one mind, one conscious intelligent principle, whom we can understand, consists of two souls, two minds; the one divine, the other human; the one weak, the other almighty; the one ignorant, the other omniscient. Now we maintain, that this is to make Christ two beings. To denominate him one person, one being, and yet to suppose him made up of two minds, infinitely different from each other, is to abuse and confound language, and to throw darkness over all our conceptions of intelligent natures. According to the common doctrine, each of these two minds in Christ has its own consciousness, its own will, its own perceptions. They have, in fact, no common properties. The divine mind feels none of the wants and sorrows of the human, and the human is infinitely removed from the perfection and happiness of the divine. Can you conceive of two beings in the universe more distinct? We have always thought that 19

one person was constituted and distinguished by one consciousness. The doctrine, that one and the same person should have two consciousness, two wills, two souls, infinitely different from each other, this we think an enormous tax on human credulity.

We say, that if a doctrine, so strange, so difficult, so remote from all the previous conceptions of men, be indeed a part and an essential part of revelation, it must be taught with great distinctness, and we ask our brethren to point to some plain, direct passage, where Christ is said to be composed of two minds infinitely different, yet constituting one person. We find none. Other Christians, indeed, tell us, that this doctrine is necessary to the harmony of the Scriptures, that some texts ascribe to Jesus Christ human, and others divine properties, and that to reconcile these, we must suppose two minds, to which these properties may be referred. In other words, for the purpose of reconciling certain difficult passages, which a just criticism can in a great degree, if not wholly, explain, we must invent an hypothesis vastly more difficult, and involving gross absurdity. We are to find our way out of a labyrinth, by a clue which conducts us into mazes infinitely more inextricable.

Surely, if Jesus Christ felt that he consisted of two minds, and that this was a leading feature of his religion, his phraseology respecting himself would have been colored by this peculiarity. The universal language of men is framed upon the idea, that one person is one person, is one mind, and one soul; and when the multitude heard this language from the lips of Jesus, they must have taken it in its usual sense, and must have referred to a single soul all which he spoke, unless expressly instructed to interpret it differently.

But where do we find this instruction? Where do you meet, in the New Testament, the phraseology which abounds in Trinitarian books, and which necessarily grows from the

doctrine of two natures in Jesus? Where does this divine teacher say, "This I speak as God, and this as man; this is true only of my human mind, this only of my divine"? Where do we find in the Epistles a trace of this strange phraseology? Nowhere. It was not needed in that day. It was demanded by the errors of a later age.

We believe, then, that Christ is one mind, one being, and, I add, a being distinct from the one God. That Christ is not the one God, not the same being with the Father, is a necessary inference from our former head, in which we saw that the doctrine of three persons in God is a fiction. But on so important a subject, I would add a few remarks. We wish, that those from whom we differ, would weigh one striking fact. Jesus, in his preaching, continually spoke of God. The word was always in his mouth. We ask, does he, by this word, ever mean himself? We say, never. On the contrary, he most plainly distinguishes between God and himself, and so do his disciples. How this is to be reconciled with the idea, that the manifestation of Christ, as God, was a primary object of Christianity, our adversaries must determine.

If we examine the passages in which Jesus is distinguished from God, we shall see, that they not only speak of him as another being, but seem to labor to express his inferiority. He is continually spoken of as the Son of God, sent of God, receiving all his powers from God, working miracles because God was with him, judging justly because God taught him, having claims on our belief, because he was anointed and sealed by God, and as able of himself to do nothing. The New Testament is filled with this language. Now we ask, what impression this language was fitted and intended to make? Could any, who heard it, have imagined that Jesus was the very God to whom he was so industriously declared to be inferior; the very Being by 20

whom he was sent, and from whom he professed to have received his message and power? Let it here be remembered, that the human birth, and bodily form, and humble circumstances, and mortal sufferings of Jesus, must all have prepared men to interpret, in the most unqualified manner, the language in which his inferiority to God was declared. Why, then, was this language used so continually, and without limitation, if Jesus were the Supreme Deity, and if this truth were an essential part of his religion? I repeat it, the human condition and sufferings of Christ tended strongly to exclude from people's minds the idea of his proper Godhead; and, of course, we should expect to find in the New Testament perpetual care and effort to counteract this tendency, to hold him forth as the same being with his Father, if this doctrine were, as is pretended, the soul and centre of his religion. We should expect to find the phraseology of Scripture cast into the mould of this doctrine, to hear familiarly of God the Son, of our Lord God Jesus, and to be told, that to us there is one God, even Jesus. But, instead of this, the inferiority of Christ pervades the New Testament. It is not only implied in the general phraseology, but repeatedly and decidedly expressed, and unaccompanied with any admonition to prevent its application to his whole nature.

Could it, then, have been the great design of the sacred writers to exhibit Jesus as the Supreme God? I am aware that these remarks will be met by two or three texts, in which Christ is called God, and by a class of passages, not very numerous, in which divine properties are said to be ascribed to him. To these we offer one plain answer. We say, that it is one of the most established and obvious principles of criticism, that language is to be explained according to the known properties of the subject to which it is applied. Every man knows, that the same words convey very different ideas, when used in relation to

different beings. Thus, Solomon BUILT the temple in a different manner from the architect whom he employed; and God REPENTS differently from man. Now we maintain, that the known properties and circumstances of Christ, his birth, sufferings, and death, his constant habit of speaking of God as a distinct being from himself, his praying to God, his ascribing to God all his power and offices, these acknowledged properties of Christ, we say, oblige us to interpret the comparatively few passages which are thought to make him the Supreme God, in a manner consistent with his distinct and inferior nature. It is our duty to explain such texts by the rule which we apply to other texts, in which human beings are called gods, and are said to be partakers of the divine nature, to know and possess all things, and to be filled with all God's fulness. These latter passages we do not hesitate to modify, and restrain, and turn from the most obvious sense, because this sense is opposed to the known properties of the beings to whom they relate; and we maintain, that we adhere to the same principle, and use no greater latitude, in explaining, as we do, the passages which are thought to support the Godhead of Christ.

Trinitarians profess to derive some important advantages from their mode of viewing Jesus. It furnishes them,they tell us, with an infinite atonement, for it shows them an infinite being suffering for their sins. The confidence with which this fallacy is repeated astonishes us. When pressed with the question, whether they really believe, that the infinite and unchangeable God suffered and died on the cross, they acknowledge that this is not true, but that Christ's human mind alone sustained the pains of death. How have we, then, an infinite sufferer? This language seems to us an imposition on common minds, and very derogatory to God's justice, as if this attribute could be satisfied by a sophism and a fiction.

21

We are also told, that Christ is a more interesting object, that his love and mercy are more felt, when he is viewed as the Supreme God, who left his glory to take humanity and to suffer for men. That Trinitarians are strongly moved by this representation, we do not mean to deny; but we think their emotions altogether founded on a misapprehension of their own doctrines. They talk of the second person of the Trinity's leaving his glory and his Father's bosom, to visit and save the world. But this second person, being the unchangeable and infinite God, was evidently incapable of parting with the least degree of his perfection and felicity. At the moment of his taking flesh, he was as intimately present with his Father as before, and equally with his Father filled heaven, and earth, and immensity. This Trinitarians acknowledge; and still they profess to be touched and overwhelmed by the amazing humiliation of this immutable being! But not only does their doctrine, when fully explained, reduce Christ's humiliation to a fiction, it almost wholly destroys the impressions with which his cross ought to be viewed. According to their doctrine, Christ was comparatively no sufferer at all. It is true, his human mind suffered; but this, they tell us, was an infinitely small part of Jesus, bearing no more proportion to his whole nature, than a single hair of our heads to the whole body, or than a drop to the ocean. The divine mind of Christ, that which was most properly himself, was infinitely happy, at the very moment of the suffering of his humanity. Whilst hanging on the cross, he was the happiest being in the universe, as happy as the infinite Father; so that his pains, compared with his felicity, were nothing. This Trinitarians do, and must, acknowledge. It follows necessarily from the immutableness of the divine nature, which they ascribe to Christ; so that their system, justly viewed, robs his death of interest, weakens our sympathy with his sufferings, and is, of all others, most unfavorable to a love of Christ, founded on a sense of his sacrifices for

mankind. We esteem our own views to be vastly more affecting. It is our belief, that Christ's humiliation was real and entire, that the whole Saviour, and not a part of him, suffered, that his crucifixion was a scene of deep and unmixed agony. As we stand round his cross, our minds are not distracted, nor our sensibility weakened, by contemplating him as composed of incongruous and infinitely differing minds, and as having a balance of infinite felicity. We recognize in the dying Jesus but one mind. This, we think, renders his sufferings, and his patience and love in bearing them, incomparably more impressive and affecting than the system we oppose.

Having thus given our belief on two great points, namely, that there is one God, and that Jesus Christ is a being distinct from, and inferior to, God, I now proceed to another point, on which we lay still greater stress. We believe in the MORAL PERFECTION OF GOD. We consider no part of theology so important as that which treats of God's moral character; and we value our views of Christianity chiefly as they assert his amiable and venerable attributes. It may be said, that, in regard to this subject, all Christians agree, that all ascribe to the Supreme Being infinite justice, goodness, and holiness. We reply, that it is very possible to speak of God magnificently, and to think of him meanly; to apply to his person high-sounding epithets, and to his government, principles which make him odious. The Heathens called Jupiter the greatest and the best; but his history was black with cruelty and lust. We cannot judge of people's real ideas of God by their general language, for in all ages they have hoped to soothe the Deity by adulation. We must enquire into their particular views of his purposes, of the principles of his administration, and of his disposition towards his creatures.

We conceive that Christians have 22

generally leaned towards a very injurious view of the Supreme Being. They have too often felt, as if he were raised, by his greatness and sovereignty, above the principles of morality, above those eternal laws of equity and rectitude, to which all other beings are subjected. We believe, that in no being is the sense of right so strong, so omnipotent, as in God. We believe that his almighty power is entirely submitted to his perceptions of rectitude; and this is the ground of our piety. It is not because he is our Creator merely, but because he created us for good and holy purposes; it is not because his will is irresistible, but because his will is the perfection of virtue, that we pay him allegiance. We cannot bow before a being, however great and powerful, who governs tyrannically. We respect nothing but excellence, whether on earth or in heaven.

We venerate not the loftiness of God's throne, but the equity and goodness in which it is established.

We believe that God is infinitely good, kind, benevolent, in the proper sense of these words; good in disposition, as well as in act; good, not to a few, but to all; good to every individual, as well as to the general system.

We believe, too, that God is just; but we never forget, that his justice is the justice of a good being, dwelling in the same mind, and acting in harmony, with perfect benevolence.

By this attribute, we understand God's infinite regard to virtue or moral worth, expressed in a moral government; that is, in giving excellent and equitable laws, and in conferring such rewards, and inflicting such punishments, as are best fitted to secure their observance. God's justice has for its end the highest virtue of the creation, and it punishes for this end alone, and thus it coincides with benevolence; for virtue and happiness, though not the same, are inseparably conjoined.

God's justice thus viewed, appears to us

to be in perfect harmony with his mercy.

According to the prevalent systems of theology, these attributes are so discordant and jarring, that to reconcile them is the hardest task, and the most wonderful achievement, of infinite wisdom. To us they seem to be intimate friends, always at peace, breathing the same spirit, and seeking the same end. By God's mercy, we understand not a blind instinctive compassion, which forgives without reflection, and without regard to the interests of virtue. This, we acknowledge, would be incompatible with justice, and also with enlightened benevolence.

God's mercy, as we understand it, desires strongly the happiness of the guilty, but only through their penitence.

It has a regard to character as truly as his justice. It defers punishment, and suffers long, that the sinner may return to his duty, but leaves the impenitent and unyielding, to the fearful retribution threatened in God's Word.

To give our views of God in one word, we believe in his Parental character. We ascribe to him, not only the name, but the dispositions and principles of a father. We believe that he has a father's concern for his creatures, a father's desire for their improvement, a father's equity in proportioning his commands to their powers, a father's joy in their progress, a father's readiness to receive the penitent, and a father's justice for the incorrigible. We look upon this world as a place of education, in which he is training men by prosperity and adversity, by aids and obstructions, by conflicts of reason and passion, by motives to duty and temptations to sin, by a various discipline suited to free and moral beings, for union with himself, and for a sublime and ever-growing virtue in heaven.

Now, we object to the systems of religion, which prevail among us, that they are adverse, in a greater or less degree, to these purifying, comforting, and honorable views of 23

God; that they take from us our Father in heaven, and substitute for him a being, whom we cannot love if we would, and whom we ought not to love if we could. We object, particularly on this ground, to that system, which arrogates to itself the name of Orthodoxy, and which is now industriously propagated through our country. This system indeed takes various shapes, but in all it casts dishonor on the Creator. According to its old and genuine form, it teaches, that God brings us into life wholly depraved, so that under the innocent features of our childhood is hidden a nature averse to all good and propense to all evil, a nature which exposes us to God's displeasure and wrath, even before we have acquired power to understand our duties, or to reflect upon our actions. According to a more modern exposition, it teaches, that we came from the hands of our Maker with such a constitution, and are placed under such influences and circumstances, as to render certain and infallible the total depravity of every human being, from the first moment of his moral agency; and it also teaches, that the offence of the child, who brings into life this ceaseless tendency to unmingled crime, exposes him to the sentence of everlasting damnation. Now, according to the plainest principles of morality, we maintain, that a natural constitution of the mind, unfailingly disposing it to evil and to evil alone, would absolve it from guilt; that to give existence under this condition would argue unspeakable cruelty; and that to punish the sin of this unhappily constituted child with endless ruin, would be a wrong unparalleled by the most merciless despotism.

This system also teaches, that God selects from this corrupt mass a number to be saved, and plucks them, by a special influence, from the common ruin; that the rest of mankind, though left without that special grace which their conversion requires, are commanded to repent, under penalty of aggravated woe; and that forgiveness is

promised them, on terms which their very constitution infallibly disposes them to reject, and in rejecting which they awfully enhance the punishments of hell. These proffers of forgiveness and exhortations of amendment, to beings born under a blighting curse, fill our minds with a horror which we want words to express.

That this religious system does not produce all the effects on character, which might be anticipated, we most joyfully admit.

It is often, very often, counteracted by nature, conscience, common sense, by the general strain of Scripture, by the mild example and precepts of Christ, and by the many positive declarations of God's universal kindness and perfect equity. But still we think that we see its unhappy influence. It tends to discourage the timid, to give excuses to the bad, to feed the vanity of the fanatical, and to offer shelter to the bad feelings of the malignant. By shocking, as it does, the fundamental principles of morality, and by exhibiting a severe and partial Deity, it tends strongly to pervert the moral faculty, to form a gloomy, forbidding, and servile religion, and to lead men to substitute censoriousness, bitterness, and persecution, for a tender and impartial charity. We think, too, that this system, which begins with degrading human nature, may be expected to end in pride; for pride grows out of a consciousness of high distinctions, however obtained, and no distinction is so great as that which is made between the elected and abandoned of God. The false and dishonorable views of God, which have now been stated, we feel ourselves bound to resist unceasingly. Other errors we can pass over with comparative indifference. But we ask our opponents to leave to us a GOD, worthy of our love and trust, in whom our moral sentiments may delight, in whom our weaknesses and sorrows may find refuge. We cling to the Divine perfections.

We meet them 24

everywhere in creation, we read them in the Scriptures, we see a lovely image of them in Jesus Christ; and gratitude, love, and veneration call on us to assert them.

Reproached, as we often are, by men, it is our consolation and happiness, that one of our chief offences is the zeal with which we vindicate the dishonored goodness and rectitude of God. Having thus spoken of the unity of God; of the unity of Jesus, and his inferiority to God; and of the perfections of the Divine character; I now proceed to give our views of the mediation of Christ, and of the purposes of his mission. With regard to the great object which Jesus came to accomplish, there seems to be no possibility of mistake. We believe, that he was sent by the Father to effect a moral, or spiritual deliverance of mankind; that is, to rescue men from sin and its consequences, and to bring them to a state of everlasting purity and happiness. We believe, too, that he accomplishes this sublime purpose by a variety of methods; by his instructions respecting God's unity, parental character, and moral government, which are admirably fitted to reclaim the world from idolatry and impiety, to the knowledge, love, and obedience of the Creator; by his promises of pardon to the penitent, and of divine assistance to those who labor for progress in moral excellence; by the light which he has thrown on the path of duty; by his own spotless example, in which the loveliness and sublimity of virtue shine forth to warm and quicken, as well as guide us to perfection; by his threatenings against incorrigible guilt; by his glorious discoveries of immortality; by his sufferings and death; by that signal event, the resurrection, which powerfully bore witness to his divine mission, and brought down to people's senses a future life; by his continual intercession, which obtains for us spiritual aid and blessings; and by the power with which he is invested of raising the dead, judging the world, and

conferring the everlasting rewards promised to the faithful.

We have no desire to conceal the fact, that a difference of opinion exists among us, in regard to an interesting part of Christ's mediation; I mean, in regard to the precise influence of his death on our forgiveness.

Many suppose, that this event contributes to our pardon, as it was a principal means of confirming his religion, and of giving it a power over the mind; in other words, that it procures forgiveness by leading to that repentance and virtue, which is the great and only condition on which forgiveness is bestowed. Many of us are dissatisfied with this explanation, and think that the Scriptures ascribe the remission of sins to Christ's death, with an emphasis so peculiar, that we ought to consider this event as having a special influence in removing punishment, though the Scriptures may not reveal the way in which it contributes to this end.

Whilst, however, we differ in explaining the connection between Christ's death and human forgiveness, a connection which we all gratefully acknowledge, we agree in rejecting many sentiments which prevail in regard to his mediation. The idea, which is conveyed to common minds by the popular system, that Christ's death has an influence in making God placable, or merciful, in awakening his kindness towards men, we reject with strong disapprobation. We are happy to find, that this very dishonorable notion is disowned by intelligent Christians of that class from which we differ. We recollect, however, that, not long ago, it was common to hear of Christ, as having died to appease God's wrath, and to pay the debt of sinners to his inflexible justice; and we have a strong persuasion, that the language of popular religious books, and the common mode of stating the doctrine of Christ's mediation, still communicate very degrading views of God's character. They give to multitudes the impression, that the 25

death of Jesus produces a change in the mind of God towards man, and that in this its efficacy chiefly consists. No error seems to us more pernicious. We can endure no shade over the pure goodness of God. We earnestly maintain, that Jesus, instead of calling forth, in any way or degree, the mercy of the Father, was sent by that mercy, to be our Saviour; that he is nothing to the human race, but what he is by God's appointment; that he communicates nothing but what God empowers him to bestow; that our Father in heaven is originally, essentially, and eternally placable, and disposed to forgive; and that his unborrowed, underived, and unchangeable love is the only fountain of what flows to us through his Son. We conceive, that Jesus is dishonored, not glorified, by ascribing to him an influence, which clouds the splendor of Divine benevolence.

We farther agree in rejecting, as unscriptural and absurd, the explanation given by the popular system, of the manner in which Christ's death procures forgiveness for men. This system used to teach as its fundamental principle, that man, having sinned against an infinite Being, has contracted infinite guilt, and is consequently exposed to an infinite penalty. We believe, however, that this reasoning, if reasoning it may be called, which overlooks the obvious maxim, that the guilt of a being must be proportioned to his nature and powers, has fallen into disuse. Still the system teaches, that sin, of whatever degree, exposes to endless punishment, and that the whole human race, being infallibly involved by their nature in sin, owe this awful penalty to the justice of their Creator. It teaches, that this penalty cannot be remitted, in consistency with the honor of the divine law, unless a substitute be found to endure it or to suffer an equivalent. It also teaches, that, from the nature of the case, no substitute is adequate to this work, save the infinite God himself; and accordingly, God, in his second person,

took on him human nature, that he might pay to his own justice the debt of punishment incurred by men, and might thus reconcile forgiveness with the claims and threatenings of his law. Such is the prevalent system. Now, to us, this doctrine seems to carry on its front strong marks of absurdity; and we maintain that Christianity ought not to be encumbered with it, unless it be laid down in the New Testament fully and expressly. We ask our adversaries, then, to point to some plain passages where it is taught. We ask for one text, in which we are told, that God took human nature that he might make an infinite satisfaction to his own justice; for one text, which tells us, that human guilt requires an infinite substitute; that Christ's sufferings owe their efficacy to their being borne by an infinite being; or that his divine nature gives infinite value to the sufferings of the human.

Not ONE WORD of this description can we find in the Scriptures; not a text, which even hints at these strange doctrines. They are altogether, we believe, the fictions of theologians. Christianity is in no degree responsible for them. We are astonished at their prevalence. What can be plainer, than that God cannot, in any sense, be a sufferer, or bear a penalty in the room of his creatures? How dishonorable to him is the supposition, that his justice is now so severe, as to exact infinite punishment for the sins of frail and feeble men, and now so easy and yielding, as to accept the limited pains of Christ's human soul, as a full equivalent for the endless woes due from the world? How plain is it also, according to this doctrine, that God, instead of being plenteous in forgiveness, never forgives; for it seems absurd to speak of men as forgiven, when their whole punishment, or an equivalent to it, is borne by a substitute? A scheme more fitted to obscure the brightness of Christianity and the mercy of God, or less suited to give comfort to a guilty and troubled mind, could not, we think, be easily framed.

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We believe, too, that this system is unfavorable to the character. It naturally leads men to think, that Christ came to change God's mind rather than their own; that the highest object of his mission was to avert punishment, rather than to communicate holiness; and that a large part of religion consists in disparaging good works and human virtue, for the purpose of magnifying the value of Christ's vicarious sufferings. In this way, a sense of the infinite importance and indispensable necessity of personal improvement is weakened, and highsounding praises of Christ's cross seem often to be substituted for obedience to his precepts. For ourselves, we have not so learned Jesus.

Whilst we gratefully acknowledge, that he came to rescue us from punishment, we believe, that he was sent on a still nobler errand, namely, to deliver us from sin itself, and to form us to a sublime and heavenly virtue. We regard him as a Saviour, chiefly as he is the light, physician, and guide of the dark, diseased, and wandering mind. No influence in the universe seems to us so glorious, as that over the character; and no redemption so worthy of thankfulness, as the restoration of the soul to purity. Without this, pardon, were it possible, would be of little value. Why pluck the sinner from hell, if a hell be left to burn in his own breast? Why raise him to heaven, if he remain a stranger to its sanctity and love?

With these impressions, we are accustomed to value the Gospel chiefly as it abounds in effectual aids, motives, excitements to a generous and divine virtue. In this virtue, as in a common centre, we see all its doctrines, precepts, promises meet; and we believe, that faith in this religion is of no worth, and contributes nothing to salvation, any farther than as it uses these doctrines, precepts, promises, and the whole life, character, sufferings, and triumphs of Jesus, as the means of purifying the mind, of changing it into the likeness of his celestial excellence.

Having thus stated our views of the highest object of Christ's mission, that it is the recovery of men to virtue, or holiness, I shall now, in the last place, give our views of the nature of Christian virtue, or true holiness. We believe that all virtue has its foundation in the moral nature of man, that is, in conscience, or his sense of duty, and in the power of forming his temper and life according to conscience.

We believe that these moral faculties are the grounds of responsibility, and the highest distinctions of human nature, and that no act is praiseworthy, any farther than it springs from their exertion. We believe, that no dispositions infused into us without our own moral activity, are of the nature of virtue, and therefore, we reject the doctrine of irresistible divine influence on the human mind, moulding it into goodness, as marble is hewn into a statue. Such goodness, if this word may be used, would not be the object of moral approbation, any more than the instinctive affections of inferior animals, or the constitutional amiableness of human beings.

By these remarks, we do not mean to deny the importance of God's aid or Spirit; but by his Spirit, we mean a moral, illuminating, and persuasive influence, not physical, not compulsory, not involving a necessity of virtue. We object, strongly, to the idea of many Christians respecting man's impotence and God's irresistible agency on the heart, believing that they subvert our responsibility and the laws of our moral nature, that they make men machines, that they cast on God the blame of all evil deeds, that they discourage good minds, and inflate the fanatical with wild conceits of immediate and sensible inspiration.

Among the virtues, we give the first place to the love of God. We believe, that this principle is the true end and happiness of our being, that we were made for union with our Creator, that his infinite perfection is the only sufficient object and true resting-place for the 27

insatiable desires and unlimited capacities of the human mind, and that, without him, our noblest sentiments, admiration, veneration, hope, and love, would wither and decay. We believe, too, that the love of God is not only essential to happiness, but to the strength and perfection of all the virtues; that conscience, without the sanction of God's authority and retributive justice, would be a weak director; that benevolence, unless nourished by communion with his goodness, and encouraged by his smile, could not thrive amidst the selfishness and thanklessness of the world; and that self-government, without a sense of the divine inspection, would hardly extend beyond an outward and partial purity.

God, as he is essentially goodness, holiness, justice, and virtue, so he is the life, motive, and sustainer of virtue in the human soul.

But, whilst we earnestly inculcate the love of God, we believe that great care is necessary to distinguish it from counterfeits.

We think that much which is called piety is worthless. Many have fallen into the error, that there can be no excess in feelings which have God for their object; and, distrusting as coldness that self-possession, without which virtue and devotion lose all their dignity, they have abandoned themselves to extravagances, which have brought contempt on piety. Most certainly, if the love of God be that which often bears its name, the less we have of it the better. If religion be the shipwreck of understanding, we cannot keep too far from it. On this subject, we always speak plainly. We cannot sacrifice our reason to the reputation of zeal. We owe it to truth and religion to maintain, that fanaticism, partial insanity, sudden impressions, and ungovernable transports, are anything rather than piety.

We conceive, that the true love of God is a moral sentiment, founded on a clear perception, and consisting in a high esteem and veneration, of his moral perfections.

Thus, it perfectly coincides, and is in fact the same thing, with the love of virtue, rectitude, and goodness. You will easily judge, then, what we esteem the surest and only decisive signs of piety. We lay no stress on strong excitements. We esteem him, and him only a pious man, who practically conforms to God's moral perfections and government; who shows his delight in God's benevolence, by loving and serving his neighbour; his delight in God's justice, by being resolutely upright; his sense of God's purity, by regulating his thoughts, imagination, and desires; and whose conversation, business, and domestic life are swayed by a regard to God's presence and authority. In all things else men may deceive themselves. Disordered nerves may give them strange sights, and sounds, and impressions. Texts of Scripture may come to them as from Heaven. Their whole souls may be moved, and their confidence in God's favor be undoubting. But in all this there is no religion. The question is, Do they love God's commands, in which his character is fully expressed, and give up to these their habits and passions? Without this, ecstasy is a mockery. One surrender of desire to God's will, is worth a thousand transports. We do not judge of the bent of people's minds by their raptures, any more than we judge of the natural direction of a tree during a storm. We rather suspect loud profession, for we have observed, that deep feeling is generally noiseless, and least seeks display.

We would not, by these remarks, be understood as wishing to exclude from religion warmth, and even transport. We honor, and highly value, true religious sensibility. We believe, that Christianity is intended to act powerfully on our whole nature, on the heart as well as the understanding and the conscience. We conceive of heaven as a state where the love of God will be exalted into an unbounded fervor and joy; and we desire, in our pilgrimage here, to drink into the spirit of that 28

better world. But we think, that religious warmth is only to be valued, when it springs naturally from an improved character, when it comes unforced, when it is the recompense of obedience, when it is the warmth of a mind which understands God by being like him, and when, instead of disordering, it exalts the understanding, invigorates conscience, gives a pleasure to common duties, and is seen to exist in connection with cheerfulness, judiciousness, and a reasonable frame of mind. When we observe a fervor, called religious, in men whose general character expresses little refinement and elevation, and whose piety seems at war with reason, we pay it little respect. We honor religion too much to give its sacred name to a feverish, forced, fluctuating zeal, which has little power over the life.

Another important branch of virtue, we believe to be love to Christ. The greatness of the work of Jesus, the spirit with which he executed it, and the sufferings which he bore for our salvation, we feel to be strong claims on our gratitude and veneration. We see in nature no beauty to be compared with the loveliness of his character, nor do we find on earth a benefactor to whom we owe an equal debt. We read his history with delight, and learn from it the perfection of our nature. We are particularly touched by his death, which was endured for our redemption, and by that strength of charity which triumphed over his pains. His resurrection is the foundation of our hope of immortality. His intercession gives us boldness to draw nigh to the throne of grace, and we look up to heaven with new desire, when we think, that, if we follow him here, we shall there see his benignant countenance, and enjoy his friendship for ever.

I need not express to you our views on the subject of the benevolent virtues. We attach such importance to these that we are sometimes reproached with exalting them

above piety. We regard the spirit of love, charity, meekness, forgiveness, liberality, and beneficence, as the badge and distinction of Christians, as the brightest image we can bear of God, as the best proof of piety. On this subject, I need not, and cannot enlarge; but there is one branch of benevolence which I ought not to pass over in silence, because we think that we conceive of it more highly and justly than many of our brethren. I refer to the duty of candor, charitable judgment, especially towards those who differ in religious opinion. We think, that in nothing have Christians so widely departed from their religion, as in this particular. We read with astonishment and horror, the history of the church; and sometimes when we look back on the fires of persecution, and on the zeal of Christians, in building up walls of separation, and in giving up one another to perdition, we feel as if we were reading the records of an infernal, rather than a heavenly kingdom. An enemy to every religion, if asked to describe a Christian, would, with some show of reason, depict him as an idolater of his own distinguishing opinions, covered with badges of party, shutting his eyes on the virtues, and his ears on the arguments, of his opponents, arrogating all excellence to his own sect and all saving power to his own creed, sheltering under the name of pious zeal the love of domination, the conceit of infallibility, and the spirit of intolerance, and trampling on people's rights under the pretence of saving their souls.

We can hardly conceive of a plainer obligation on beings of our frail and fallible nature, who are instructed in the duty of candid judgement, than to abstain from condemning men of apparent conscientiousness and sincerity, who are chargeable with no crime but that of differing from us in the interpretation of the Scriptures, and differing, too, on topics of great and acknowledged obscurity. We are astonished at the hardihood of those, who, with Christ's 29

warnings sounding in their ears, take on them the responsibility of making creeds for his church, and cast out professors of virtuous lives for imagined errors, for the guilt of thinking for themselves. We know that zeal for truth is the cover for this usurpation of Christ's prerogative; but we think that zeal for truth, as it is called, is very suspicious, except in men, whose capacities and advantages, whose patient deliberation, and whose improvements in humility, mildness, and candor, give them a right to hope that their views are more just than those of their neighbours. Much of what passes for a zeal for truth, we look upon with little respect, for it often appears to thrive most luxuriantly where other virtues shoot up thinly and feebly; and we have no gratitude for those reformers, who would force upon us a doctrine which has not sweetened their own tempers, or made them better men than their neighbours.

We are accustomed to think much of the difficulties attending religious enquiries; difficulties springing from the slow development of our minds, from the power of early impressions, from the state of society, from human authority, from the general neglect of the reasoning powers, from the want of just principles of criticism and of important helps in interpreting Scripture, and from various other causes. We find, that on no subject have men, and even good men, grafted so many strange conceits, wild theories, and fictions of fancy, as on religion ; and remembering, as we do, that we ourselves are sharers of the common frailty, we dare not assume infallibility in the treatment of our fellow-Christians, or encourage in common Christians, who have little time for investigation, the habit of denouncing and condemning other denominations, perhaps more enlightened and virtuous than their own. Charity, forbearance, a delight in the virtues of different sects, a backwardness to censure and condemn, these are virtues, which,

however poorly practised by us, we admire and recommend; and we would rather join ourselves to the church in which they abound, than to any other communion, however elated with the belief of its own orthodoxy, however strict in guarding its creed, however burning with zeal against imagined error.

I have thus given the distinguishing views of those Christians in whose names I have spoken. We have embraced this system, not hastily or lightly, but after much deliberation; and we hold it fast, not merely because we believe it to be true, but because we regard it as purifying truth, as a doctrine according to godliness, as able to "work mightily" and to "bring forth fruit" in them who believe. That we wish to spread it, we have no desire to conceal; but we think, that we wish its diffusion, because we regard it as more friendly to practical piety and pure morals than the opposite doctrines, because it gives clearer and nobler views of duty, and stronger motives to its performance, because it recommends religion at once to the understanding and the heart, because it asserts the lovely and venerable attributes of God, because it tends to restore the benevolent spirit of Jesus to his divided and afflicted church, and because it cuts off every hope of God's favor, except that which springs from practical conformity to the life and precepts of Christ. We see nothing in our views to give offence, save their purity, and it is their purity, which makes us seek and hope their extension through the world.

My friend and brother; -- You are this day to take upon you important duties; to be clothed with an office, which the Son of God did not disdain; to devote yourself to that religion, which the most hallowed lips have preached, and the most precious blood sealed. We trust that you will bring to this work a willing mind, a firm purpose, a martyr's spirit, a readiness to toil and suffer for the truth, a devotion of your best powers to the 30

interests of piety and virtue. I have spoken of the doctrines which you will probably preach; but I do not mean, that you are to give yourself to controversy. You will remember, that good practice is the end of preaching, and will labor to make your people holy livers, rather than skilful disputants. Be careful, lest the desire of defending what you deem truth, and of repelling reproach and misrepresentation, turn you aside from your great business, which is to fix in men and women's minds a living conviction of the obligation, sublimity, and happiness of Christian virtue. The best way to vindicate your sentiments, is to show, in your preaching and life, their intimate connection with Christian morals, with a high and delicate sense of duty, with candor towards your opposers, with inflexible integrity, and with an habitual reverence for God. If any light can pierce and scatter the clouds of prejudice, it is that of a pure example. My brother, may your life preach more loudly than your lips. Be to this people a pattern of all good works, and may your instructions derive authority from a well-grounded belief in your hearers, that you speak from the heart, that you preach from experience, that the truth which you dispense has wrought powerfully in your own heart, that God, and Jesus, and heaven, are not merely words on your lips, but most affecting realities to your mind, and springs of hope and consolation, and strength, in all your trials.

Thus laboring, may you reap abundantly, and have a testimony of your faithfulness, not only in your own conscience, but in the esteem, love, virtues, and improvements of your people.

To all who hear me, I would say, with the Apostle, Prove all things, hold fast that which is good. Do not, brethren, shrink from the duty of searching God's Word for yourselves, through fear of human censure and denunciation. Do not think, that you may innocently follow the opinions which prevail around you, without investigation, on the

ground, that Christianity is now so purified from errors, as to need no laborious research. There is much reason to believe, that Christianity is at this moment dishonored by gross and cherished corruptions. If you remember the darkness which hung over the Gospel for ages; if you consider the impure union, which still subsists in almost every Christian country, between the church and state, and which enlists people's selfishness and ambition on the side of established error; if you recollect in what degree the spirit of intolerance has checked free enquiry, not only before, but since the Reformation; you will see that Christianity cannot have freed itself from all the human inventions, which disfigured it under the Papal tyranny. No. Much stubble is yet to be burned; much rubbish to be removed; many gaudy decorations, which a false taste has hung around Christianity, must be swept away; and the earth-born fogs, which have long shrouded it, must be scattered, before this divine fabric will rise before us in its native and awful majesty, in its harmonious proportions, in its mild and celestial splendors This glorious reformation in the church, we hope, under God's blessing, from the progress of the human intellect, from the moral progress of society, from the consequent decline of prejudice and bigotry, and, though last not least, from the subversion of human authority in matters of religion, from the fall of those hierarchies, and other human institutions, by which the minds of individuals are oppressed under the weight of numbers, and a Papal dominion is perpetuated in the Protestant church. Our earnest prayer to God is, that he will overturn, and overturn, and overturn the strong-holds of spiritual usurpation, until HE shall come, whose right it is to rule the minds of men; that the conspiracy of ages against the liberty of Christians may be brought to an end; that the servile assent, so long yielded to human creeds, may give place to honest and devout enquiry into the Scriptures; and that 31

Christianity, thus purified from error, may put forth its almighty energy, and prove itself, by its ennobling influence on the mind, to be

indeed "the power of God unto salvation."

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BOOK REVIEW:

The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity Hyam Maccoby.

Barnes & Noble Publishing, 1998. 237 pages

Reviewed by Theresa Welsh Most Christians think of the "early Christians" as one group, the followers of Jesus who stayed together after the crucifixion.

Believing Jesus had risen from the dead, then ascended to heaven, they awaited his return and spread his message. These followers included the original apostles, minus Judas who had hanged himself, and they were led by Jesus' brother, James. And then there was Paul, a man who had never met Jesus but had experienced a vision that brought him into the fold. Whatever happened to him as he traveled the road to Damascus convinced him that Jesus really had conquered death. Paul joined the group at Jeruselem and declared himself "apostle to the gentiles."

Who was this Paul? Was he a Jew, a

Pharisee who has persecuted the followers of Jesus, then later became the greatest advocate of Christian ideas? That is the conventional view of him, largely supported by the Bible, but it is not the view presented in The Mythmaker.

Hyam Maccoby lives up to his name (the Maccabees of the Bible were hereditary High Priests who rebelled against Roman rule) and refuses to accept the status quo. He says the poor Pharisees have been given a bum rap, that far from being the hypocrites Christians believe them to be, they were actually very flexible and tolerant in their beliefs, and maintained dialogs on every subject, always examining new points of view. In fact, Maccoby tells us that most likely Jesus was himself a Pharisee. He says Jesus' teachings were identical to the Pharisee teachings, while Paul 33

falls far short of the elegant logic and extensive knowledge required of a Pharisee.

We learn in this book that it was the Saducees who were stooges of the Romans.

They were connected to the High Priest who was selected by the Romans. Maccoby's theory is that Paul, before his so-called conversion, was working for the High Priest who would have been trying to stamp out the Jesus movement because it was a threat to Rome. In Maccoby's view, Jesus was a political agitator who adhered to the Jewish idea of the messiah as one who would deliver the Jews from political (not spiritual) bondage. Maccoby says Jesus was just one more failed messiah.

His death on the cross basically ended his movement. Except for one thing. His followers believed they had seen him alive after he'd been placed in a tomb. Because of this, they continued to believe he was the messiah.

Maccoby does not offer an explanation of how Jesus could have been seen alive; he does not deal with the difficult -- and crucial -- question of whether Jesus actually rose from the dead.

But the implications of the situation he describes have nothing to do with founding a new religion. Jesus and his followers were Jews who were looking for an earthly delivery from hundreds of years of subjugation by the brutality of Rome.

So, if that is the case, how did the Christian religion get started? Enter Paul, with his vision and his guilt for having persecuted the disciples of Jesus. Paul never shared the same idea of the Jesus movement as the Jeruselem apostles who had actually known Jesus. Paul instead devised his own version of Jesus, based largely on existing pagan religions. Under Paul's teaching, Jesus became the son of God, the suffering savior who died to redeem the rest of us. This was not

a new idea, but borrows from older religions like Zoroastrianism, and also takes on some of the flavor of the mystery cults of the day. In the idea of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the savior, a kind of "magic" that became the eucharist that gives us instant salvation based only on faith, Paul roams a long way from traditional Jewish ideas. The eucharist is a basically pagan form of ritual, a practice that learned Jewish scholars of the time would have abhorred.

Paul's ideas were not Jewish ideas, but Jesus was a loyal Jew, always faithful to the Torah. Maccoby suspects that Paul was no Jew, but had converted to Judaism and tried to become a scholar like the Pharisees but could not make the grade. The simple ideas of the Christianity he invented gave him the power and prestige he craved. Did Paul break away from the Jeruselem church and go it alone?

Maccoby looks for clues in the Bible, and is willing to throw away the passages that don't match his theory and accept those that do. He sees in Paul's invention the origins of Christian anti-semitism, which go back to the idea that "the Jews killed Jesus." He says since the gospels were written well after Paul had established his myth, they are not accurate. It is necessary, in his view, to look beneath the surface for evidence of the original story that can still be discerned if one knows how to interpret the words. In Maccoby's version, there is no religious conflict because Jesus and all his followers were Jews with no interest in converting any gentiles; there was nothing to convert them to. It was the Jews and only the Jews who needed a messiah.

Is Maccoby right about any of this? Or is he one more Jew bummed out about Christians? His views on Paul are extreme, but there is evidence in the Dead Sea Scrolls that 34

the community at Qumran, which those scrolls document, was probably the same as the socalled Jeruselem Church, and though these ancient documents are cryptic, many scholars think they show an early "Christian" community that was essentially Jewish. It comes down to a question of whether Jesus intended to begin a new church and why that church was based in Rome, the site of the enemy of James and his

band of disciples who believed in the messiahship (but not the divinity) of Jesus.

Is the Christianity that dominates the world today based on a myth invented by Paul and finally allied with the Roman enemy through its ultimate acceptance by Constantine? If these questions interest you, you might want to read Hyam Maccoby's book.

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Theodore Parker, Unitarian Minister

August 24, 1810 (Lexington, – May 10, 1860 (Florence, Italy) Theodore Parker was a reforming minister of the Unitarian Church. As much a social reformer as minister, he was an abolitionist. His sermons and orations would be inspiration to later reformers such as Abraham Lincoln.

In 1829, at age 19, Parker walked the ten miles from Lexington to Cambridge to apply to Harvard College, initially intending to be a lawyer but decided on theology.

Although he was accepted, he could not pay the tuition. So he continued to live at home, to work on his father’s farm, and to study as he was able, joining his classmates only for exams. Because of his diligence, he was able to complete three years of

study in one. He then took various posts as a teacher, teaching at an academy from 1831-1834 at Watertown, MA, While at Watertown, Parker produced his first significant manuscript, The History of the Jews, in which he outlined his skepticism of biblical miracles and an otherwise liberal approach to Bible, themes which would follow him throughout his ministry. There is much speculation about his radical theological positions but speculation is that he was influenced by the works of such as Coleridge, Carlyle and Emerson.

Some sources suggest that he was acquainted with many languages: Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Arabic as well as the ancient Biblical languages of Chaldee, Syriac, Coptic and Ethiopic.

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Eventually, his Unitarian clerical colleagues became alarmed by his radical theological views

and declarations and he was “invited” to leave the church. He respectfully declined the invitation.

THE TRUE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN CHURCH.A DISCOURSE AS MINISTER OF THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH IN BOSTON, JANUARY 4, 1846.

Theodore Parker (Note: The content of the discourse seems to suggest that this was on the occasion of the first anniversary of Parker's ministry at this church) (Editor's note: Parker was writing at a time when the masculine was used almost exclusively in writing.

At attempt has been made to change his language to be gender inclusive. Sometimes, it is difficult to achieve this end because of the limitations of our language, it having no gender neutral or gender inclusive terms. An attempt has also been made to excise Parker's copious use of “manly” and substitute other words which may provide a more accurate sense of what he meant in contemporary language.

Parker would have been horrified to know that anyone might suggest that his writings would ever be interpreted as not providing women with their equality.

Apologies to the purists who believe that Parker's work should not receive the assault of an editor's pen!

But, to quote Parker himself: A Christian church should be a means of reforming the world, of forming it after the pattern of Christian ideas. It should therefore bring up the sentiments of the times, the ideas of the times, and the actions of the times, to judge them by the universal standard. It is thought, therefore, that Parker would approve of the effort to make his writings gender inclusive.)

For nearly a year we have assembled

within these walls from week to week,--I think not idly; I know you have not come for any trivial end.

You have recently made a formal organization of yourselves for religious action. To-day, at your request, I enter regularly on a ministry in the midst of you. What are we doing; what do we design to do? We are here to establish a Christian church; and a Christian church, as I understand it, is a body of men and women united together in a common desire of religious excellence and with a common regard for Jesus of Nazareth, regarding him as the noblest example of morality and religion,--as the model, therefore, in this respect for us. uch a church may have many rites, as our Catholic brothers, or but few rites, as our Protestant brothers, or no rites at all, as our brothers, the Friends. It may be, nevertheless, a Christian church; for the essence of substance, which makes it a religious body, is the union for the purpose of cultivating love to God and man; and the essence of form, which makes it a 37

Christian body, is the common regard for Jesus, considered as the highest representative of God that we know. It is not the form, either of ritual or of doctrine, but the spirit which constitutes a Christian church. A staff may sustain an old person, or a young man or woman may bear it in their hands as a toy, but walking is walking, though the old person have no staff for ornament or support. A Christian spirit may exist under rituals and doctrines the most diverse.

It were hard to say a person is not a Christian, because he or she believes in the doctrine of the Trinity, or the Pope, while Jesus taught no such doctrine; foolish to say one is no Christian because he or she denies the existence of a Devil, though Jesus believed it. To make a person's Christian name depend on a belief of all that is related by the numerous writers in the Bible, is as absurd as to make that depend on a belief in all the words of Luther, or Calvin, or St. Augustine.

It is not for me to say that a person is not theoretically a Christian because he or she believes that Slavery is a Divine and Christian institution; that War is grateful to God – saying, with the Old Testament, that God himself “is a man of war,” who teaches people to fight, and curses such as refuse; -- or because he or she believes that all people are born totally depraved, and the greater part of them are to be damned everlastingly by “a jealous God,” who is “angry with the wicked every day,” and that the few are to be “saved” only because God unjustly punished an innocent man for their sake.

I will not say a person is not a Christian though he or she believe all the melancholy things related of God in some parts of the Old Testament. Yet I know few doctrines so hostile to real religion as these have proved themselves. In our day it has strangely come to pass that a little sect, themselves hooted at and called “Infidels” by the rest of Christendom, deny the name of Christian to such as publicly reject the miracles of the Bible. Time will doubtless correct this error.

Fire is fire, and ashes ashes, say what we may;

each will work after its kind.

Now if Christianity be the absolute religion, it must allow all beliefs that are true, and it may exist and be developed in connection with all forms consistent with the absolute religion, and the degree thereof represented by Jesus.

The action of a Christian church seems to be twofold: first on its own members, and then, through their means, on others out of its pale. Let a word be said of each in its order.

If I were to ask you why you came here to-day; why you have often come to this house hitherto? -- the serious amongst you would say: That we might become better; more manly; upright before God and downright before men; that we might be Christians, men good and pious after the fashion Jesus spoke of. The first design of such a church then is to help ourselves become Christians.

Now the substance of Christianity is Piety – Love to God, and Goodness – Love to men. It is a religion, the germs whereof are born in your heart, appearing in your earliest childhood; which are developed just in proportion as you become a man, and are indeed the standard measure of your life. As the primeval rock lies at the bottom of the sea and appears at the top of the loftiest mountains, so in a finished character religion underlies all and crowns all. Christianity, to be perfect and entire, demands a complete manliness; the development of the whole man, mind, conscience, heart and soul. It aims not to destroy the sacred peculiarities of individual character. It cherishes and develops them in their perfection, leaving Paul to be Paul, not Peter, and John to be John, not Jude nor James.

We are born different, into a world where unlike things are gathered together, that there may be a special work for each. Christianity respects this diversity in men, aiming not to undo but further God's will; not fashioning all men after one pattern, to think alike, act alike, be alike, even look alike. It is something far other than Christianity which demands that. A Christian church, then, should put no fetters on the man; it 38

should have unity of purpose, but with the most entire freedom for the individual.

When you sacrifice the individual to the mass in church or state, church or state becomes an offence, a stumbling-block in the way of progress, and must end or mend. The greater the variety of individualities in church or state, the better is it, so long as all are really manly, humane and accordant. A church must needs be partial. It must not be catholic - where all men think alike, narrow and little. Your church-organ, to have compass and volume, must have pipes of various sound, and the skilful artist destroys none, but tunes them all to harmony; if otherwise, he does not understand his work. In becoming Christians let us not cease to be men; nay, we cannot be Christians unless we are men first. It were unchristian to love Christianity better than the truth, or Christ better than man.

But Christianity is not only the absolute religion; it has also the ideal-man. In Jesus of Nazareth it gives us, in a certain sense, the model of religious excellence. It is a great thing to have the perfect idea of religion; to have also that idea made real, satisfactory to the wants of any age, were a yet further greatness. A Christian church should aim to have its members Christians as Jesus was the Christ; sons of man as he was; sons of God as much as he.

To be that it is not needful to observe all the forms he complied with, only such forms as help you; not needful to have all the thoughts that he had, only such thoughts as are true. If Jesus were ever mistaken, as the Evangelists make it appear, then it is a part of Christianity to avoid his mistakes as well as to accept his truths. It is the part of a Christian church to teach people so; to stop at no person's limitations; to prize no word so high as truth; no man so dear as God. Jesus came not to fetter men, but free them.

Jesus is a model-man in this respect: that he stands in a true relation to men, that of forgiveness for their ill-treatment, service for their needs, trust in their nature, and constant love

towards them,--towards even the wicked and hypocritical; in a true relation to God, that of entire obedience to Him, of perfect trust in Him, of love towards Him with the whole mind, heart and soul; and love of God is also love of truth, goodness, usefulness, love of Love itself.

Obedience to God and trust in God is obedience to these things, and trust in them.

If Jesus had loved any opinion better than truth, then had he lost that relation to God, and so far ceased to be inspired by Him; had he allowed any partial feeling to overcome the spirit of universal love, then also he had sundered himself from God, and been at discord, not in harmony with the Infinite.

If Jesus be the model-man, then should a Christian church teach its members to hold the same relation to God that Christ held; to be one with Him; incarnations of God, as much and as far as Jesus was one with God, and an incarnation thereof, a manifestation of God in the flesh.

It is Christian to receive all the truths of the Bible; all the truths that are not in the Bible just as much. It is Christian also to reject all the errors that come to us from without the Bible or from within the Bible.

The Christian person, or the Christian church, is to stop at no person's limitation; at the limit of no book. God is not dead, nor even asleep, but awake and alive as ever of old; He inspires men now no less than beforetime; is ready to fill your mind, heart and soul with truth, love, life, as to fill Moses and Jesus, and that on the same terms; for inspiration comes by universal laws, and not by partial exceptions.

Each point of spirit, as each atom of space, is still bathed in the tides of Deity. But all good people, all Christian people, all inspired people will be no more alike than all wicked people. It is the same light which is blue in the sky and golden in the sun. “All nature's difference makes all nature's peace.�

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We can attain this relation to man and God only on condition that we are free. If a church cannot allow freedom it were better not to allow itself, but cease to be. Unity of purpose, with entire freedom for the individual, should be the motto. It is only free people that can find the truth, love the truth, live the truth. As much freedom as you shut out, so much falsehood do you shut in. It is a poor thing to purchase unity of church-action at the cost of individual freedom. The Catholic church tried it, and you see what came thereof: science forsook it, calling it a den of lies. Morality forsook it, as the mystery of iniquity, and religion herself protested against it, as the mother of abominations.

The Protestant churches are trying the same thing, and see whither they tend and what foes rise up against them,--Philosophy with its Bible of nature, and Religion with its Bible of man, both the hand-writing of God. The great problem of church and state is this: To produce unity of action and yet leave individual freedom not disturbed; to balance into harmonious proportions the mass and the man, the centripetal and centrifugal powers as, by God's wondrous, living mechanism, they are balanced in the worlds above. In the state we have done this more wisely than any nation heretofore. In the churches it remains yet to do.

But a person is equal to all which God appoints for him or her. Their desires are ever proportionate to their duty and his destinies. The strong cry of the nations for liberty, a craving as of hungry people for bread and water, shows what liberty is worth, and what it is destined to do.

Allow freedom to think, and there will be truth; freedom to act, and we shall have heroic works; freedom to live and be, and we shall have love to men and love to God. The world's history proves that, and our own history.

Jesus, our model-man, was the freest the world ever saw!

Let it be remembered that every truth is

of God, and will lead to good and good only.

Truth is the seed whereof welfare is the fruit; for every grain thereof we plant some one shall reap a whole harvest of welfare. A lie is “of the Devil,� and must lead to want and woe and death, ending at last in a storm where it rains tears and perhaps blood. Have freedom, and you will sow new truth to reap its satisfaction; submit to thraldom, and you sow lies to reap the death they bear. A Christian church should be the home of the soul, where it enjoys the largest liberty of the sons of God. If fettered elsewhere, here let us be free. Christ is the liberator; he came not to drive slaves, but to set men free. The churches of old did their greatest work when there was most freedom in those churches.

Here, too, should the spirit of devotion be encouraged; the soul of humanity communing with his God in aspirations after purity and truth, in resolutions for goodness and piety, and a manly life. These are a prayer. The fact that people freely hold truths in common, great truths and universal; that unitedly they lift up their souls to God seeking instruction of Him, this will prove the strongest bond between person and person.

It seems to me that the Protestant churches have not fully done justice to the sentiment of worship; that in taking care of the head we have forgotten the heart. To think truth is the worship of the head; to do noble works of usefulness and charity the worship of the will; to feel love and trust in humanity and God, is the glad worship of the heart. A Christian church should be broad enough for all; should seek truth and promote piety, that both together might toil in good works.

Here should be had the best instruction which can be commanded; the freest, truest, and most mature voice; the mind most conversant with truth; the eloquence of a heart that runs over with goodness, whose faith is unfaltering in truth, justice, purity, and love; a faith in God, whose charity is living love to humanity, even the sinful and the base.

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Teaching is the breathing of one person's inspiration into another, a most real thing amongst real people. In a church there should be instruction for the young. God appoints the father and mother the natural teachers of children; above all is it so in their religious culture. But there are some who cannot, many who will not fulfil this trust. Hence it has been found necessary for wise and good people to offer their instruction to such. In this matter it is religion we need more than theology, and of this it is not mere traditions and mythologies we are to teach, the juvenile tales of a rude people in a dark age, things our pupils will do well to forget soon as they are adult, and which they will have small reason to thank us for obscuring their minds withal; but it is the great, everlasting truths of religion which should be taught, enforced by examples of noble men and women, which tradition tells of, or the present age affords, all this to be suited to the tender years of the child.

Christianity should be represented as human, as people's nature in its true greatness; religion shown to be beautiful, a real duty corresponding to humanity's deepest desire, that as religion affords the deepest satisfaction to people, so it is their most universal want. Christ should be shown to people as he was, the most mature of people, the most divine because the most human. Children should be taught to respect their nature; to consider it as the noblest of all God's works; to know that perfect truth and goodness are demanded of them, and by that only can they be worthy people; taught to feel that God is present in Boston and to-day, as much as ever in Jerusalem in the time of Jesus.

They should be taught to abhor the public sins of our times, but to love and imitate its great examples of nobleness, and practical religion, which stand out amid the mob of worldly pretenders in this day.

Then, too, if one of our members falls into unworthy ways, is it not the duty of some one to speak with him or her, not as with authority to

command, but with affection to persuade? Did any one of you ever address an erring brother or sister on the folly of his or her ways with gentle tenderness, and try to charm him or her back, and find a cold repulse? If a brother or sister is in error they will be grateful to one that tells them so; will learn most from people who make him ashamed of his or her littleness of life. In this matter it seems many a good person comes short of his duty.

There is yet another way in which a church should act on its own household, and that is by direct material help in time of need. There is the eternal distinction of the strong and the weak, which cannot be changed. But as things now go there is another inequality not of God's appointment, but of people's perversity, the distinction of rich and poor--of people bloated by superfluous wealth others starving and freezing from want. You know and I know how often the strong abuse their strength, exerting it solely for themselves and to the ruin of the weak; we all know that such are reckoned great in the world, though they may have grown rich solely by clutching at what others earned.

In Christianity, and before the God of justice, all people are brothers and sisters; the strong are so that they may help the weak. As a nation chooses its wisest men and women to manage its affairs for the nation's good, and not barely their own, so God endows Charles or Suzannah with great gifts that they may also bless all people thereby. If they use those powers solely for their pleasure then are they false before humanity; false before God. It is said of the church of the Friends that no one of their number has ever received the charity of an almshouse, or for a civil offence been shut up in a jail. If the poor forsake a church, be sure that the church forsook God long before. *

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But the church must have an action on others out of its pale. If individual people or a 41

society of persons have a truth, they hold it not for themselves alone, but for all. The solitary thinker, who in a moment of ecstatic action in his or her closet at midnight discovers a truth, he or she discovers it for all the world and for eternity. A Christian church ought to love to see its truths extend; so it should put them in contact with the opinions of the world, not with excess of zeal or lack of charity.

A Christian church should be a means of reforming the world, of forming it after the pattern of Christian ideas. It should therefore bring up the sentiments of the times, the ideas of the times, and the actions of the times, to judge them by the universal standard. In this way it will learn much and be a living church, that grows with the advance of people's sentiments, ideas and actions, and while it keeps the good of the past will lose no brave spirit of the present day. It can teach much; now moderating the fury of evil people, then quickening their sluggish steps.

We expect the sins of commerce to be winked at in the street; the sins of the state to be applauded on election days and in a Congress, or on the fourth of July; we are used to hear them called the righteousness of the nation. There they are often measured by the avarice or the ambition of greedy men. You expect them to be tried by passion, which looks only to immediate results and partial ends.

Here they are to be measured Conscience and Reason, which look permanent results and universal ends; to looked at with reference to the Laws of God, everlasting ideas on which alone is based welfare of the world. Here they are to examined in the light of Christianity itself.

by to be the the be

If the church be true, many things which seem gainful in the street and expedient in the senate-house, will here be set down as wrong, and all gain which comes therefrom seen to be but a loss. If there be a public sin in the land, if a lie invade the state, it is for the church to give the

alarm; it is here that it may war on lies and sins; the more widely they are believed in and practised, the more are they deadly, the more to be opposed. Here, let no false idea or false action of the public go without exposure and rebuke.

But let no noble heroism of the times, no noble person pass by without due honor. If it is a good thing to honor dead saints and the heroism of our forefathers and mothers; it is a better thing to honor the saints of to-day, the live heroism of men and women who do the battle, when that battle is all around us. I know a few such saints; here and there a hero of that stamp, and I will not wait till they are dead and classic before I call them so and honor them as such, for “To side with truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified, And the multitude make virtue of the faith they once denied; For Humanity sweeps onward; where to-day the martyr stands, On the morrow crouches Judas, with the silver in his hands; Far in front the cross stands ready, and the crackling fagots burn, While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn.�

(Please see end note)

Do you not see that if a man have a new truth, it must be reformatory and so create an outcry? It will seem destructive as the farmer's plough; like that, it is so to tares and thistles, but the herald of the harvest none the less. In this way a Christian church should be a society for 42

promoting true sentiments and ideas. If it would lead, it must go before people; if it would be looked up to, it must stand high.

That is not all: it should be a society for the promotion of good works.

We are all beneath our idea, and therefore transgressors before God. Yet He gives us the rain, the snow and the sun. It falls on me as well as on the field of my neighbor, who is a far juster man. How can we repent, cast our own sins behind us, outgrow and forget them better, than by helping others to work out their salvation?

We are all brothers and sisters before God. Mutually needful we must be; mutually helpful we should be. Here are the ignorant that ask our instruction, not with words only, but with the prayer of their darkness, far more suppliant than speech. I never see an ignorant man younger than myself, without a feeling of self-reproach, for I ask: “What have I been doing to suffer him to grow up in nakedness of mind?� Every person, born in New England, who does not share the culture of this age, is a reproach to more than themselves, and will at last actively curse those who began by deserting them. The Christian church should lead the movement for the public education of the people.

Here are the needy who ask not so much your gold, your bread, or your cloth, as they ask also your sympathy, respect and counsel; that you assist them to help themselves, that they may have gold won by their industry, not begged out of your benevolence. It is justice more than charity they ask. Every beggar, every pauper, born and bred amongst us, is a reproach to us, and condemns our civilization. For how has it come to pass that in a land of abundance here are people, for no fault of their own, born into want, living in want, and dying of want?

And that, while we pretend to a religion which says all men are brothers! There is a horrid wrong somewhere.

Here too are the drunkard, the criminal, the abandoned person, sometimes the foe of society, but far oftener the victim of society.

Whence come the tenants of our almshouses, jails, the victims of vice in all our towns? Why, from the lowest rank of the people; from the poorest and most ignorant! Say rather from the most neglected, and the public sin is confessed, and the remedy hinted at. What have the strong been doing all this while, that the weak have come to such a state? Let them answer for themselves.

Now for all these ought a Christian church to toil. It should be a church of good works; if it is a church of good faith it will be so.

Does not Christianity say the strong should help the weak? Does not that mean something? It once did. Has the Christian fire faded out from those words, once so marvellously bright? Look round you, in the streets of your own Boston! See the ignorant, men and women with scarce more than the stature of men and women; boys and girls growing up in ignorance and the low civilization which comes thereof, the barbarians of Boston.

Their character will one day be a blot and a curse to the nation, and who is to blame? Why, the ablest and best people, who might have had it otherwise if they would. Look at the poor, people of small ability, weak by nature, born into a weak position, therefore doubly weak; men and women whom the strong use for their purpose, and then cast them off as we throw away the rind of an orange after we have drunk its generous juice.

Behold the wicked, so we call the weak men that are publicly caught in the cobweb of the law; ask why they became wicked; how we have aimed to reform them; what we have done to make them respect themselves, to believe in goodness, in man and God? And then say if there is not something for Christian people to do, something for a Christian church to do! Every almshouse in Massachusetts shows that the churches have not 43

done their duty, that the Christians lie lies when they call Jesus “master” and men “brothers!”

Every jail is a monument, on which it is writ in letters of iron that we are still heathens, and the gallows, black and hideous, the embodiment of death, the last argument a “Christian” State offers to the poor wretches it trained up to be criminals, stands there, a sign of our infamy, and while it lifts its horrid arm to crush the life out of some miserable man, whose blood cries to God against Cain in the nineteenth century, it lifts that same arm as an index of our shame.

Is that all? Oh, no! Did not Jesus say, resist not evil with evil? Is not war the worst form of that evil; and is there on earth a nation so greedy of war; a nation more reckless of provoking it; one where the war-horse so soon conducts his foolish rider into fame and power?

The “Heathen” Chinese might send their missionaries to America, and teach us to love people!

Is that all?

Far from it!

Did not Christ say, whatsoever you would that men should do unto you, do you even so unto them; and are there not three million brothers of yours and mine in bondage here, the hopeless sufferers of a savage doom; debarred from the civilization of our age, the barbarians of the nineteenth century; shut out from the pretended religion of Christendom, the heathens of a Christian land; chained down from the liberty unalienable in man, the slaves of a Christian republic?

Does not a cry of indignation ring out from every legislature in the North; does not the press war with its million throats, and a voice of indignation go up from East and West, out from the hearts of freemen?

Oh, no!

There is none of that cry against the mightiest sin of this age. The rock of Plymouth, sanctified by the feet which led a nation's way to freedom's large estate, provokes no more voice than the rottenest stone in all the mountains of the West. The few that speak a courageous word for truth and everlasting right, are called fanatics; bid be still, lest they spoil the market!

Great God! And has it come to this, that men are silent over such a sin?

'Tis even so. Then it must be that every church which dares assume the name of Christ, that dearest name to men and women, thunders and lightens on this hideous wrong! That is not so. The church is dumb, while the state is only silent; while the servants of the people are only asleep, “God's ministers” are dead!

In the midst of all these wrongs and sins, the crimes of men and women, society and the state, amid popular ignorance, pauperism, crime, and war, and slavery too--is the church to say nothing, do nothing; nothing for the good of such as feel the wrong, nothing to save them who do the wrong?

Men and women tell us so, in word and deed; that way alone is “safe!” If I thought so, I would never enter the church but once again, and then to bow my shoulders to their most expert work, to heave down its strong pillars, arch and dome, and roof, and wall, steeple and tower, though like Samson I buried myself under the ruins of that temple which profaned the worship of God most high, of God most loved. I would do this in the name of humankind; in the name of Christ I would do it; yes, in the dear and blessed name of God. It seems to me that a church which dares name itself Christian, the Church of the Redeemer, which aspires to be a true church, must set itself about all this business, and be not merely a church of theology, but of religion; not of 44

faith only, but of works; a just church by its faith bringing works into life. It should not be a church termagant, which only peevishly scolds at sin, in its infantile way; but a church militant against every form of evil, which not only censures, but writes out on the walls of the world the brave example of a Christian life, that all may take pattern therefrom. Thus only can it become the church triumphant.

practical love of God shown by a practical love of humanity. Christ told us that if we had brought our gift to the very altar, and there remembered our brother had cause of complaint against us, we must leave the divine service, and pay the human service first! If my brother be in slavery, in want, in ignorance, in sin, and I can aid him and do not, he has much against me, and God can better wait for my prayer than my brother for my help!

If a church were to waste less time in building its palaces of theological speculation, palaces mainly of straw, and based upon the chaff, erecting air-castles and fighting battles to defend those palaces of straw, it would surely have more time to use in the practical good works of the day. If it thus made a city free from want and ignorance and crime - I know I vent a heresy - I think it would be quite as Christian an enterprise, as though it restored all the theology of the dark ages; quite as pleasing to God.

The saints of olden time perished at the stake; they hung on gibbets; they agonized upon the rack; they died under the steel of the tormentor.

A good sermon is a good thing, no doubt, but its end is not answered by its being preached; even by its being listened to and applauded; only by its awakening a deeper life in the hearers. But in the multitude of sermons there is danger lest the bare hearing thereof be thought a religious duty, not a means, but an end, and so our Christianity vanish in words. What if every Sunday afternoon the most pious and mature of our number, who saw fit, resolved themselves into a committee of the whole for practical religion, and held not a formal meeting, but one more free, sometimes for the purpose of devotion, the practical work of making ourselves better Christians, nearer to one another, and sometimes that we might find means to help such as needed help, the poor, the ignorant, the intemperate and the wicked? Would it not be a work profitable to ourselves, and useful to others weaker than we?

For my own part I think there are no ordinances of religion like good works; no day too sacred to help my brother in; no Christianity like a

It was the heroism of our fathers' day that swam the unknown seas; froze in the woods; starved with want and cold; fought battles with the red right hand. It is the sainthood and heroism of our day that toils for the ignorant, the poor, the weak, the oppressed, the wicked. Yes, it is our saints and heroes who fight fighting; who contend for the slave, and his master too, for the drunkard, the criminal; yes, for the wicked or the weak in all their forms. It is they that with weapons of heavenly proof fight the great battle for the souls of men.

Though I detest war in each particular fibre of my heart, yet I honor the heroes among our fathers who fought with bloody hand; peacemakers in a savage way, they were faithful to the light; the most inspired can be no more, and we, with greater light, do, it may be, far less.

I love and venerate the saints of old; men who dared step in front of their age; accepted Christianity when it cost something to be a Christian, because it meant something; they applied Christianity, so far as they knew it, to the lies and sins of their times, and won a sudden and a fiery death. But the saints and the heroes of this day, who draw no sword, whose right hand is never bloody, who burn in no fires of wood or sulphur, nor languish briefly on the hasty cross; the saints and heroes who, in a worldly world, dare to be mature and responsible people; in an 45

age of conformity and selfishness, speak for Truth and Humanity, living for noble aims; men who will swear to no lies howsoever popular; who will honor no sins, though never so profitable, respected and ancient; men who count Christ not their master, but teacher, friend, brother, and strive like him to practise all they pray; to incarnate and make real the Word of God, these men I honor far more than the saints of old. I know their trials, I see their dangers, I appreciate their sufferings, and since the day when the man on Calvary bowed his head, bidding persecution farewell with his “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,� I find no such saints and heroes as live now! They win hard fare, and hard toil. They lay up shame and obloquy. Theirs is the most painful of martyrdoms.

Racks and fagots soon waft the soul of God, stern messengers but swift.

A boy could bear that passage, the martyrdom of death. But the temptation of a long life of neglect, and scorn, and obloquy, and shame, and want, and desertion by false friends; to live blameless though blamed, cut off from human sympathy, that is the martyrdom of to-day.

I shed no tears for such martyrs. I shout when I see one; I take courage and thank God for the real saints, prophets and heroes of to-day.

In another age, people shall be proud of these puritans and pilgrims of this day. Churches shall glory in their names and celebrate their praise in sermon and in song. Yea, though now men would steal the rusty sword from underneath the bones of a saint or hero long deceased, to smite off therewith the head of a new prophet, that ancient hero's son; though they would gladly crush the heart out of him with the tomb-stones they piled up for great men, dead and honored now, yet in some future day, that mob, penitent, baptized with a new spirit, like drunken men returned to sanity once more, shall search through all this land for marble white enough to build a monument to that prophet whom their

fathers slew; they shall seek through all the world for gold of fineness fit to chronicle such names!

I cannot wait; but I will honor such people now, not adjourn the warning of their voice, and the glory of their example till another age! The church may cast out such men; burn them with the torments of an age too refined in its cruelty to use coarse fagots and the vulgar axe! It is no less to these men; but the ruin of the church. I say the Christian church must honor such people, if it would do a church's work; must take pains to make such people as these, or it is a dead church, with no claim on us, except that we bury it. A true church will always be the church of martyrs. The ancients commenced every great work with a victim! We do not call it so; but the sacrifice is demanded, got ready, and offered by unconscious priests long ere the enterprise succeeds. Did not Christianity begin with a martyrdom? *

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In this way, by gaining all the truth of the age in thought or action, by trying public opinions with its own brave ideas, by promoting good works, applying a new truth to an old error, and with unpopular righteousness overcoming each popular sin, the Christian church should lead the civilization of the age.

The leader looks before, goes before, and knows where he is going; knows the way thither.

It is only on this condition that he leads at all. If the church by looking after truth, and receiving it when it comes, be in unison with God, it will be in unison with all science, which is only the thought of God translated from the facts of nature into the words of men. In such a case, the church will not fear philosophy, nor in the face of modern science aim to re-establish the dreams and fables of a ruder day. It will not lack new truth, daring only to quote, nor be obliged to sneak behind the inspired words of old saints as its only fortress, for it will have words just as truly inspired, dropping from the golden mouths of saints and 46

prophets now. For leaders it will look not back, but forth; will fan the first faint sparkles of that noble fire just newly kindled from the skies; not smother them in the ashes of fires long spent; not quench them with holy water from Jordan or the Nile.

lead the Christian movements of these times?-why, has there not just been driven out of this city, and out of this State, a man conspicuous in all these movements, after five and twenty years of noble toil; driven out because he was conspicuous in them! You know it is so!

A church truly Christian, professing Jesus as its exemplar, and aiming to stand in the relation he stood, must lead the way in moral enterprises, in every work which aims directly at the welfare of humankind. There was a time when the Christian churches, as a whole, held that rank. Do they now? Not even the Quakers-perhaps the last sect that abandoned it. A prophet, filled with love of man and love of God, is not therein at home.

Christianity is humanity; Christ is the Son of man; the manliest of men; humane as a woman; pious and hopeful as a prayer; but brave as man's most daring thought. He has led the world in morals and religion for eighteen hundred years, only because he was the most mature man in it; the humanest and bravest man in it, and hence the divinest. He may lead it eighteen hundred years more, for we are bid believe that God can never make again a greater man; no, none so great. But the churches do not lead men therein, for they have not his spirit; neither that womanliness which wept over Jerusalem, nor that manliness which drew down fire enough from heaven to light the world's altars for well-nigh two thousand years.

I speak a sad truth, and I say it in sorrow.

But look at the churches of this city: do they lead the Christian movements of this city--the temperance movement, the peace movement, the movement for the freedom of men, for education, the movement to make society more just, more wise and good, the great religious movement of these times--for, hold down our eyelids as we will, there is a religious movement at this day on foot, such as even New England never saw before;--do they lead in these things?

Oh, no, not at all. That great Christian orator, one of the noblest men New England has seen in this century, whose word has even now gone forth to the nations beyond the sea, while his spirit has gone home to his Father, when he turned his attention to the practical evils of our time and our land, and our civilization, vigorously applying Christianity to life, why he lost favor in his own little sect! They feared him, as soon as his spirit looked over their narrow walls, aspiring to lead men to a better work.

I know men can now make sectarian capital out of the great name of Channing, so he is praised; perhaps praised loudest by the very men who then cursed him by their gods.

Ay, by their gods he was accursed! The churches

There are many ways in which Christ may be denied:--one is that of the bold blasphemer, who, out of a base and haughty heart mocks, scoffing at that manly man, and spits upon the nobleness of Christ! There are few such deniers: my heart mourns for them. But they do little harm.

Religion is so dear to men and women, no scoffing word can silence that, and the brave soul of this young Nazarene has made itself so deeply felt that scorn and mockery of him are but an icicle held up against the summer's sun. There is another way to deny him, and that is: to call him Lord, and never do his bidding; to stifle free minds with his words; and with the authority of his name to cloak, to mantle, screen and consecrate the follies, errors, sins of people!

From this we have much to fear.

The church that is to lead this century will not be a church creeping on all fours; mewling and whining, its face turned down, its eyes turned back. It must be full of the brave, spirit of the day, 47

keeping also the good of times past. There is a terrific energy in this age, for humanity was never so much developed, so much the master of himself before.

Great truths, moral and political, have come to light. They fly quickly.

The iron prophet of types publishes his visions, of weal or woe, to the near and far. This marvellous age has invented steam, and the magnetic telegraph, apt symbols of itself, before which the miracles of fable are but an idle tale. It demands, as never before, freedom for itself, usefulness in its institutions; truth in its teachings, and beauty in its deeds. Let a church have that freedom, that usefulness, truth, and beauty, and the energy of this age will be on its side. But the church which did for the fifth century, or the fifteenth, will not do for this.

What is well enough at Rome, Oxford or Berlin, is not well enough for Boston. It must have our ideas, the smell of our ground, and have grown out of the religion in our soul. The freedom of America must be there before this energy will come; the wisdom of the nineteenth century before its science will be on the churches' side, else that science will go over to the “infidels.�

Our churches are not in harmony with what is best in the present age.

Men call their temples after their old heroes and saints - John, Paul, Peter, and the like. But we call nothing else after the old names; a school of philosophy would be condemned if called Aristotelian, Platonic, or even Baconian.

We out-travel the past in all but this. In the church it seems taught there is no progress unless we have all the past on our back; so we despair of having men fit to call churches by.

We look back and not forward. We think the next saint must talk Hebrew like the old ones, and repeat the same mythology. So when a new prophet comes we only stone him.

A church that believes only in past inspiration will appeal to old books as the standard of truth and source of light; will be antiquarian in its habits; will call its children by the old names; and war on the new age, not understanding the man-child born to rule the world. A church that believes in inspiration now will appeal to God; try things by reason and conscience; aim to surpass the old heroes; baptize its children with a new spirit, and using the present age will lead public opinion, and not follow it. Had Christ looked back for counsel, he might have founded a church fit for Abraham or Isaac to worship in, not for the ages to come, or the age then. He that feels he is near to God, does not fear to be far from men; if before, he helps lead them on; if above, to lift them up. Let us get all we can from the Hebrews and others of old time, and that is much; but still let us be God's free men, not the Gibeonites of the past.

Let us have a church that dares imitate the heroism of Jesus; seek inspiration as he sought it; judge the past as he; act on the present like him; pray as he prayed; work as he wrought; live as he lived. Let our doctrines and our forms fit the soul, as the limbs fit the body, growing out of it, growing with it. Let us have a church for the whole man: truth for the mind; good works for the hands; love for the heart; and for the soul, that aspiring after perfection, that unfaltering faith in God which, like lightning in the clouds, shines brightest, when elsewhere it is most dark. Let our church fit man, as the heavens fit the earth! *

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In our day men have made great advances in science, commerce, manufactures, in all the arts of life. We need, therefore, a development of religion corresponding thereto.

The leading minds of the age ask freedom to inquire; not merely to believe, but to know; to rest on facts. A great spiritual movement goes swiftly forward. The best men see that religion is 48

religion; theology is theology, and not religion; that true religion is a very simple affair, and the popular theology a very foolish one; that the Christianity of Christ is not the Christianity of the street, or the state, or the churches; that Christ is not their model-man, only “imputed� as such.

a result should we not behold! We should build up a great state with unity in the nation, and freedom in the people; a state where there was honorable work for every hand, bread for all mouths, clothing for all backs, culture for every mind, and love and faith in every heart.

These men wish to apply good sense to matters connected with religion; to apply Christianity to life, and make the world a better place, men and women fitter to live in it. In this way they wish to get a theology that is true; a mode of religion that works, and works well. If a church can answer these demands, it will be a live church; leading the civilization of the times, living with all the mighty life of this age, and nation. Its prayers will be a lifting up of the hearts in noble men and women towards God, in search of truth, goodness, piety. Its sacraments will be great works of reform, institutions for the comfort and the culture of men.

Truth would be our sermon, drawn from the oldest of Scriptures, God's writing there in nature, here in man; works of daily duty would be our sacrament; prophets inspired of God would minister the word, and piety send up her psalm of prayer, sweet in its notes, and joyfully prolonged.

The noblest monument to Christ, the fairest trophy of religion, is a noble people, where all are well fed and clad, industrious, free, educated, manly, pious, wise and good.

Let us have a church in which religion, goodness towards men, and piety towards God, shall be the main thing; let us have a degree of that suited to the growth and demands of this age.

In the middle ages, men had erroneous conceptions of religion, no doubt; yet the church led the world. When she wrestled with the state, the state came undermost to the ground. See the results of that supremacy--all over Europe there arose the cloister, halls of learning for the chosen few, minster, dome, cathedral, miracles of art, each costing the wealth of a province. Such was the embodiment of their ideas of religion, the prayers of a pious age done in stone, a psalm petrified as it rose from the world's mouth; a poor sacrifice, no doubt, but the best they knew how to offer.

Now if men were to engage in religion as in politics, commerce, arts; if the absolute religion, the Christianity of Christ, were applied to life with all the might of this age, as the Christianity of the church was then applied, what

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Some of you may now remember, how ten months and more ago, I first came to this house to speak. I shall remember it forever. In those rainy Sundays the very skies looked dark. Some came doubtingly, uncertain, looking around, and hoping to find courage in another's hope. Others came with clear glad face; openly, joyfully, certain they were right; not fearing to meet the issue; not afraid to be seen meeting it. Some came, perhaps, not used to worship in a church, but not the less welcome here; some mistaking me for a destroyer, a doubter, a denier of all truth, a scoffer, an enemy to man and God! I wonder not at that.

Misguided men had told you so, in sermon and in song; in words publicly printed and published without shame; in the covert calumny, slyly whispered in the dark! Need I tell you my feelings; how I felt at coming to the town made famous by great men, Mayhew, Chauncy, Buckminster, Kirkland, Holley, Pierpont, Channing, Ware - names dear and honored in my boyish heart! Need I tell you how I felt at sight of the work which stretched out before me?

Do you wonder that I asked: Who is 49

sufficient for these things? And said: Alas, not I, Thou knowest, Lord! But some of you told me you asked not the wisdom of a wiser man, the ability of one stronger, but only that I should do what I could. I came, not doubting that I had some truths to say; not distrusting God, nor man, nor you; distrustful only of myself. I feared I had not the power, amid the dust and noises of the day, to help you see and hear the great realities of religion as they appeared to me; to help you feel the life of real religion, as in my better moments I have felt its truth! But let that pass. As I came here from Sunday to Sunday, when I began to feel your spirits prayed with mine a prayer for truth and life; as I looked down into your faces, thoughtful and almost breathless, I forgot my selfdistrust; I saw the time was come; that, feebly as I know I speak, my best thoughts were ever the most welcome! I saw that the harvest was plenteous indeed: but the preacher, I feel it still, was all unworthy of his work! *

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Brothers and Sisters: let us be true to our sentiments and ideas. Let us not imitate another's form unless it symbolize a truth to us. We must not affect to be singular, but not fear to be alone.

Let us not foolishly separate from our brothers elsewhere. Truth is yet before us, not only springing up out of the inspirational words of this Bible, but out of the ground; out of the heavens; out of humanity and God. Whole firmaments of truth hang ever o'er our heads, waiting the telescopic eye of the true-hearted seer. Let us follow truth, in form, thought or sentiment, wherever she may call. God's daughter cannot lead us from the path. The further on we go, the more we find. Had Columbus turned back only the day before he saw the land, the adventure had been worse than lost.

We must practise a thoughtful self-denial.

Religion always demands that, but never more than when our brothers separate from us, and we stand alone.

By our mutual love and mutual forbearance, we shall stand strong. With zeal for our common work, let us have charity for such as dislike us, such as oppose and would oppress us.

Let us love our enemies, bless them that curse us, do good to them that hate us, and pray for such as despitefully use us. Let us overcome their evil speech with our own goodness. If others have treated us ill, called us unholy names, and mocked at us, let us forgive it all, here and now, and help them also to forget and outgrow that temper which bade them treat us so. A kind answer is fittest rebuke to an unkind word.

If we have any truth it will not be kept hid.

It will run over the brim of our urn and water our brother's field. Were any truth to come down to us in advance from God, it were not that we might forestall the light, but shed it forth for all His children to walk by and rejoice in. “One candle will light a thousand� if it be itself lighted. Let our light shine before people so that they may see our good deeds, and themselves praise God by a goodly life. This we owe to them as to ourselves. A noble thought and a mean person make a sorry union. Let our idea show itself in our life - that is preaching, right eloquent. Do this, we begin to do good to people, and though they should oppose us, and our work should fail, we shall have yet the approval of our own heart, the approval of God, be whole within ourselves, and one with Him.

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Some of you are venerable men. I have wondered that a youthful ardor should have brought you here. Your silvery heads have seemed a benediction to my work. But most of you are young. I know it is no aping of a fashion that has brought you here. I have no eloquence to charm or please you with; I only speak right on.

I have no reputation but a bad name in the churches. I know you came not idly, but seeking 50

after truth.

Give a great idea to an old man, and he carries it to his grave; give it to a young man, and he carries it to his life. It will bear both young and old through the grave and into eternal Heaven beyond.

Young men and women, the duties of the world fall eminently on you. God confides to your hands the ark which holds the treasures of the age. On young shoulders He lays the burden of life. Yours is the period of passion; the period of enterprise and of work. It is by successive generations that mankind goes forward. The old, stepping into honorable graves, leave their places and the results they won to you. But departing they seem to say, as they linger and look back: Do ye greater than we have done! The young just coming into your homes seem to say: Instruct us to be nobler than yourselves! Your life is the answer to your children and your sires.

The next generation will be as you make it. It is not the schools but the people's character that educates the child. Amid the trials, duties, dangers of your life, religion alone can guide you. It is not the world's eye that is on you, but God's; it is not the world's religion that will suffice you, but the religion of a Man, which unites you with truth, justice, piety, goodness; yes, which makes you one with God! Young men and women--you can make this church a fountain of life to thousands of fainting souls. Yes, you can make this city nobler than city ever was before. A meaningful life is the best gift you can leave mankind; that can be copied forever. Architects of your own weal or woe, your destiny is mainly in your own hands. It is no great thing to reject the popular falsehoods; little and perhaps not hard. But to receive the great sentiments and lofty truths of real religion, the Christianity of Christ; to love them, to live them in your business and your home, that is the greatest work of man. Thereby you partake of the spirit and nature of God; you achieve the true

destiny for yourself; you help your brothers do the same.

When my own life is measured by the ideal of that young Nazarene, I know how little I deserve the name of Christian; none knows that fact so well as I. But you have been denied the name of Christian because you came here, asking me to come. Let men see that you have the reality, though they withhold the name. Your words are the least part of what you say to men.

The foolish only will judge you by your talk; wise men by the general tenor of your life. Let your religion appear in your work and your play. Pray in your strongest hours. Practise your prayers by fair-dealing, justice, kindness, self-control, and the great work of helping others while you help yourself, let your life prove a worship.

These are the real sacraments and Christian communion with God, to which water and wine are only helps. Criticize the world not by censure only, but by the example of a great life.

Shame men out of their littleness, not by making mouths, but by walking great and beautiful amongst them.

You love God best when you love men most. Let your prayers be an uplifting of the soul in thought, resolution, love, and the light thereof shall shine through the darkest hour of trouble.

Have not the Christianity of the street; but carry Christ's Christianity there. Be noble men, then your works must needs be great and manly. *

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This is the first Sunday of a new year.

What an hour for resolutions; what a moment for prayer! If you have sins in your bosom, cast them behind you now. In the last year, God has blessed us; blessed us all. On some his angels waited, robed in white, and brought new joys; here a wife, to bind men closer yet to Providence; and there a child, a new Messiah, sent to tell of innocence and heaven. To some his angels came clad in dark livery, veiling a joyful countenance 51

with unpropitious wings, and bore away child, father, sister, wife, or friend. Still were they angels of good Providence, all God's own; and he who looks aright finds that they also brought a blessing, but concealed, and left it, though they spoke no word of joy. One day our weeping brother shall find that gift and wear it as a diamond on his breast.

The hours are passing over us, and with them the day. What shall the future Sundays be, and what the year? What we make them both.

God gives us time. We weave it into life, such figures as we may, and wear it as we will. Age slowly rots away the gold we are set in, but the adamantine soul lives on, radiant every way in the light streaming down from God. The genius of eternity, star-crowned, beautiful, and with prophetic eyes, leads us again to the gates of time, and gives us one more year, bidding us fill that golden cup with water as we can or will.

There stand the dirty, fetid pools of worldliness and sin; curdled, and mantled, filmcovered, streaked and striped with many a hue, they shine there, in the slanting light of new-born day. Around them stand the sons of earth and cry: Come hither; drink thou and be saved! Here fill thy golden cup! There you may seek to fill your urn; to stay your thirst.

The deceitful element, roping in your hands, shall mock your lip. It is water only to the eye. Nay, show-water only unto men half-blind.

But there, hard by, runs down the stream of life, its waters never frozen, never dry; fed by perennial dews falling unseen from God. Fill there thine urn, oh, brother-man, and thou shalt thirst no more for selfishness and crime, and faint no more amid the toil and heat of day; wash there, and the leprosy of sin, its scales of blindness, shall fall off, and thou be clean for ever. Kneel there and pray; God shall inspire thy heart with truth and love, and fill thy cup with never-ending joy!

Endnotes: It would appear that Parker is quoting some version of Once to Every Man and Nation, a poem by James R. Lowell that appeared in the Boston Courier, December 11,1845. Lowell wrote these words as a poem protesting America’s war with Mexico. The original poem was 90 lines long; the words below were arranged by Garrett Horder in his Hymns Supplemental to Existing Collections, 1896. The line “Then to side with truth is noble, when we

share her wretched crust” is popularly quoted. It is not clear that it is original with Lowell.

Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight, And the choice goes by forever, ’twixt that darkness and that light.

Then to side with truth is noble, when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses while the coward stands aside, Till the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

By the light of burning martyrs, Christ, Thy bleeding feet we track, Toiling up new Calv’ries ever with the cross that turns not back; New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth, They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.

Though the cause of evil prosper, et the truth alone is strong; Though her portion be the scaffold, 52

and upon the throne be wrong; Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown,

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own.

Pages from a Unitarian's notebook

A Unitarian perspective on Salvation

Rev. Dr. Ronald Ryan (A Unitarian Christian Minister at Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada)

The Roman Catholic church proclaimed that Salvation was a matter of faith plus works, being obedient to the church, accepting, without question, church dogma, and giving the church money and property, especially in a will. The church was given so much property, in men's belief that they were purchasing their way into Heaven, that it became the richest landowner in Europe, eventually controlling more property that most independent countries. The Calvinists, in contrast, proclaimed that Salvation and a guarantee of a seat at the Celestial feast table, sitting at the right hand of God, was a matter of faith alone, which included adherence to the strict fundamentalist Calvinist interpretation of the Bible, getting “saved,” belief in supernaturalism and, of course, giving money.

women – and had nothing whatsoever to do with God or salvation or people's souls, immortal or otherwise.

The difference in the theological views, insignificant as it was to an outside observer, was irreconcilable – although why it needed to be reconciled is a mystery. Actually, it is no mystery: it all came down to the egos of men – hardly ever

So, typically self-righteous, hypocritical Christians, motivated only by personal ego and hatred, they fought. The Hundred year's war was the result of this insignificant difference between Christians, supposedly followers of the same

What do staunch Christians do when they have a theological difference? Why, they fight of course! They are all motivated by the love of God. Right?

And by the example of compassion of Jesus. Right?

And by the message of Jesus to love each other as they love themselves, and by the the Golden Rule. Right?

And, of course, by the Commandment that “Thou shalt not kill!” Right?

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gentle Christ! They slaughtered each other by the tens of thousands, for a hundred years. They are still not reconciled!

Is it any wonder that Unitarians eventually shouted, “A pox on both your houses!” only to be hounded to death by both houses. One Bishop advised the pope that the Unitarians should be eliminated because the high moral standards of the Unitarians were making the Roman Catholic priests look bad in comparison.

Lest we suppose that it is only “western” Christians who fight over insignificant differences, consider the case of the Russian Orthodox.

The issue: How should one bless oneself, that is make the sign of the cross? Any sane or rational person would think that that could hardly be a question. But, keep in mind that we are talking about Christians, among whom a fart takes on the significance of tornado.

One group of Russian Orthodox even resorted to burning the churches, with worshippers inside, because those in the church blessed themselves differently than those outside.

How does one bless oneself? Why with two fingers of the right hand, of course, because two represents some kind of duality.

Oops, wrong answer!

For that answer you get slaughtered.

It seems that the correct answer, the answer that allowed you to keep your head on your shoulders, is three fingers, because three represents the Holy Trinity! The fact that there is no such thing as a Holy Trinity is way beside the point! Even paul declared that there was only one God (Galations 3: 20).

(Roman Catholic theologians and scholars have acknowledged, for generations, that no kind of “Trinity” can be wrung out of the

Bible, in all of its many Versions. So, in the 1960s, Mother Church produced a new bible: The Jerusalem Bible and, you guessed it, they put in the Trinity that had never before been there.)

And, if you make the sign representing the risen Christ, the only begotten son who was sacrificed for your sins, in the inappropriate manner, then that is sufficient call to kill you – all in the love of the gentle Jesus.

Make sense? Of course not. But then, you are not Russian Orthodox, or Greek Orthodox, or Coptic, or Armenian Orthodox …

But, you are Christian. That is the point that matters. And, if someone disagrees with you , even by one jot or tittle, then you are supposed to slaughter your beloved brethren. That is the Christian way! (also, incidentally, the Islamic way, the Hindu way, the Buddhist way, ….).

Actually, it is the egotistically way. It is as simple as that: the insecurity of one's religion. It is the manner of those who believe in a creed, accepted a dogma, worship a scripture, people of the book. If any of these religious people were secure in their beliefs, what someone else believed would not bother them.

Unitarians are not people of the book, any book. Unitarians, typically, believe that salvation is not a matter of faith; salvation is not a matter of faith plus works.

Unitarians believe that salvation is a matter of Character and by character alone. Moreover, Salvation is not by God, it is not by a human blood sacrifice. You save yourself by your living, by your character, by how you treat other people, by how you treat the earth, by how you can acknowledge your faults and failings, forgive yourself, make amends whenever and as quickly as possible, and move on.

Unitarians believe that Salvation is a matter of living according to the teachings of 54

Jesus – really living by these precepts. Not by mere saying we agree with them by reciting some creed; not by declaring that we love them or that we believe that we should live by them; but by doing, by our daily, hour by hour practise, of living by them, without hypocrisy, without selfrighteousness, without display, without seeking approbation from anyone.

What are these precepts?

Love others as you love yourself.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you. Do not treat others in a manner that you, yourself, would not want to be treated. Or, to quote, paraphrased, Emmanuel Kant's Categorical Moral Imperative: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law .

Whatever you do to the least of people or the environment, you do unto and for God. Judge not!

Forgive!

You are your brother's and your sister's keeper!Unitarians believe in living to the highest possible standard of moral and ethical behaviour.

It is indeed, tragic, that we cannot look to the Christian church for teaching or example in this regard. One would have to look long and hard to find morality or ethics in the church record of practice and behaviour. Unitarians have no interest in what they proclaim to believe.

Unitarians look only at what they have done and do!

In practice, living to the highest standards means that we treat people fairly; we do not attempt to take advantage of people; we do not misinterpret our capabilities or qualifications; we do not engage in dishonest business practices;

we neither offer nor accept nor condone bribes; We provide quality service and goods – the best that we are able to provide for the price agreed to; we do not misrepresent our products or services.

Unitarians strive for justice for all; we demand and provide due process and procedural fairness; we deal honestly with others and we create integrity in all aspects of our lives. We honour trust placed in us and we stand beside those whose rights have been violated.

Salvation, for the Unitarian, is not a deal negotiated with God wherein we agree to live by a creed, or accept a dogma, or participate in rituals so that we can avoid Hell or be given a place in Paradise. Unitarians consider such ideas to be childishness, immaturity, crudity, callousness, institutionalized cynicism, and cowardice.

Unitarians engage in right thinking and right behaviour (to quote the Blessed Buddha), not because of fear of Hell (because there is no such place!) or for a promise of Heaven (regardless whether there is any such place or state!), but because it is the right thing to do – and ONLY because it it the right thing to do!

In practice this means that an employer,or his or her part, will treat employees fairly and with respect, while the employee, for his or her part, will provide honest, dependable and dedicated service. Integrity is for everyone. If an employee doesn't like his or her job, then they are honour bound and duty bound to resign if they are not able or unwilling to provide competent service. If an employee is not performing according to the conditions of employment, then the employer should engage in professional job supervision and evaluation characterized by due process and procedural fairness. (I did a study, in Canada, of court cases of 30 teachers, over a five year period, who fought their school boards on the grounds of unfair dismissal for incompetence. 25 55

of these teachers won their cases because the school district personnel were incompetent.)

Essentially, I think, the essence of the message of Jesus is that we do not live in the world alone. Or, to quote, the great British poet, John Donne: No man is an island, Entire of itself, Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thy friend's Or of thine own were: Any man's death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind, And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

We err grievously if we consider ourselves alone in any way. We are part of all; there should be no “other” in any way that excludes ourself from the equation. There can be no other or it, in the sense that the Jewish theologian, Martin Burber, uses the term. To “otherfy” the other is to objectify them, to make them objects, not humans like us. Otherness is separation. We are one with each other and one in God and one in essence, physically, and spiritually. We all share in the universal essence, the cosmic consciousness. We should all be evolving spiritually. At least, here, is one aspect of evolution over which we have some significant measure of control. Acceptance of our shared existence as people should be forefront of our awareness. Moreover, we are one with the earth, with all of its creatures, and with the universe.

The earth is me, is us; I am, we are, the earth. If we violate another person, we violate ourselves; when we demean another person, we demean ourselves; When we degrade another person, we degrade ourselves. If we cheat another, we cheat ourselves. If we deny life to another, we deny life

to ourselves.

This does not mean that we have to be clones of each other. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Every person should have the opportunity to develop his or her own uniqueness and to make their individual contributions to society, to culture, and to the universe. Moreover, despite the advances in understanding of genetics that suggests overall commonality, we are not, in fact, programmed alike nor to be very much, specifically. Continuing research into epigenetics indicates that the unique dynamic interplay of nature and nurture (that is, what we are born with and what happens to us afterwards) virtually guarantees individually unique development.

That is to say that we cannot predict what one person may become, or the kind of contribution one can make, simply on the basis of some notion of one's ethnic or geographic heritage. We have to be accepting of the unique development of each individual. Inevitably, this is also true of spiritual development.

As Unitarians, we cherish these differences and we anticipate with excitement the possibility of having our understanding and spirituality enhanced by the unique spiritual development and understandings of others when they willingly share their unique insights with us, not that we will accept them without analysis, but that we will have been provided with additional, and enhanced spiritual fodder to consider.

When we adopt these principles then we continue the development of our salvation.

Salvation is not a one-time event; it is not a matter of participating in some ritual. Salvation is a never-ending process. Although we have no way of knowing what happens to our essence when it is absorbed into God. Would it not be wonderful to believe that the process of salvation could continue for eternity!

So, then, the skeptic will inquire, can Jesus, whom some call the Christ, still be 56

saviour? The Unitarian will answer, “of course!

Jesus can be saviour in the sense that he has provided a series of principles that, we believe, constitute an adequate guideline for living when properly understood, incorporating, for example, The Gospel of Thomas and other writings, ancient and contemporary, and if assiduously and diligently lived.

Unitarians hasten to add, however, that not only Jesus can be saviour. Through ancient history, there have been numerous saviours who have tried to lead people to salvation. Likewise, today, there are wise people, who, if carefully listened to, and whose teachings are wisely and thoughtfully applied, can be saviours. Some of them might be surprised to find them cast in that classification.

David Suzuki, the Canadian ecologist, and Al Gore, the environmentalist, might be two men who might be accorded that appellation. Like the case of Jesus, the could-be saviours may be ignored,marginalized, vilified, crucified. But, as it says in Ezekiel, the people

will still know that a prophet has been among them.

It is not a matter of the person; it is a matter of the lessons we can learn from them and if we choose to live the relevant aspects of our lives in accord with them.

What salvation comes down to is that we are not saved by somebody or something else, not even by God. Salvation is in our own hands and within our own capabilities. We, individually, decide to (or not to) save ourselves.

Whether there is some Heaven, somewhere, is a moot consideration. This life is NOT the vestibule for eternity. It is meant to be lived, here and now, and we can strive – and, indeed, succeed – in creating a Heaven for ourselves and for each other in the here and now.

Salvation is our character! NOTHING MORE! NOTHING LESS!

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A Hymn I Sing to the Rocks Words: R. Lloyd Ryan Melody: Lord of the Dance

I sing to the rocks and the grasses and the trees

I sing to the Buddha with the Delia Lama

I sing to the birds and the beetles and the bees.

I sing to the prophets; they sing with me.

I sing to the kine and the fishes in the sea

The theme of our song is UNITY.

I am Nature and nature is me.

Chorus: I am the sea and the sea is me

Sing, then, whoever you may be.

I am the flowers and the grasses and the trees.

Sing to the earth and sing to the sea

I am the animal, the fish and the bird

Sing to the flowers and the grasses and the trees!

I will sing ‘till all has heard

I sing to the rocks! They call to me.

I am the rock. The rock is me.

I sing with people, white and brown.

Chant: (in decreasing volume)

I sing with gays and straights all around

I am the rock; the rock is me.

We celebrate varying theologies

I am the tree; the tree is me.

But the theme of our song is unity.

I am the bird; the bird is me.

I am the air; the air is me.

I am the wind and the wind is me

I am the cloud; the cloud is me.

I am the clouds and the rustle in the trees

I am the fish; the fish is me.

I am the worm that lives underground.

I am the sea; the sea is me.

I am the air that flows all around.

I am the earth;

I sing to Jesus and I sing to Mohamed

the earth is me. (almost a whisper)

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Unitarian History Each issue of TIUJ will include a section on Unitarian History.

The first book to be serialized is UNITARIANISM by W.G. Tarrant, published in London in 1912.

Tarrant, William George, B.A., b. 1853, was, for some time, Minister of the Wandsworth Unitarian Christian Church. Editor of The Inquirer, 1888-97. One of the editors of the Essex Hall Hymnal. 1890, and of the Revised edition, 1902. He authored many hymns including: Come, let us Join with faithful souls; Draw nigh to God, He will draw nigh to you; Long ago the lilies faded; The Light along the ages; and With happy voices ringing.

O God of ages, help us,

Three of his hymns are included here.

And vain the merchant’s wealth;

Such citizens to be, That children’s children here may sing The songs of liberty.

Let all the people praise Thee, Give all Thy saving health, Or vain the laborer’s strong right arm Send out Thy light to banish

The fathers built this city

The shadows of the shame,

The fathers built this city

Till all the civic virtues shine

In ages long ago,

Around our city’s name.

And busy in the busy streets, They hurried to and fro;

A commonweal of brothers,

The children played around them,

United, great and small,

And sang the songs of yore,

Upon our banner blazoned

Till one by one they fell asleep,

be The charter, Each for all!

To work and play no more.

Nor let us cease from battle, Nor weary sheathe the sword,

Yet still the city standeth,

Until this city is become

A hive of toiling men,

The city of the Lord.

And mother’s love makes happy home For children now as then; 59

The Light Along the Ages

One brotherhood in heart are we,

The light along the ages

And One our Lord and King.

Shines higher as it goes;

Faithful are all who love the truth,

From age to age more glorious

And dare the truth to tell;

Its radiant splendor grows.

Who steadfast stand at God’s right hand, And strive to serve Him well.

Man’s life, begun so lowly,

And faithful are the gentle hearts

Now soars to Heaven above,

To whom the power is given.

To share in life eternal The joys of endless love.

Of every hearth to make a home Of every home a heaven.

But every gift surpassing,

O mighty host! No tongue can tell

This wondrous gift we own—

The numbers of its throng;

The Son of Man is risen

No words can sound the music vast

To dwell before Thy throne.

Of its great battle song.

Wherever goodness reigneth

From step to step it wins its way

The soul of Christ lives on,

Against a world of sin;

And every Christlike spirit

Part of the battlefield is won,

Shall rise where He hath gone.

And part is yet to win.

O Lord of hosts, our faith renew,

Come, let us join with faithful souls.

And grant us in Thy love

Come, let us join with faithful souls

To sing the songs of victory

Our song of faith to sing;

With faithful souls above.

UNITARIANISM W.G. Tarrant INTRODUCTION In certain quiet nooks of Old England and, by contrast, in some of the busiest centres of New England, landmarks of religious history are to be found which are not to be easily understood

by every passer-by. He is familiar with the ordinary places of worship, at least as features in, the picture of town or village. Here is the parish church where the English episcopal order has succeeded to the Roman; yonder is the more modern dissenting chapel, homely or ornate. But, 60

now and then, among the non-episcopal buildings we find what is called distinctively a 'Meeting House,' or more briefly a 'Meeting,' which may perhaps be styled 'Old,' 'New,' or 'Great'. Its architecture usually corresponds with the simplicity of its name. Plain almost to ugliness, yet not without some degree of severe dignity, stand these old barn-like structures of brick occasionally of stone - bearing the mellowing touch of time, surrounded by a little overshadowed graveyard which often adds a peculiar quaintness and solemnity to the scene.

Mrs. Gaskell has described one such in her novel, Ruth, and admirers of her art should know well that her own grave lies beside the little sanctuary she pictured so lovingly.

Sometimes, though, the surroundings of the ancient chapel are less attractive. It stands, it may be, in some poverty-stricken corner or court of a town or city. Whatever picturesqueness it may have had once has long since vanished.

Unlovely decay, an air of desolation, symptoms of neglect, present a mournful sight, and one wonders how much longer the poor relic will remain.

Many places of the kind have already been swept away; others have been renovated, enlarged, and kept more worthy of their use. Not all the Meeting Houses are of one kind.

Independents, Baptists, and Friends each possess some of them. Now and again, the notice-board tells us that this is a 'Presbyterian' place of worship. But a loyal Scot who yearns for an echo of the kirk would be greatly surprised on finding, as he would if he entered, that the doctrine and worship there is not Calvinistic in any shape whatever, but - Unitarian.

A similar surprise awaits the visitor to New England, it may be even a greater. For if he should tread In the footsteps of the Pilgrim Fathers and find the 'lineal descendants' of their original places of worship at Plymouth, Salem, or Boston, he will find Unitarians in possession. So it

is in many of the oldest towns founded by the American colonists of the seventeenth century. In their centres the parish churches, First, Second, or otherwise, stand forth challenging everybody's attention.

There is no lack of self-assertion here, nothing at all like the shrinking of the Old English Presbyterian into obscure alleys and corners.

Spacious, well appointed, and secure, these Unitarian parish churches, in the words of a popular Unitarian poet, “look the whole world in the face, and fear not any man.�

The object of the present brief sketch is to show how these landmarks have come to be where they are, to trace the thoughts and fortunes of Unitarians from their rise in modern times, to indicate their religious temper and practical aims, and to exhibit the connections of the English-speaking Unitarians with some closely approximating groups in Europe and Asia.

Before entering upon a story which is extremely varied and comprehensive, one or two important points must be emphasized. In the first place the reader must bear in mind that the term 'Unitarianism' is one of popular application. It has not been chosen and imposed as sect-name by any sect-founder, or by any authoritative assembly. There has never been a leader or a central council whose decisions on these matters have been accepted by Unitarians as final. Even when most closely organized they have steadily resisted all attempts so to fix the meaning of 'Unitarianism' as to exclude further growth of opinion.

Consequently there is always room for variety of opinion among them; and every statement of their principles and teachings must be taken as a sort of average estimated from a survey more or less extended.

Thus the significance of Unitarianism as a feature of modern religious development cannot be grasped apart from its history as a movement

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of thought. Nowhere is it more necessary than here to reflect that to know what a thing is we must know what it has been and consider what its future naturally involves.

Secondly, amid all the varieties of thought referred to, complicated as they are by the eager advance of some and the clinging to survivals by others, there are two notes to be found undeniably, if unequally, characteristic of Unitarianism. It is both rationalistic and mystical.

If the historian seems more attentive to the former than to the latter, this must not be taken as indicating their relative importance.

Obviously, it is easier to record controversies than to unfold the wealth of profound conceptions. Perhaps we may fairly suggest the true state of the case by the mere juxtaposition of such earlier names as Socinus, Bidle, and Locke, with those of Channing, Emerson, and Martineau; or by a reference to the earlier Unitarian hymns in contrast with those of the later stages.

SOME TERMS EXPLAINED A brief explanation at the outset may help the reader to follow more intelligently the history of Unitarianism. As is well known, the chief issue between Trinitarians and Unitarians arises in connection with the relation of Jesus Christ to God, questions concerning the Holy Spirit being usually less discussed. There are consequential issues also, bearing upon man's nature, atonement, salvation, and other subjects, but these call for no remark here. In its full statement, as given for instance in the Athanasian Creed, the Trinitarian dogma presents the conception of Three 'Persons' in One God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -'Persons' with different functions, but all equal and co-eternal. The Eastern (Greek Orthodox) Church differs from the Western (Roman Catholic) in holding that the Third Person 'proceeds' from the Father alone; the Western adds “and from the Son� (filioque). The full

dogma as given in the Athanasian Creed is thought not to be earlier than the fifth century; debates as to the 'two natures' in Christ, and the 'two wills,' and other abstruse points involved in the dogma, continued for centuries still. At an earlier period discussion was carried on as to whether the Son were of the 'same substance' (homoousion) or 'similar substance' (homoiousion) with the Father.

The latter view was held by Arius and his party at the Council of Nicaea, A.D. 325.

Athanasius held the former view, which in time, but only after many years of controversial strife and actual warfare, became established as orthodox. The Arians regarded the Son as a subordinate being, though still divine. Another variety of opinion was put forth by Sabellius (c.

250 A.D.) who took the different Persons to be so many diverse modes or manifestations of the One God. This Sabellian idea, though officially condemned, has been often held in later times.

Socinianism, so far as regards the personality and rank of Christ, differed from Arianism, which maintained his pre-existence, though not eternal; the Socinian doctrine being that the man Jesus was raised by God's approving benignity to divine rank, and that he thus became a fit object of Christian worship. The Humanitarian view, finally, presented Jesus as a 'mere man,' i.e. a being not essentially different in his nature from the rest of humankind. Modern Unitarianism, however, usually avoids this kind of phrase; 'all minds,' said Channing, 'are of one family.'

THE EARLIER MOVEMENT IN ENGLAND I.THE UNITARIAN MARTYRS The rise of any considerable body of opinion opposed to the cardinal dogma of orthodoxy was preceded in England by a very strongly marked effort to secure liberty of thought, and a corresponding plea for a broadly comprehensive religious fellowship.

The

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culmination of this effort, is reached, for the period first to be reviewed in the writings of John Locke (1632-1704). This celebrated man, by his powerful arguments for religious toleration and his defence of the 'reasonableness' of the Christian religion, exerted an influence of the most important kind. But we must reach him by the path of his predecessors in the same line.

The principles of liberty of thought and the broadest religious fellowship are warmly espoused by Unitarians, and they look upon all who have advanced these principles as in spirit related to them, however different their respective theological conclusions may have been.

At the time of the Reformation a great deal of speculation broke forth on points hitherto closed by the Church's authority, including the fundamental doctrine of the Trinity. But, while this new ferment led to departures from the received opinions in many countries, especially in Poland and the Netherlands, the Protestant leaders maintained that upon the great articles of the creeds they were still one with Rome, and in fact they soon displayed an eagerness to stifle heresy. Men often fail to see the logic of their own position, and many who claimed the right to differ from Rome on points which Rome considered vital were unable to grant that others had an equal right to differ from Luther, Calvin, or an English State Church. The outrageous cruelty of Calvin towards the Anti-trinitarian, Servetus, whom he caused to be burned at Geneva in 1553, affords a glaring instance of this inconsistency. But a sad proof is given that, about that time, even Anti-trinitarians themselves were not always tolerant.

Among the countries where the orthodox dogma was most freely questioned was Transylvania, adjacent to Hungary proper.

Here the sovereign, John Sigismund, took sides with the Anti-trinitarians, and issued, in 1568, an edict permitting four recognized types of doctrine and worship--Romanist, Lutheran,

Calvinist, and Unitarian. The Transylvanians were at this time largely under the influence of their Polish brethren in the faith, who still practised the invocation of Christ. Francis David, a powerful religious leader in Hungary, having arrived at a 'Humanitarian' view of Christ two centuries before it was held by English Unitarians, opposed Christworship. In 1579, when a Catholic had succeeded to the throne, David was denounced for an intolerable heretic by the Polish party and, being imprisoned, died the same year.

This blot on the record has long been deplored, and David is held in honour as a martyr by the Transylvanian Unitarian Church, which still flourishes and forms a third member in alliance with the Unitarians of Great Britain and America.

As, however, these Transylvanian (popularly called 'Hungarian') Unitarians had until the nineteenth century little or no connection with the English and Americans, and have not materially affected the development of the movement, we omit the details of their special history.

In England a number of Anti-trinitarians suffered burning (at the stake) in the sixteenth century, being usually, but loosely, described as 'Arians.' The last two in England who died by fire as heretics were men of this class. In March, 1612, Bartholomew Legate was burned at Smithfield, and a month later Edward Wightman had the same fate at Lichfield. So late as 1697 a youth named Pakenham was hanged at Edinburgh on the charge of heretical blasphemy.

Although these were the only executions of the kind, here in the seventeenth century, the evidence is but too clear that the authorities conceived it to be their duty to put down this form of opinion with the severest rigour. In a letter sent

by Archbishop Neile, of York, to Bishop Laud, in 1639, reference is made to Wightman's case, and it is stated that another man, one Trendall, deserves the same sentence.

A few years later, Paul Best, a scholarly gentleman who had travelled in Poland and 63

Transylvania and there adopted Anti-trinitarian views, was sentenced, by vote of the House of Commons, to be hanged for denying the Trinity.

The Ordinance drawn up in 1648 by the Puritan authorities was incredibly vindictive against what they judged to be heretical. Happily, Oliver Cromwell and his Independents were conscious of considerable variety of opinion in their own ranks, and apparently the Protector secured Best's liberation. It was certainly he who saved another and more memorable Unitarian from the extreme penalty.

This man was John Bidle, a clergyman and schoolmaster of Gloucester.

Bidle's Biblical studies led him to a denial of the Trinity, which he lost no occasion of making public. During twenty years, broken by five or six imprisonments, he persisted in the effort to diffuse Unitarian teachings, and even to organize services for Unitarian worship. His writings and personal influence were so widely recognized that it became a fashion later to speak of Unitarians as 'Bidellians.'

Cromwell was evidently troubled about him, feeling repugnance to his doctrine yet averse to ill-treat a man of unblemished character. In 1655, ten years after Bidle's first imprisonment, the Protector (Cromwell) sent him to the Scilly Islands, obviously to spare him a worse fate, and allowed him a yearly sum for maintenance. A few months before Cromwell's death, Bidle was brought back to London and, on being set at liberty, at once renewed his efforts.

Finally, he was caught 'conventicling' in 1662 and sent to gaol, and in September of that year he died.

II. INFLUENCES MAKING FOR 'LATITUDE' The foregoing sufficiently illustrates the position confronting those who at that time openly avowed their departure from the Trinitarian dogma. Those who dared and suffered were no doubt but a few of those who really shared in the

heretical view; the testimony of orthodox writers is all in support of this surmise. Equally clear is the fact that while the religious authorities were thus rigorous, a steadily deepening undercurrent of opinion made for 'Latitude.' How far this Latitude might properly go was a troublesome question but, at any rate, some were willing to advocate what many must have silently desired.

Apart from the extremists in the great struggle between High Church and Puritans there existed a group of moderate men, often of shrewd intellect, ripe scholarship, and attractive temper, who sought in a wider liberty of opinion an escape from the tyrannical alternatives presented by the two opposing parties. Even in connection with these very parties there were tendencies, peculiar to themselves, which could not fail in the end to mitigate the force of their own contentions. The High Church was mostly 'Arminian,' (i.e. On the side of the more 'reasonable' theology of that age). The Puritans were wholly committed to the principle of democratic liberty, as then understood, and in religious matters set the Bible in the highest place of authority. It could not be but that these several factors should ultimately tell upon the solution of the problem of religious liberty. But the immediate steps toward that solution had to be taken by the advocates of Latitude.

Among them were Lord Falkland, John Hales, and William Chillingworth, the last of whom is famous for his unflinching protest that 'the Bible, the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants,' a saying which was as good as a charter to those who based their so-called heresies on the explicit words of Scripture. In the second half of that seventeenth century the work of broadening the religious mind was carried forward by others of equal or even greater ability; it is sufficient here to name Jeremy Taylor among Churchmen, and Richard Baxter among Nonconformists.

There was, of course, a good deal of 64

levity, the temper of the Gallio (i.e., one who lives on milk, used her a little derisively. Editor's note.) who cares for none of these things. But this was not the temper of the men to whom we refer.

Their greatest difficulty, indeed, arose from their intense interest in religious truth. They could not conceive a State which should not control men's theology in some real way. Even Locke did not advocate toleration for the atheist, for such a man (in his opinion) could not make the solemn asseverations on which alone civil life could go forward. Nor would he tolerate the Roman Catholic. But, in this case, political considerations swayed the balance; the Catholic introduced the fatal principle of allegiance to a 'foreign prince.'

Taking for granted, then, the necessity for some degree of State supervision of religion, how could this be rendered least inimical to the general desire for liberty?

The reply to this question brought them very close to the position taken up by Faustus Socinus long before, as follows. That the 'essentials' of a Christian faith should be recognized as few and, as far as possible, simple. Of course, it is from his name that the term 'Socinian' is derived, a term that has often been applied, but mistakenly, to Unitarians generally. The repeated and often bitter accusation brought against the advocates of Latitude that they were 'Socinians,' or at least tainted with 'Socinianism,' renders appropriate some short account of Socinus himself.

This man was one of the sixteenthcentury Italian Reformers who were speedily crushed or dispersed by the vigilance of the Inquisition. Those who escaped wandered far, and some were at different times members of the Church for 'Strangers,' or foreigners, to which Edward VI assigned the nave of the great Augustine Church, still standing at Austin Friars in the heart of the City of London. It is Interesting to observe here that a Dutch liberal congregation lineally inherits the place to-day.

Careful investigation has shown that among the refugees here in the sixteenth century were some whose opinions were unsound on the Trinity; possibly they affected English opinion in some small degree. Loelius Socinus (1525-62), uncle of Faustus (1539-1604), was for a short time in London. But interesting thinker as he was, his nephew - who never set foot in England really exerted much more influence upon English thought.

It was, however, in Poland especially that the influence of Faustus Socinus first became prominent. That country, then flourishing under its own princes, early became (as we have seen) the home of an Anti-trinitarian form of Protestantism.

Socinus joined this group and, during the latter half of the sixteenth century, effected much improvement among them, organizing their congregations, establishing schools, promoting a Unitarian literature. The educational work thus begun achieved great success. But in his own lifetime Socinus met with fierce opposition and even personal violence. After he died in 1604, the Polish Unitarian Church fell under the persecution of both Catholics and orthodox Protestants, and was finally crushed out in 1660.

Important for our present study is the fact that the literary output of these Polish Socinians was both large and of high quality. Their 'Racovian Catechism' was translated into different languages, and early found its way into England. James I promptly had it burned, despite the fact that the Latin version was dedicated to himself! Other books and pamphlets followed and, even if we abate something as due to the exaggerating fears and suspicions of the authorities, there would seem to have been no time as the seventeenth century went on when Socinian literature was not widely circulated here, albeit at first in secret.

Into the details of this literature there is no need to go; it is sufficient to observe its outstanding features. They correspond in the 65

main to the temper of the master mind, Socinus, a man who in the absence of imaginative genius displayed remarkable talent as a reasoner, and a liberal disposition considerably in advance of his times. The later Socinian writings, preserved in eight large volumes issued by the 'Polish Brethren' (Amsterdam, 1666), exhibit in addition the results of much diligent research and scholarship, in which the wide variety of opinion actually held by the Fathers and later Church authorities is proved, and the moral is drawn.

In the presence of so much fluctuating teaching upon the abstruser points of the creeds was it not desirable to abandon the pretence of a rounded system complete in every detail? Would it not he better to simplify the faith - in other and familiar words, to reduce the number of (doctrinal) 'essentials'? In order to discover these essentials, surely the inquirer must turn to the Bible, the record of that miraculous revelation which was given to deliver man's unassisted reason from the perils of ignorance and doubt. At the same time, man's reason itself was a divine gift, and the Bible should be carefully and rationally studied in order to gather its real message.

As the fruit of such study the Socinians not only propounded an Anti-trinitarian doctrine derived from Scripture but, in particular, emphasized the arguments against the substitutionary atonement as presented in the popular Augustinian scheme and philosophically expounded in Anselm's Cur Deus Homo. Socinus himself must be credited with whatever force belongs to these criticisms on the usual doctrine of the death of Christ, and it may be fairly said that most of the objections advanced in modern works on that subject are practically identical with those of three centuries ago.

Now there is good reason for believing that towards the end of the seventeenth century this Socinian literature really attracted much attention in England, and probably with considerable effect. But as a matter of fact no

English translation of any part of it was made before John Bidle's propagandist activity in the middle of the century, and we have the explicit testimony of Bidle himself and most of the earlier Unitarians that they were not led into their heresy by foreign books. It was the Bible alone that made them unorthodox.

A famous illustration of this is the case of John Milton (1608-74). In 1823 a long-forgotten manuscript of Milton was found in a State office at Westminster, and two years later it was published under the editorship of Dr. Sumner, afterwards Bishop of Winchester. The work is entitled A Treatise of Christian Doctrine. It was a late study by the poet, laboriously comparing texts and pondering them with a mind prepared to receive the verdict of Scripture as final, whether in agreement with orthodoxy or not.

The most ardent of Milton's admirers, and even the most eager Unitarian, must find the book a trial; but the latter can at least claim the author of Paradise Lost as an Anti-trinitarian, and the former may solace himself by noticing that here, as in all the rest, Milton's soul 'dwelt apart.'

He emphatically denies that it was the works of 'heretics, so called,' that directed and influenced his mind on the subject. We may notice, here, the interesting fact that another great mind of that age, Sir Isaac Newton, has left evidence of his own defection from the orthodox view; and his correspondent John Locke, whose views appear to have been even more decided, is only less conspicuous on this point because his general services to breadth and liberality of religious fellowship are more brilliantly striking.

Locke's Plea for Toleration is widely recognized as the deciding influence, on the literary side, which secured the passage of the Toleration Act in 1689. Deferring for the moment further allusion to the position created by this Act, we must at once observe the scope of one of Locke's works which is not so popularly known.

This is his Reasonableness of Christianity which, 66

with his rejoinders to critics, makes a considerable bulk in his writings. In pursuance of the aim to 'reduce the number of essentials' and to discover that which, in the Christian religion , is available for simple people - the majority of mankind - Locke examines the historical portion of the New Testament and presents the result.

Practically, this amounts to the verdict that it is sufficient for the Christian to accept the Messiahship of Christ and to submit to his rule of conduct. The orthodox critics complained that he had omitted the epistles in his summary of doctrine; his retort is obvious: if the gospels lead to the conclusion just stated, the epistles cannot be allowed, however weighty, to establish a contrary one. Of course, Locke was called a

'Socinian'; but the effect of his work remained, and we should remark that if it looked, on the one hand, toward the orthodox, on the other, it looked toward the sceptics and freethinkers who began at that time a long and not ineffectual criticism of the miraculous claims of Christianity. Locke endeavoured to convince such minds that Christianity was, in reality, not an irrational code of doctrines, but a truly practical scheme of life. In this endeavour he was preceded by Richard Baxter, who had written on the 'Unreasonableness of Infidelity,' and was followed during the eighteenth century by many who in the old Dissenting chapels were leading the way towards an overt Unitarianism.

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JAMES WHITE CHADWICK

OLD AND NEW UNITARIAN BELIEF

John White Chadwick (19 October 1840 – 11 December 1904) was an American author and a Unitarian minister. Born in Marblehead, MA, he was, at first, a shoemaker but decided to further his education. He entered the Massachusetts normal school at Bridgewater in 1857. Then he decided to become a minister, graduating from Harvard Divinity School in 1864 whereupon he became pastor of Second Unitarian Church in Brooklyn, NY. His sermons soon attracted attention, and he became a leading Unitarian opinion leader and theologian. He was elected Phi Delta Kappa poet at Harvard in 1885. The

following year preached the alumni sermon at the Divinity School. He remained at the Second Unitarian Church until his death in Brooklyn. He is the author of about a dozen books on Unitarianism and numerous poems.

(Note: Some minor editing has been done to make this work a little more readable for modern audiences. Nothing of substance has been changed.)

This work will be serialized until the complete book has been presented in the pages of The International Unitarian Journal.

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HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION. Unitarianism, as a doctrine of the unity of God, is much older than the Christian Church, not only in the direct line of development from Judaism, but on various subsidiary lines. This is true of the explicit doctrine, and it is much more widely true of that implied in many forms of primitive religion.

The heroic company of scholars which has argued for a primitive Monotheism, from which the various polytheisms of, the world were a decadence, has not been wholly given over to believe a lie. Their crude result has been the clumsy symbol of a striving after unity, or tendency to it, in the most primitive and polytheistic forms of worship and belief.

Thanks to this tendency or striving, the Vedic Hymns elevate Indra or Varuna into a prominence that sometimes leaves the other deities of the pantheon with their occupations gone. Behind the dualistic strife of Ahrimanes and AhuraMazda a power is conceived that reconciles their opposition, and in the Greek mythology we have an ultimate fate to which the Olympian gods must yield.

Underlying and over-topping all the different theological schemes, with their multiplicity of gods and goddesses, there was the sense of the Divine, of that mysterious power which was at the heart of things, coming to clearer consciousness in the thought of philosophic minds, but seldom wholly absent from the most simple and untaught That the early Christian Church was Unitarian in the sense of being Monotheistic

is evident from the fact that the early Christians were mainly Jews; the earliest, Jews without exception. Whatever Jesus might have thought as to its being no robbery for him to be equal with God, to say nothing of identity, for him to have broached such an opinion would have brought his ministry to such a sudden termination that we should never have so much as heard his name. The fishermen of Galilee, equally with the scholars of Jerusalem, would have recoiled from such presumption with immeasurable distrust; and there would have been no need of any civil process to punish it : an outburst of spontaneous rage would have anticipated Pilate's acquiescence.

The simple fact that the first theoretic conception of Jesus was that which regarded him as the Jewish Messiah makes the idea of his original deity absurd, for the idea of deity no more entered into the conception of the Messiah than the idea of comfort entered into the later doctrine of eternal hell.

The deification of Jesus was a very gradual process. To say that the beginnings can be found in the New Testament is not to claim for them a very primitive Christianity, for the New Testament books took just about a century to come full circle, — from 50 to 150 A.D. Paul's Epistles represent a more developed form of the doctrine of Christ's nature than do the Synoptic Gospels ; but this is only what we should expect from what we know of Paul and his relation to the early Church, and of the character of the Synoptics, as the last result of a long process of traditional aggregation.

The highest point in either of the three 69

is found in the idea of a dignity and office to be bestowed on Jesus as a reward of his faithfulness, and through the medium of his death and resurrection. That all the Epistles of Paul were written before the first of the Synoptics shows, when we consider how little the Epistles colored them, how tenaciously the human side of Jesus held its ground. As the deification proceeded, the Jews were alienated more and more. In the Epistles of Paul the process of exaltation is much further advanced than in the Synoptics; but it stops short of actual deification, as does the Fourth Gospel also, though that goes a little beyond Paul.

The nature of Christ was a matter of free speculation for the next two hundred years, and even further on. Midway of the third century Sabellius advocated the doctrine that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all emanations of the Logos, which he identified with the Supreme God. For a time this quaternity, this fourfold mystery of the divine nature, threatened to be the orthodox doctrine; but it was finally condemned as heretical, and in its place the doctrine of the Nicene Creed was set up, namely, that Christ was of the same substance with the Father, and was the product of his eternal generation. The great advocate of this doctrine at Nicaea, in 325 a.d., was Athanasius; and its great opponent was Arius.

Time was when the majority of Unitarians cast in their lot with Arius, and those who were inclined to question his superiority to Athanasius were received with much suspicion and alarm. But the preference is now quite the other way, not as fully accepting the thought of Athanasius, but as thinking that it had probably more

philosophic truth in it than the Arian conception.

This tendency has been inter- preted by some orthodox critics, whose wish is father of their thought, as a retreat upon the orthodox position. But, in truth, the late attraction of Athanasius for Unitarians has been his teaching of the humanity of Jesus. If he affirmed his deity, he affirmed his humanity with equal energy; while Arius makes him a being sui generis — not a nonnatural man, but a non-natural God ; not quite so old as God, but so nearly that that Arius would not say "there was a time when he was not," but "there was when he was not."

It is interesting and significant that Dr. Hedge, sympathizing with the Athanasian doctrine rather than with that of Arius, would have had the Unitarians call themselves Humanitarians. The animating motive of both Arius and Athanasius was much the same, — to steer clear of Ditheism, — the affirmation of two gods - while still exalting Jesus to the highest possible degree.

But, dreading one and the same evil, the two parties took different methods of avoiding it, and in their hot insistence, each on its own way, made every corner of the Roman Empire ring with angry altercation.

When this at length had died away, there was very little Unitarianism, as opposed to Trinitarianism, for some dozen centuries, though there was here and there a good deal of earnest criticism of the creed of our traditional orthodoxy, some of whose doctrines were slowly getting themselves established all along this weary time. The doctrine of the Atonement had to wait till the eleventh century for anything approximating to its modern form.

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Considered doctrinally, the Reformation was a reactionary movement; and its reaction was to those opinions and beliefs which were most horrible in the earlier centuries, those that had most oppressed the mind and heart of Catholic Christendom, and which had been shorn of something of their hatefulness. As for the doctrine of the Trinity, although Luther accepted it by sheer force of will, Melanchthon would not consider it too seriously; Zwingli was sounder (less tritheistic) upon this point than Calvin himself, while he differed from him by the heavens' width in regard to total depravity, finding in every child a new-born Adam, thanks to the power of Jesus' death and resurrection. He matched the Free Religionists of our own time in his abundant sympathy with the religions of the heathen world.

Castellio, one of the finest spirits of his age, at first befriended by Calvin, afterwards became the victim of his implacable enmity for his free handling of predestination, and was so beset that in his lonely banishment he was literally starved to death.

The name of Servetus is much better known. With all his brilliant qualities, he was somewhat crotchety, or, in more precise language, "one of those bold spirits who sometimes seize hold at once, and, as by instinct, of high and rich truths, but are wanting in the depth and sobriety of reasoning power necessary for the working out of a great system."

His system has been described by M. Riville, a competent critic, as a crude mixture of rationalism, pantheism, materialism, and theosophy. Generally hailed by Unitarians as "one of themselves," if he had been, the shame of Calvin would have been less in putting him to death. In truth, he would have

had him beheaded, and not burned; but, as he had done his best to hand him over to the Roman Inquisition, which would have tortured him first and burned him afterwards, he should not be too much admired on this account.

So far as a matter somewhat obscure and difficult can be made out, Servetus held an opinion which was much the same as that of Sabeillus. A man is never sure of orthodoxy who does a little thinking for himself. This was Bishop Huntington's trouble when he left the Unitarians: before he knew it, he had a quatemity upon his hands, as Dr. Hedge made clear enough. One thing is certain: Servetus was no Arian.

He said distinctly that Arius was "not equal to the glory of Christ" (gloriae Christi incapacimus = incapable of Christ). And as little Arian were the Socini, Laelius and Faustus, uncle and nephew, whose name has nicknamed English Unitarians to the present time, though long since it ceased to indicate their opinions as obviously as the name Calvinism has ceased to indicate the opinions of the modern orthodox.

But I do not know of any name upon their calendar of which Unitarians have more reason to be proud, not even William Ellery Channing's, than the name Socinus, such a leap the uncle and nephew of this name made out of the darkness of the ancient and the medieval into the light and beauty of the modern world. It was no petty or equivocal arraignment that the younger brought against the orthodox creed: it was a sweeping one, without paltering or obscurantism; and the scope of it included the doctrines of the deity of Christ, the Trinity, the personality of the devil, total depravity, vicarious atonement, and eternal hell. Moreover, he had the social 71

temper of Joseph Priestley and W. E. Channing, their hatred of oppression, their sacred passion for a kingdom of heaven upon earth.

Poland and Transylvania had been troubled with dissentients from the doctrine of the Trinity before the burning of Servetus in 1553; and in 1558 Georgio Blandrata went to Poland, and heaped such fuel on the fire that in a little while there was a general conflagration and a schism in the Church, the year 1565 seeing the establishment of the first Unitarian church that Christendom had seen since Constantine, throwing his sword into the Athanasian scale, had made the other kick the beam. The history of Polish Unitarianism is a history of an efficient organization, and a success so positive that it drew upon itself the arm of persecution with its utmost strength, a decree of expulsion (1658) marking the first centennial of Blandrata's arrival in Poland.

The exiles went in all directions, those that went to Transylvania finding there a goodly fellowship which had sprung into being almost simultaneously fact, largely a reaction against the natural theology of the eighteenth-century Deists. It was less rational and progressive than that. And it tended much more to the dogmatic hardness of a creed than the Presbyterianism of " the Bible only " from which it was evolved. It made religion as much a matter of belief as it has ever been made.

The hand of Priestley has been heavy upon English Unitarianism. But nothing shows more clearly and impressively what libels labels may become, and how wide the range of thought included in the Unitarian name, than a comparison of Priestley's Unitarianism with that of recent date. And

nowhere else does this inclusion come out so strikingly as in a comparison of his thought with that of James Martineau, at whose birth in 1805 Priestley's death was so recent as the previous year. Martineau himself began with the materialistic philosophy and necessarian ethics of Priestley, but for forty years they have had no sterner opposition than from him.

And, while Priestley contended that belief in the Messiahship of Jesus was the only essential of the Christian religion, Martineau contends that Jesus neither was the Messiah nor conceived himself to be so, that the doc- trine of his Messiahship was one of the " Corruptions of Christianity" which Priestley omitted from his catalogue.

Three other names stand out with Priestley's as pre-eminent among the Unitarian founders of the eighteenth century.

They are Price and Belsham and Lindsey.

Price was not a Socinian, like Priestley and Belsham, in his theology, but an Arian; yet he was in thorough sympathy with Priestley's political ideas. He was an intimate and valued friend of Benjamin Franklin, to whom he introduced Priestley at the beginning of that scientific career of which the discovery of oxygen was the proudest incident.

He was equally the valued friend of American independence, and, with Priestley, of the French Revolution, in its earlier manifestations. His public advocacy of the Revolution drew upon him Burke's celebrated 'Reflections' ; while Priestley's drew upon him the mob which sacked his house in Birmingham, and scattered his papers, and destroyed his philosophical instruments, where now his statue looks serenely down, as if he had forgotten or forgiven every wrong.

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But Unitarianism as a distinct organization in England derives neither from Price nor Priestley, nor from Belsham, who was a loud echo of Priestley's materialistic, necessarian Christianity, but from Theophilus Lindsey. He was the solitary contribution of the Established Church to the new faith.

There were hundreds in that Church who agreed with him; and a number of them got together, and petitioned Parliament for some alteration of the creeds and articles that would enable them to use them without mental reservation. The petition was not even received. Whereupon all except Lindsey fell back upon their livings, fat or lean, resolved to wait for better times, meantime to go on using the words which they did not believe.

So could not he. He gave up his Yorkshire vicarage, and went up to London with 20 Pounds, the proceeds of his furniture and books; and in an auction-room in 1 Essex Street, just off the Strand, he started the first Unitarian Church.

There, shortly after, was built the Essex Street Chapel, which still remains, the Unitarian headquarters of to-day; and, speaking there one morning in June, 1887, I felt myself to be on holy ground, not only because of the denominational association, but because Theophilus Lindsey was one of the holiest of men, one of the gentlest, purest, truest, that the world has ever known.

Belsham was his successor, and thereby hangs a tale.

Priestley, homeless in England, came to America in 1794, and was instrumental in the organization of a church in Philadelphia, which had lay-preaching till 1825, when Dr. Fumess was installed its minister; and he is now, in 1894, its pastor emeritus, having brought his active ministry to an end in 1875.

This was not the first Unitarian Society in America. The first, like the first in England, and solitary as that in this respect, had an Episcopalian reformer for its minister, James Freeman, of King's Chapel, the grandfather, by marriage, of James Freeman Clarke. An English nobleman, travelling in this country, — Lord Stanley or Lord Amberley, I have forgotten which, — speaking of the King's Chapel Prayer Book, said to Dr. Bellows, " I understand it is our liturgy watered." "No," said Dr. Bellows, "washed." The washing, or watering, was done in 1785, by Dr., then young Mr. Freeman, who acknowledged his indebtedness to Theophilus Lindsey in his preface.

In 1787 Mr. Freeman was installed by his vestrymen - he had been a lay-reader before that - no bishop being willing to lay his apostolic hands upon a head so full of heresy. There were other Episcopal churches which the new wine made for a while somewhat unsteady in their gait, but they all settled down at length into a sober acquiescence. It was very different in the Congregational churches. These furnished the Unitarian body with nearly all its early churches in America, as the Presbyterians furnished them with nearly all their churches in England.

Ecclesiastically speaking, the Unitarian Church in America is "the liberal wing of the great Congregational body which founded the first colonies of New England and gave the law to Church and State for more than two hundred years." Twelve years ago 120 or more of our 366 Unitarian churches of that date were on an historical basis of Puritan Congregationalism.

They had all descended from Puritan parishes; and thirty-eight of them antedated 73

the year 1700, including the first church in Plymouth, that of the Pilgrim Fathers. For many years before the beginning of the present century Calvinism had been undergoing a process of softening and abridgment in the New England churches.

Since the beginning of the century this process had become more general, and more conspicuous in its manifestations.

It especially characterized some of the ablest ministers in and around Boston. A class was thus formed to which the name " Liberal Christians" was applied. The meaning of this term was simply that they were disposed to put a liberal construction on the Calvinistic creed.

Among the members of this class there was no organized sympathy. They were generally Arminians, but so predominantly intellectual rather than emotional, and so conservative in taste, that Arminian Methodism had for them no attractions. A smaller majority were dissenters from the Trinitarian dogma. In regard to the rank of Jesus and the nature of the atonement there was much less unanimity. Liberal Christian ministers exchanged pulpits freely with the so-called orthodox, and united with them in all the ecclesiastical relations of the time.

Presently some of the more rigid of the orthodox party began to see that Liberal Christianity was silently but surely eating out the heart of Calvinism.

The catastrophe would probably have come a few years sooner but for the War of 1812, which was of such absorbing interest that for the time the dangers to which Calvinism was subject were forgotten. But peace between America and England had hardly been proclaimed when war between Orthodoxy and Liberalism was declared. The

declaration came from the orthodox side, — an article written in the Panaplist by Jeremiah Evarts, father of the Hon. William M. Evarts, written at the instance of Dr. Jedediah Morse, its editor, whose 'Geography' was a famous book in the forepart of the century.

It was, perhaps, some sharp reviews of that, in which he fancied odium ideologicum (hated ideological goal) was present, that stirred him up to make reprisals in a book called 'American Unitarianism, which was based on Belsham's Life of Lindsey. And now you have the tale which I said hung thereby, in speaking of Belsham's succession to Lindsey 's place and work.

Belsham's book was made up mainly of letters to Lindsey by Dr. Freeman, Buckminster, and other Boston Liberals.

Morse's book, and, still more vigorously and violently, Evarts's article, was bent on showing the sympathy and identity of the American Liberal Christians with the English Unitarians, and on convicting the former of dishonesty in covertly teaching or hypocritically concealing their opinions.

Finally, the article was a call upon all orthodox Christians to come out from the Liberals, and deny to them the Christian name and Christian fellowship. Dr. Channing, who in 1815 was thirty-five years old and had been for twelve years the beloved minister of the Federal Street Church in Boston, wrote an elaborate letter in answer to Morse's article, denying the general sympathy of his party with Priestley and Belsham (they were not Socinians, but Arians, for the most part, in their theory of Christ), but claiming for the Socinian humanitarians the Christian name, and all the rights and courtesies of Christian fellowship.

But it was his reply to Evarts's charge 74

of dishonesty and hypocrisy that showed what a reserve of moral indignation his quiet modesty had long concealed.

His disclaimer was entirely rational, but the event proved the mistakenness of the policy which the Liberals had pursued. In periods of transition, negation and affirmation should go hand in hand. The policy of the Boston minister, who was " mighty careful to tell no lies," always fails in the long run. It is not enough to preach that which you believe, as Channing and his party did, with passionate sincerity. The negations must come out They had to, then and there.

In conclusion, Channing pleaded earnestly against the exclusive spirit which would deny the Christian name, and shut out from Christian fellowship all those who could not take the Calvinistic shibboleth upon their lips.

His pleading was in vain. The controversy which had been so vigorously begun went on for several years, and drew into it, on either side, men of great ability.

Many things were said that showed how independent of each other are in theological soundness and the Christian spirit. In the asperities of debate, in the injustice of parochial divisions, there was blame enough on either side. Scores of congregations were divided ; and hundreds of the clergy and laity who should have been lifelong friends were ranged in hostile camps and met each other with indifferent greetings or averted eyes.

Channing's contribution to the controversy was equally remarkable for the smallness of its bulk and the weight, of each particular item of the count.

There was one mighty sermon in Baltimore (1819) at Jared Sparks's

ordination; and not long ago I stood in the very church and pulpit in which it was preached, and felt myself again on holy ground.

The pulpit's shape is not unlike that of a mortar, and the sermon that was shot from it exploded like a bomb in the orthodox camp.

There was another mighty sermon that was preached at the dedication of the Second Unitarian Church in New York, in which the sacred eloquence of Dewey was afterwards a soaring flame.

There were a few articles in the Christian Examiner and a few public letters to the same effect. But every sermon that he preached was interpenetrated with his Unitarian gospel of the dignity of human nature, the supremacy of reason, salvation by character, and the intellectual and moral unity of God and man. He had no liking for controversy, and the most of it fell into other hands, some of them mighty for the pulling down of strongholds of inveterate error, some of them plastic for the shaping of new forms of church organization and missionary work.

Of the former, Andrews Norton, of the latter, Ezra Stiles Gannett, was easily the first. The elder Ware contended against Woods of Andover for the new interpretations : whence an imperfect pun - the " Wood'nd Ware Controversy " - touched with a gleam of humor the top sombre spirits of a strenuous and baleful time.

My friend, William C. Gannett, reckons that few of the preachers who were over forty at the outbreak were ever anything but Arians. The younger men were more inclined to the Socinian interpretation, which was not inconsistent with an intense Biblicism and supematuralism. Jesus might be a man, and 75

still invested with miraculous powers, miraculously born and raised up from the dead; and the Bible might be the infallible record of his life and teaching and of much besides.

Hardly had the Unitarian controversy, as between Liberals and Calvinists, reached its term, which may be roughly fixed at 1830, than the first signs began to appear of a new controversy within the limits of the Unitarian body, - a controversy in which Channing was distinctly on the Liberal side, though others broke much more effectually than he with the Arian and supernaturalist tradition.

We find him lamenting the development of "a Unitarian orthodoxy and deprecating "a swollen way of talking about Christ' and these signs are two of many that make clear in what direction he was going, and why the more conservative people viewed him with distrust; though it should not be forgotten that his anti-slavery sympathies also were intolerable to many.

The Unitarianism of Channing, and those whose intellectual and spiritual temper was nearest akin to his, contained from the outset of the denominational history a principle - the principle of reason in religion -which soon or late was sure to carry those obedient to it a great deal farther away from Arianism, which exalted Christ sometimes to a degree of inappreciable difference from God, than the Socinian doctrine of a miraculously gifted man and an infallible book.

It was inevitable, if reason was sufficient to determine the grounds and limits of a revelation, and within those limits to interpret what was written, that there should come the moment when it would dare to judge the revelation, and by such judgment

assert its own superiority thereto. When Channing said, " The truth is, and it ought not to be denied, that our ultimate reliance is, and must be, on our own reason : I am surer that my rational nature is from God than that any book is an expression of his will," he said that in which all our later developments were folded like the oak within the acorn's cup.

But the development would probably have been much slower if a new philosophy, quite different from that of Locke, — which was consciously the philosophy of Channing, while unconsciously he anticipated a more spiritual rendering of the world, - and very different from that of Hartley - which Priestley and Belsham had espoused - had not sprung up in Germany, and been illustrated by such names as Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, and in England found such advocates as Coleridge and Carlyle.

These last, it would appear, did much more than the Germans directly to foster the Transcendental movement in New England; and Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, with its one glorious chapter on Natural Supernaturalism" the most of all. There were many touched with the new thought, - pre-eminently Emerson and Hedge, and Ripley and Clarke, and Bartol and Parker; and to the first and last of these respectively it fell to give to it its loftiest expression, and its most thoroughgoing application to the religious questions of the hour.

Emerson's withdrawal from the Hanover Street pulpit in 1832, because of his inability to use the forms of the Lord's Supper as they were then generally understood, was followed in 1836 by his little book called 'Nature,' and in 1838 by his 'Divinity School Address,' higher than which the wings of his religious aspiration never beat the upper 76

heavens.

Furness's 'Remarks on the Four Gospels,' a book of startling radicalism in its day, came out in 1836; and Strauss's Life of Jesus, of the year before, had consequences not to be measured by the degree to which his mythical theory might commend itself to an intelligent and earnest mind. It laid bare the countless inconsistencies of the miraculous stories and the insufficiency of naturalistic ingenuity to meet the case.

But it was a young man — who was one of the first American readers of Strauss's book, and who reviewed it for the Christian Examiner with more satire than appreciation, who had just finished a translation, printed later, of De Wette's Introduction to the Old Testament - who was to concentrate in himself to an unparalleled degree the influence of the New Criticism and New Philosophy on the Unitarian body.

I speak of Theodore Parker, who was born Aug. 24, 18 10, was settled at West Roxbury in 1837, and in Boston, where he had been preaching for some time, in 1846, and died in Italy, May 10, 1860. What manner of preaching he did in West Roxbury we have just now a better opportunity for knowing than formerly, a volume of his sermons there being still (1892) warm from the press. They are much warmer from the impress of his spirit. They have a wonderful simplicity. The love of God, the love of man, the love of all things beautiful and sweet and true, blossoms on every page. I had hoped that his sermon on The Temptations of Milkmen would be there, but it is not.

Reading everything, three hundred and twenty volumes in fourteen months before he fairly got up steam, Parker read deep in all the philosophical and critical

literature of the time, and skimmed from it the cream of cream. He heard Emerson in Cambridge, and walked home to Roxbury with a stormy pulse, thinking unutterable things. At least, so far he had not uttered them ; but now he felt he must.

And soon he did, first to his own people, and then one day — May 19, 1841 — in a South Boston sermon at the ordination of a friend ; and now the sermon ranks with Channing's Baltimore sermon and Emerson's at Cambridge as one of the great epoch making sermons of the Unitarian development. Its subject was "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity."

The permanent was the spiritual truth of Jesus and his personality exalted to a degree which the most conservative Unitarian of the present time could not easily surpass. It was the transient part that was most permanent in the hearers' memories and the denominational consciousness. In this he included the New Testament miracles, - not as never having happened, but as being now more an encumbrance than a help. He also included the supernatural character of the Bible and Jesus, and the sacraments, — not as invalid and unworthy, but as not essential to a Christian faith and life.

Parker had not yet thought out his system to the end; but he had gone too far already for the brethren's peace, or for his own. For, like some others, while he must speak frankly and strongly, he had a woman's heart, hated to wound others, and was easily wounded himself. The South Boston sermon was followed up with a course of lectures, afterwards published in a book called ' A Discourse on Matters pertaining to Religion,' which are the best expression of Parker's 77

theological position.

No more religious book has ever welled from the deep heart of man. His new philosophy united with the fundamental religiousness of his nature to produce this result. His interpretation of the philosophy was much more positive than that of its great German expounders.

Compared with Schelling's or Fichte's, it was as a mountain to a cloud ; and, where Kant's God and Immortality were merely posited as conveniences for the working of his "Categorical Imperative " of the Moral Law, with Parker God, Immortality, the Moral Law, were intuitional certainties of irrefragable stability.

It was as if he had set aside a public supernatural revelation only to substitute for it a private one in each several mind and heart.

At the same time, it must be said that in the general working of Parker's mind he was much more experiential than intuitional.

His religious intuitionalism was very much the splendid symbol of his personal genius for religion and his own abiding faith.

Channing, theoretically inductive, was practically deductive ; while Parker, theoretically deductive, had such a stomach for facts as few men ever had, and his digestion of them gave the tone and vigor of his intellectual life.

The controversy growing out of Parker's theological position was both long and hard; and it was harder upon none than upon those who, honoring and loving him for his great gifts and noble spirit, felt that they could not walk with him because they were not agreed. He made no attempt to organize a party, and was left very much alone.

To exchange with him was dangerous; and for daring so much on one occasion

James Freeman Clarke saw the secession of a large section of his congregation, and John T. Sargent lost his standing as a minister at large. The influence of the controversy on the life of the denomination was simply paralyzing for some twenty years. It alienated from its organized activities, if not from its name and its communion, many of the younger men, some of them, such asJohnson and Longfellow and Higginson and Weiss and Frothingham and Wasson, men of the rarest intellectual force and largest spiritual capacity, to lose whose furtherance and sympathy was almost a fatal blow.

The bias of the anti-slavery conflict on the situation was such as to prevent an organized schism from the body. It was, moreover, of the essence of Transcendentalism to be distrustful of organization, and the anti-slavery movement drew on a world of Parker's energy that might have made the theological controversy still more hot; while the ethical passion of the young Abolitionists who followed the double lead of Parker and Garrison was for the time being the "one world at a time" which they could entertain, and furnished them with all the high and genial fellowship that they could ask.

The war of words came to an end at last on the political field, and the war of ships and armies followed; and in April, 1865, just as the tottering strength of the great rebellion was rushing down to final wreck, a Unitarian convention met in New York to initiate the fourth period of our denominational life, the period of organization.

We will call the other three the periods of controversy, internal division, and stagnation - the last of these designations 78

relative to the unrealized possibilities of the time. It was a good year for such a meeting, the three hundredth anniversary of the first Unitarian church established in the world, that of Georgio Blandrata, in Poland.

The convention was the direct result of Dr. Bellows' personal application to himself of that great word of the spirit, — "Thou hast been faithful over a few things : I will make thee ruler over many things." He had been faithful over the few things of the Sanitary Commission - few relatively to the boundless energy of his organizing and inspiring genius.

He had conceived and managed and inspired its glorious work ; and all that he had done instead of exhausting his energy had stored up in him a fresh amount, which must have some new outlet, or the man would spiritually burst.

In advance of the convention, in response to his appeal, much money was raised by subscription, and turned over into the treasury of the Unitarian Association, four-fifths as much as had been given for denominational work through that channel during the preceding twenty-five years.

But I must have no one suppose that this period of organized activity has been troubled by no controversy whatever.

Because we have freedom of enquiry and religious liberty, and because some hasten slowly and others a little faster in the revision of their opinions, I am inclined to think that we shall always have some differences of opinion and policy, and that we shall wax warm about them, if we do not get red-hot.

But I doubt if we are any worse on this account.

Periods of difference in religious bodies are quite as often periods of prosperity and growth as periods of

decadence. We have, in fact, had three somewhat memorable controversies in America during the last thirty years in our denomination. The formation of our National Conference in 1865 was the signal for the beginning of the first.

Some wanted a creed of several articles as a banner for our organization. That had no chance. The proposition was defeated by an overwhelming vote. It would have been perfectly easy to frame a constitution that would have been true to all and agreeable to both parties, under which we could have gone on conquering and to conquer from that time till now.

But what some wanted was "a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence" ; and they had their way, incorporating in the preamble of the constitution a phrase describing Jesus as our ''Lord and Master Jesus Christ," which, for a good many, carried with it a suggestion of authority inimical to spiritual freedom and a suggestion of official dignity unwarranted by the historic facts. There was a great debate, and it was renewed at Syracuse at the second meeting of the Conference which was established in New York.

Indeed, what has been aptly called the " Battle of Syracuse " was one of the greatest meetings we ever had. I shall never forget the flaming eloquence of the Abolitionist hero, Charles C. Burleigh, as he appealed "from you to your Master," pointing to the words of Jesus on the frescoed wall; nor how Dr. Bellows had to hold down the top of his dear shining head after such an extemporaneous speech as only he could make.

The battle was a victory for the conservative party; and that night upon the home-bound train the Free Religious 79

Association was conceived, and duly born in Boston the next May. It detached many wholly from the Unitarian body, and gave many others room for their wider sympathies, while they still kept up their connection with the parent body, and tried time and again to bring the obnoxious preamble into better shape.

As it now stands, there is an article of the constitution declaring that the preamble is only binding upon those who can agree to it.

This miserable arrangement is likely to be done away with before long, a committee having been appointed at the last meeting of the Conference to this end, and their report having been made advising certain changes that would satisfy the scruples of the radical party and may be satisfactory to all concerned.

Meantime the broadening temper of the Conference has drawn back every year a greater number of those who were alienated from it by its earlier course.

What is known in our annals as the " Year Book Controversy" was a pendant of the controversy in and about the National Conference. The question mooted was whether the names of those who could not conscientiously appropriate the Christian name should appear in the Year Book of the Unitarian Association.

It may seem a petty question; but it involved the question, “What is Christianity, and What is Unitarianism?� and the further question whether a man can be a Unitarian who is not a Christian. The personal centre of the controversy was the Rev. William J. Potter of New Bedford, after the Rev. O. B. Frothingham the President of the Free Religious Association, a preacher of the loftiest moral temper and the rarest

intellectual gifts, his published sermons the best expression of our most characteristic thought to which we have yet attained, as calm as Channing's in their tone, but with an intellectual grasp which Channing never had, and a sweep of vision which was impossible before the orb of scientific truth had fairly risen and dispersed the misty exhalations of the dawn.

The final outcome of the controversy was the admission to the Year Book, and by that sign to the denomination, in good standing, of all ministers who were in charge of Unitarian societies, and of all who had been so and had not withdrawn from the ministry. And so again we took the broader road which leads to the destruction Alive when this was written, he died Dec. ai, 1893. of all artificial barriers between men who, if not of one mind, are of one heart and one soul.

And last we had our "Western Controversy." It came about through the attempt of certain earnest spirits to limit the fellowship of the Western Conference by a " statement of purpose," committing the Conference as such to a belief in Christian theism.

In the great debate which followed, at its annual meeting, the Conference, refusing to limit its fellowship by any dogmatic test, welcomed all to come in and help who would fain build up the kingdom of righteousness and truth and love. This action, known as "the Cincinnati Resolution," was the signal for the withdrawal of many individuals and some churches from the Western Conference, and for the extension of the controversy in everwidening circles, until the East hardly less than the West was included in their sweep.

There was much more misunderstanding 80

than real difference.

The principal contestants for the broader way were men preeminent for their theistic ardor and the tenderness of their devotion to the memory and example of Jesus of Nazareth.

What they have contended for has been simply a franker avowal of the National Conference position, putting first, however, the principle of generous inclusion, and then making a statement of "things commonly believed among us " wonderfully rich and strong, and expressly given as not covering all and binding none.

I have no doubt in my own mind that we shall, as a denomination, ultimately come to this position, and that the wandering sheep will all come home at last, and that there will be one flock and one fold, open on every side to pastures new.

Long since the spiritual genius of Dr. Martineau, whom the Messianic phrase of the National Conference preamble would logically exclude from our fellowship, if it were made a test, sounded the note of highest courage when he said, "The true religious life supplies grounds of sympathy and association deeper and wiser than can be expressed in any doctrinal names or formulas; and free play can never be given to these genuine spiritual affinities till all stipulation, direct or implied, for specified agreement in theological belief is discarded from the bases of church union." Into the largeness of this liberty we are sure to come at length. Nor is it now a distant city sparkling like a grain of salt, but near at hand, and beautiful with unimagined light.

So it seemed to me in 1892 before the meeting of the Western Conference for that year. At that meeting a resolution was passed

pledging the Conference to religious work in harmony with the Cincinnati Resolution and the ''Statement of Things commonly believed among us." To many this appeared to be unnecessary, because sufficiently implied before; while some of the stanchest friends of the Cincinnati Resolution feared a construction prejudicial to that utterance.

Further resolutions were adopted in 1893 which were satisfactory to both parties, and brought the painful controversy to a tardy end.

The fifty years which have gone by since Channing died in 1842 have seen great changes in the several worlds of politics and science and philosophy and criticism and theology. They have seen the anti-slavery conflict, in which Channing and Parker took conspicuous and noble parts, culminating in civil war and in the destruction of slavery.

They have seen science advancing, with a step ever more confident, to discoveries ever more magnificent, the doctrine of evolution central to them all, and giving them organic unity and life. They have seen philosophy driven back by science from the transcendental ground, and compelled to base itself upon experience. They have seen theology powerfully affected both by philosophy and science, and criticism in its treatment of the Bible making all things new with its discovery of the modem date of great portions of the Pentateuch and all the Psalms, if we take the Exile as the dividing line between ancient and modern in the Old Testament history.

And all of these changes have powerfully affected Unitarian thought and life.

Nobody has been more sensitive to them than we. No sect has been less backward and more cordial in accepting the new ideas.

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But so it has happened that, while the philosophy for which Emerson and Parker were made anathema has passed into the keeping of the orthodox sects, the scientific philosophy which these have made anathema in its turn has become very generally the philosophy of Unitarian thought.

So it happens that the critical results which Parker reached, and which his brother Unitarians could not endure, are now the commonplaces of the progressive orthodox.

So it happens that the doctrine of the divine unity now resumes a wealth of meaning in which, at first, it had no part Science is but another name for the discovered unity of the world; and the unity of the world reflects as in a mirror the Unity of the Universal Soul. If any doctrine was more central to the Unitarianism of Channing than the unity of God, it was the Dignity of Human Nature.

But, clearly, Channing's '' one sublime idea," as he called it, has been vigorously challenged by the doctrine of heredity, and by the Darwinian theory of human origins. In the first particular, the gain of pity and compassion is much more than any loss entailed; while, as for the second, what seemed to wreck our faith in human nature has been its grandest confirmation.

For nothing argues the essential dignity of man more clearly than his triumph over the limitations of his brute inheritance, while the long way that he has come is prophecy of the novel heights undreamed of that await his tireless feet. As it is here, so it is everywhere. If that which was done away was glorious, much more that which remaineth is glorious.

It is through its inheritance from Priestley, in the main, that Unitarianism has

been a movement of thought in sympathy with science. It is through its inheritance from Socinus and Milton and Locke and Price and Priestley and Channing and Parker that it has been a movement of conscience in sympathy with reform.

And, as the former binds it to the religious interpretation of science, so does the latter bind it to intelligent cooperation with every movement that makes for the purification of our politics and the improvement of our social life. Common worship is beautiful, and mutual incitement to the highest moral things is more than beautiful; but a church, or body of churches, which is not persuaded that the field is the worldy and does not shape its life conformably to that persuasion, is a thing that cumbereth the ground.

Part II: The Doctrine of Man In this course of lecture-sermons I wish to bring out as clearly as I can the distinctive doctrines of our Unitarian faith.

They have not always been what they are now. In this respect they have not been singular. A Christianity that is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever is a theological fiction to which nothing real corresponds, as Cardinal Newman finally discovered, and so wrote his 'Development of Christian Doctrine,' endeavoring therein to establish a principle by which the extent of variation, without a difference of species, could be determined.

But the Unitarian doctrine in regard to human nature has had more consistency from first to last than any other. The first Unitarians in the line of our development were the Hebrews and the Jews - a distinction of historical succession merely 82

the survival of whose fittest literature we have in the Old Testament.

The general conception of human nature in the books of that collection, covering about eight centuries, is one of generous appreciation and noble selfrespect. It is true that the doctrine of total depravity has backed itself up with as many texts from the Old Testament as from the New; as many from the Psalms as from Paul's Episties, if not more.

But the individual self-abasement of the psalmists cannot be taken in evidence of a general estimate of human nature, and no more can the denunciations of the prophets hurled at specific criminals and crimes.

Moreover, it is the opinion of our most learned scholar that only in the fifty-first Psalm do we find the depravity of human nature clearly taught: "Behold I was shapened in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me."

Much more in consonance with the general view than this is the verse in the eighth Psalm: "Thou hast made him but little lower than God. Thou hast crowned him with glory and honor." The Septuagint reading, "but little lower than the angels," perpetuated by the King James translation, is sufficiently at variance with the Calvinistic view.

The characteristic note of the Old Testament, and of Jesus in the New, is that, if a man will, he can obey the law of righteousness, and that, too, without divine interposition. He is the architect of his own fortunes. “It matters not how straight the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll ; I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul."

This language of the modern poet is

nothing but a free translation of the average tone of the Old Testament and the earlier Gospels of the New. Jesus was always drawing inferences from the goodness of men to that of God: " Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors;� " For what man is there of you who, if his son ask him for a loaf, will give him a stone ; or, if he ask a fish, will give him a serpent ? " Everywhere in the parables, and especially in that of the Prodigal Son, a human goodness furnishes an image and an argument for the divine. If theologians had had only the words of Jesus, the first Christian Unitarian, to build upon, they would not have built one stone of their doctrine of man's total depravity upon another.

But they have had also the Epistles of Saint Paul; and it must be confessed that, to paint human nature blacker than he sometimes painted it, or more incompetent, would be difficult, if not impossible.

Augustine, John Calvin, Johnathan Edwards, have all dipped their brushes in his pot; and there has been enough in it for them and all their kind.

The Unitarianism of Arius in the fourth century, so often treated as a novel heresy, was, in fact, the swan-song of the Unitarian orthodoxy of the earlier Church; and swan-songs are not sweet.

His doctrine, while it saved the unity of God, saved nothing of "the excellency of Christ" for human nature. Indeed, the Athanasian doctrine, which triumphed over Arius, at Nicaea, in its identification of Jesus with God, while still affirming his humanity, was a doctrine much more honorable to human nature than that of Arius, which made Jesus a being sui generis as far as possible removed from man, as near as possible to God, short of identity. The attractiveness of 83

Athanasius - whom you must not associate with the seventh-century Athanasian Creed, but with the fourth-century Nicene - for many Unitarians is in virtue of the fact that they find in him a blundering expression of *' the divinity of man and the humanity of God/' and of the one substance of all uncreated and created things.

For some centuries after the Council of Nicaea, in 325, the Unitarianism of Arius made a good fight for its life, and had many able coadjutors. At Nicaea the opposing doctrine conquered only because the Emperor Constantine threw his sceptre into the scale; and for a long time after the question which should finally prevail was simply a question which could get the strongest battalions — those of the imperial power — upon its side.

Given a little more assistance from the secular arm, and the Unitarianism of Arius might have been the orthodoxy of the succeeding centuries for a thousand years.

We, of to-day, have little reason to regret the actual course of history. It would seem that the doctrine of Arius must have been much more fatal to the human aspect of the life of Jesus, and the helpfulness implied in that, than the doctrine of the victorious party.

Once the doctrine of the Trinity had got fairly established in the sixth century or thereabout, there was very little Unitarianism in Christendom until the Protestant Reformation; that is, there was very little denial of the identity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit But, though Augustine, looking down into the unsunned depths of his breast - into hideous gulfs of bottomless guile, into weltering abysses of insatiate lust, and seeing the hells open, hell underneath hell in his darkling, selfish heart," inferred from this

experience the total depravity of human nature; and, though his doctrine triumphed over the more genial doctrine of Pelagius, nevertheless, as time went on, it was the doctrine of Pelagius, rather than that of Augustine that became the ruling doctrine of the Church.

In our own time we have Roman Catholics assuring us that Romanism, and not Protestantism, must be the religion for America, because self-government and universal suffrage presuppose that human nature is not, as Protestantism teaches, radically corrupt They certainly do; but, if God has made man upright, the political bosses have sought out many crooked inventions.

The doctrine of Luther and Calvin on the human side was a reactionary doctrine. It went back to Augustine for the most horrible doctrines which his perturbed imagination had conceived the doctrines of total depravity and predestination.

It was these doctrines rather than the Trinity or the Deity of Christ that made the first Protestant heretics. Zwingli taught that every newborn child - thanks to Christ's making alive of all those who had died in Adam - was as free from any taint of sin as Adam was before his fall.

(This brave old Zwingli had such appreciation of the Pagan scholars, saints and heroes that he anticipated the late Parliament of Religions by three centuries and half another.)

Laelius and Faustus Socinus were the first Unitarians of the Reformation period out of whose thinking came a definite body of Unitarian belief and a definite Unitarian organization. These two were men whose reputation has been much spattered and 84

obscured by the incalculable mud thrown at their followers by the more orthodox, but no sect in Christendom has representatives of whom it is more justly proud. It was no slight departure which they made from the theology of their contemporary, Calvin, and those who thought with him.

They broke with these at almost every point; and, while a great body of churches in Poland and Transylvania sprang from their thought, it was a long time before the Unitarianism of Great Britain and America reached the mark of their high calling.

The earlier Unitarians in England and America for the most part took the Arian line; and, except for their anti-trinitarian ideas, they were in general agreement with the opinions of the majority. But there was no fixed rule. Richard Price, of London, was a belated Arian among Socinians, — Priestley, and Lindsey, and their kind; but it was his preaching in favor of the French Revolution that drew Burke's 'Reflections on the French Revolution' on his venerable head, and we may be sure that no man preached that way in 1789 who did not believe in human nature as something radically sound and good.

And here in America it was not one of the radical Socinians, of whom there were a few, but one of the conservative Arians, of whom there were many, who made the doctrine of the dignity of human nature his "one sublime idea," set it in the forefront of his preaching, and rallied to its illustration and defence all that was best in his own nature, and in the fellowship of which he, William Ellery Channing, was the leading spirit. It was that illustration and defence that made the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Parker possible a few years further on. What was their doctrine but a corollary of

Channing's dignity of human nature ?

Many before Channing had asserted the dignity of human nature, notably one William Shakspere, in a passage which I need not quote, beginning, " What a piece of work is man! "But it was reserved for Channing to assert this dignity with such amplitude and consistency as had not been known before, and in his personal character to furnish the doctrine with such an argument and illustration as he could not send abroad upon his winged words.

The dignity of human nature ! No other doctrine has been so central to our faith and work as this. It enters into all our other doctrines, leavening the lumpishness of what was dullest once, raising the meanest to some better height, compelling new interpretations, broader and truer than the old. Not all there was in it was seen by Channing when he first published it with glowing heart, nor even when he finished his course amidst the beauties of an outward nature as calm and peaceful as his own.

All the denials and affirmations of Theodore Parker were contained in Channing's "one sublime idea," as the days are in the year and the stars are in the sky.

Logically carried out, it meant the complete humanity of Jesus. Given such faith as Channing's in the possibilities of human excellence, and what need to claim for Jesus any superhuman quality?

Within the wide space of humanity his greatness swings as freely as the earth amidst the various stars. Given such faith, and the Bible in its marvellous richness and its wonderful complexity seems an easy thing for human genius to create, no prophecy or psalm or gospel or epistle too ethically stern or too spiritually exalting for man's normal 85

delight in the infinite God and the law of the Eternal. Given such faith, and man's reason, conscience, and imagination furnish him with all needful revelation.

Given such a faith, and not to hope for immortality - nay, not to heartily believe in it would be quite the impossible thing. The dignity of human nature is not an inference from that, as many have imagined, inverting the true order of relations, but the immortality of the soul is a just inference from its present dignity and worth. So with the doctrine of the atonement No magical appropriation of the merits of the blood of Jesus, nothing less than character, obedience, righteousness, could save the soul from the only real hell, — that of the great refusal to be what we may and can be, working out our own salvation, and God working evermore in us.

And so on, through the whole range.

There was not a doctrine held by the earlier Unitarians that Channing's "one sublime idea" did not make fluid and recast in some diviner mould.

But its practical implications were of more importance than those merely doctrinal.

Certainly, they were so for Channing himself Here was the root and ground, the motive, inspiration, spur, of all his philanthropic zeal. ''What I strike a man!" was his sufficient argument against flogging in the navy. And for himself he asked no better argument against slavery, against intemperance, against debasing punishments, against the oppression of one class by any other, against the niggardly support of education by the town or state. In every man or woman, white or black, educated or ignorant, good or bad, elevated or degraded, he saw the glory of the human - if not a realized, then a potential fact.

And it is so with every one who has entered faith- fully into his spirit, whose appropriation of his ''one sublime idea " is not merely nominal, but vital. If in the anti-slavery conflict, for all the thin-voiced and weakkneed apologists for slavery that stood in Unitarian pulpits, there was a larger company who witnessed a good confession at whatever cost, it was because they had not sat at Channing's feet in vain.

There are aspects of society in our own time which in Channing's time were not conspicuous. They have come from the development of our industrial organization, from the widening gulf which has been fixed between the employer and the employed by the stupendous changes that have taken place in methods of industrial production.

But for these novel aspects the doctrine of Channing has as clear a word as if he had anticipated their utmost stress ; and how often do I wish that he were here to make the application ! For I hold that nothing is more sure than this: that underlying and over- topping every other necessity of our industrial organization is the necessity, on the part of the employer, of seeing in every workman at his forges or his looms, in his quarries or his mines, not merely so much ''labor," and not merely an industrial machine, but a fellow-creature, a human being, a conscious soul, a brother man whom he must not treat with any least indignity or disrespect without this vision and this sympathy no legislative ordering of our political economy will bring us much nearer than we are now to the mark of our high calling.

The changes in industrial organization are not the only changes that have taken place during the four- score years that have elapsed since Channing's "one sublime idea 86

" touched his thought with beauty and his lips with flame. And during these years it must be confessed that our theories of human nature have been subjected to a good deal of stress and strain by the changes which have overtaken our conceptions of man's physical and intellectual and moral history - changes coming from the side of that great doctrine of evolution into which each several science is now pouring itself in an abounding stream.

It must be confessed that the problems of human character are far less simple as they present them-selves to us than as they presented themselves to Channing and his contemporaries. For one thing our studies in heredity have made it plain that every new-born soul is not that tabula rasa, that clean white sheet of paper, just like every other, which in the popular presentations of Unitarianism in its earlier course it often was.

The parable of the talents is a parable of human inequality: only this ranges from one talent to five hundred instead of from one to five. Some men are born with aptitudes for virtue, some with aptitudes for vice. The will, however free, is in one case drawn by a stupendous energy in the direction of the good, and in another case by an equally stupendous energy in the direction of the bad. There have been many fluctuations in the battle which has raged upon this ground.

Buckle was a man after the early Unitarians' own heart so far as he did not believe in heredity at all. But, then, he did believe in the incalculable and enormous influence of the environment. Spencer, on the other hand, has made heredity the central principle of his philosophy, the inheritance of acquired variations being essential to his doctrine that the gain of evolution is

transmitted, in the accumulations of experience, from one generation to another, not as a social tradition only, but registered in nerve and sinew, blood and bone. The most lively battle now proceeding in the scientific world is on this very ground. Spencer has encountered a most vigorous and confident antagonist in the German naturalist.

Professor Weismann, whose doctrine of heredity does not admit of any transmission of acquired peculiarities. No use and no abuse of their original outfit, on the part of parents, has the least congenital effect upon their offspring according to the teachings of this new philosophy.

Here is a doctrine which has important bearings on our individual and social life. For all the learning with which it has been defended, it has not yet been established; not by a good deal: and Weismann has made more notches in his sword by his own grinding than have his enemies by their sturdy blows. He has abated so much from the first form of his doctrine that it is now, though different from Darwin's, and more different from Spencer's, very near akin to that of Galton, whose “Hereditary Genius “ is one of the most interesting books the general controversy has brought forth.

We have in Galton's a doctrine of heredity which denies much less confidently than Weismann the transmission of individually acquired traits, and which narrows much less than he the path of prenatal influences, especially of the mother on the child. But not all prenatal influences, he insists, are hereditary - a distinction which will not impress the average mind as practically a difference.

Be these things as they may, the doctrine of heredity rather gains than loses in 87

significance, if it prevails after this manner rather than after that of Spencer. Only, if this happens, the doctrine becomes much less appealing to parental virtue; there is no longer occasion to say of the unborn children, "For their sakes we sanctify ourselves."

The working of heredity is much more than before that of a blind and helpless fate for good or ill, though certain of its larger implications still remain. And in the mean time the fact remains, however caused, that human nature presents no such equality and lucidity to our recent science as it did generally to the Unitarians of Channing's generation.

But the inequality does not impeach the dignity. The range is wide, but its inclusions on the higher side are so magnificent that it can well afford the lower and the lowest in the scale. Then, too, the lowest natures frequently manifest traits that ally them with the highest, and put to shame the conventional moralities of the professionally pious.

Consider, too, how much of grievous fault is but the exaggeration and the overplus of appetites and passions of which we need not be ashamed.

Consider yet again how marvellously responsive many of the lowest are to the touch of sympathy and love. Suppose the upshot of the battle, now raging so fiercely between Spencer and Weismann, should be the complete discomfiture of the former - an event which I do not anticipate - we should gain more upon the side of the environment as determinative of the good or evil of the individual life than we should lose upon the side of inherited acquisitions. Indeed, upon this side, the gains are clear and steady independently of the immediate question in

dispute.

How often do the children that are born of ignorance and lawless passion, of intemperance and crime, where they have been sequestered from the influences of their congenital environment, develop in due time the noblest manly strength, the rarest womanly perfection, The dignity of human nature stands approved in the ability of the most basely born to reach the heights of intellect and will; in the nobility that is bound by its advantages to service of the miserable and perishing. In seven generations there accumulate more than two thousand possibilities of heredity for each new adventurer. More than a match for these, in the majority of cases, is the environment of thoughtful love which can be built around the growing child to shield him from all harm.

Nay, but we should not know how great our human nature really is, were it not for these contrasting depths and heights. We would have none continue in sin that grace may abound in others; but we cannot but be glad that a Pope, Leo X, compels a Luther to Stand forth, a King, Philip II, and an Alva bring a William the Silent safe to his political birth, a pig-headed king, George III of England, means Sam Adams and John Adams and George Washington in America, the slavocracy of the South means Garrison and Lincoln and a mighty company who were fellow- laborers with these.

From the abstractions of philosophy and the ballooning of speculative science, they that are wise will often turn to the pages of history, to the records of personal greatness, to their own knowledge and recollection of the most exalted character and worth.

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It will be impossible for them to contemplate the spectacle of so many men and women of great name and high example, or of private goodness and fidelity, without assurance that the dignity of human nature is not at the mercy of any doctrine of heredity, no matter whose or what. " Beloved, now are we the sons of God; and it doth not yet appear what we shall be."

So said the writer of old time. And what say we? "Beloved, still are we the sons of God, whatever we have been in those from whom we draw the bane or blessing of the life we call our own."

Whereupon suddenly and sharply we are told that the dignity of human nature must not only reckon with the inequalities of human life and the mysteries of hereditary taint, but also with the descent of man from lower animal forms. Here is some- thing which did not enter into the most prophetic calculations of the earlier Unitarians, and it must be confessed that to many of the later ones it has been an unwelcome and annoying guest.

How would the Calvinists rage, and the orthodox imagine a vain thing! And yet, strange as it may appear, it was not the Calvinists to whose aid Darwin had seemed to come after a fashion, but the Unitarians whose exalted estimate of human nature he had seemed to seriously impeach, who were among the first to accord to him a patient hearing, and afterward a general acquiescence.

And with what loss, if any, of their confidence in the dignity of human nature.?

With none whatever, albeit with some better understanding of the stress of certain motions in our blood, some happier confidence that what the theologians have

called original sin is some inheritance from far-off ancestors of whom we have no call to be ashamed. We are too prone to think that all that we inherit from the lower animals is a deduction from our proper nature. But the distinction of lower and higher has in it a good deal of human vanity. We should be no lower than we are if we could swim like the fish, see like the hawk and float as he does in the upper deeps, run like the deer, and wrestle like the pard.

Are not the most of us such miserable weaklings that we might well desire that we had inherited more of the primitive ancestral brawn, had more of the original Berserker marrow in our bones? (Berserker: ancient Viking warrior).

Plotinus was ashamed of his body with good reason probably - like many of the Christian saints. Here and there we have seen a reversion to that sentiment, coming from two quarters, contempt for the ladder by which we have reached the top of animal life, and insistence on "spirit" as the only real thing by our friends, the Christian Scientists, and such as they.

But who more spiritual than Novalis? and he said, “I touch heaven when I touch a human body." "Every muscle," said Theodore Parker, "is a good muscle, every bone is a good bone." And Browning sang : — Then let us no more say, Spite of this flesh, to-day I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole.

As the bird wings and sings, Let us cry, ' All good things Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more now than flesh helps soul.

You that despise the body, buy a firstrate 'Anatomy and Physiology: read and 89

study that. Look at the Venus of Milo and Michel Angelo's Dying Captive, and remember it was Michel Angelo who said,Nor hath God deigned to show himself elsewhere More clearly than in human forms sublime.

You that despise your animal birthright, learn from the biologist that every substance, every cell, and every tissue of your body is the same as in the mammals next to man, and farther back, and that they are as beautiful and good as God can make.

Tennyson is always flouting at the tiger and the ape in us, as if they were all of our inheritance. But the world is big enough for apes and tigers, too ; and I am glad of that. " The young lions roar, and seek their meat from God !

Good for the young lions ! May they never suffer lack ! Be far from us that conceit which regards the steps of animal creation, from the protozoon up to man, only as so many steps toward man and not each good in itself, even as each successive stage in a delightful journey which brings us to some happy goal.

It is not the goal, but the course, that makes us happy, said Jean Paul. Nay, but in this matter it is both the course and goal.

The dignity of human nature is not in the least impeached by these considerations of the connections and resemblances of animal and human life. Man is a cup which the Eternal Power has had for many million years upon his wheel and 'neath his moulding hand. Therein I read in part, the worth and dignity of what has taken shape and beauty from his plastic stress.

Whatever the Eternal might have done, what he has done is plain enough. He has taken millions and billions of years to bring forth man from the first living sea

creatures, - about half a million from the time when first he fairly got him on his feet to bring him to his present amplitude of life.

And have we not a perfect right in the long way that we have come to find a hint and prophecy of the long way we are to go ?

As yet we have not reached the half-way house upon the mountain of our great endeavor. The highest summits that now beckon us are only foot-hills to that top and crown on which humanity shall be transfigured into the image of that glory which it had in the beginning before the world was with God. Nay, but we cannot think of any possible achievement that shall end the endless quest. " The sun is but a morning star.�

Now, there are those who find no deduction from the dignity of human nature in the past history of the race who confess themselves staggered by the prospect which speculative astronomy opens to their view; that is, the prospect of an ultimate collapse of our whole mundane order, the degeneration of the earth to the condition of the moon, " A gray, wide, lampless, dim, unpeopled world," throwing itself at length in sheer despair upon the fiery bosom of the sun.

This prospect, it must be confessed, does not agree with the idea that in a perfected humanity upon the earth we have a sufficient substitute for personal immortality.

This prospect resolves the spectacle of universal life into the play of children on a sandy beach, who comfort one another by singing as they work: " Perhaps, if we hurry very much, And don't lose a minute of the day, Therell be time for the last lovely touch Before the sea sweeps it all away."

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In the phrase of Omar Khayydm, the caravan would reach "the nothing it set out from." But, if that were so, we should not cry with Omar Khayydm, "Oh, make haste!"

No, as the disciples said to Jesus, " It is good for us to be here." Such a prospect does not impeach the dignity of human nature, but it does impeach the husbandry of heaven. The Scotch woman, asked what she would say to God's damning her forever, answered, "And if he does, he'll lose mair than I do."

If the prophecy of the speculative astronomers is made good, and there be no personal immortality, God will lose more than we shall by the transaction. We shall have had our day - our love and laughter, our sunshine and sweet rain, our work and rest; and " we know that what has been was good."

But can God afford such prodigal destruction of his work ? Why not ? There are so many stars in heaven. But without personal immortality, unless our speculative astronomers are "all wranglers and all wrong," there will come a time when the whole process of terrestrial development will be as if it had never been.

So help me God, I can no otherwise than think some better thing of him than that.

And, if the speculative astronomers are right, then we have one great, sad reason more for an unconquerable hope and stout assurance of a spiritual immortality that shall justify the ruin of the physical environment in which the soul has nourished for a time its halfunconscious life.

Another challenge to the dignity of human nature has come from those for whom the expanding universe and the greater God which it implies have dwarfed mankind into a

hopeless relative insignificance.

What said the Psalmist? "When I consider the heavens the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man ? " And if the Psalmist was so impressed, how much more must be the modem man, for whom the heavens are so much more vast and wonderful than they could be for him ?

But pari passu with the enlargement of the sidereal universe there has been an enlargement of humanity. It is man who has read the secrets of the heavens. He has weighed the stars as in his hand. He has measured them as with a surveyor's chain.

And hence he is more wonderful than they: " Thou gazest on the stars, my soul: Oh, would that I might be Yon starry skies, with thousand eyes, That I might gaze on thee ! " Moreover, it is evident from our latest studies that we are as far from fathoming the mysteries of the human brain and mind as we are from fathoming the mysteries of the heavens. And when to the mysterious greatness of the mind we add on the one hand the wonder and beauty of the physical organism, and on the other the tragedies of misplaced and disappointed and the exaltations of triumphant love, the heroisms and devotions of the moral life, the splendors of the imagination, the trust of broken hearts which cry, "Though the Lord slay me, yet will I trust in him I" - if we cannot "still suspect and still revere ourselves," still front with unabashed demeanor the greater universe and the greater God which science has revealed, it is because we have not individually the mind to enter into and appropriate the most obvious meaning of the 91

things that press upon us day and night The apostle promised those to whom he wrote that they should be like God, for they should "see him as he is." " We are like him," rejoins our modern thought, ''because we do see him as he is."

All genuine appreciation means a common mind. It is so between man and man. No Shakespeare or Rembrandt or Beethoven in you, and no appreciation of their glorious art. It is so between man and God. An intelligible universe must be intelligent. The converse of the proposition is as true. The order of our notions and ideas means the order of the universe; and our apprehension of that order means, as Channing said, that "all minds are of one family," that we have the mind of God, and by that sign are now the sons of God, and not merely in some future tense.� *�Were not the eye itself a sun, No light for it could ever shine : By nothing Godlike could the soul be won, Were not the soul itself divine.'�

The power in us to read the laws, to hear the harmonies, to appreciate the beauty of the world, is proof of our celestial mind as absolute and glorious as we can ask or dream.

So, then, having attended to each separate challenge that our doctrine of the dignity of human nature has received from modern thought, we may, I think, conclude that the doctrine of the dignity of human nature has suffered no detriment, no diminution, from the changes that have taken place in men's conceptions of the universe and human origins during the last halfcentury.

The more we know of geology and

biology and anthropology and archaeology, the more significant and grand must seem the human nature for which there was such costly preparation, whose physical constitution is such a marvel of infinitely delicate and beautiful coordinated powers, whose prehistoric training brought about a change only less signal than the whole extent between the animal and man, whose historic manifestation has been a splendid and victorious march, illuminated by the heroisms of men and women of whom we may not say, " The world was not worthy," but who were worthy of the world and of an immortal destiny.

And even if it were not so, if the teachings of science were apparently conclusive of an origin and an inheritance fatal to all worth and dignity in man, and if the examples of history and experience only tended to confirm this verdict by their apparent balance on the side of weakness and injustice, extravagance of passion and infirmity of will, the dignity of human nature might still hope to come off conqueror, and more than conqueror, if only those in doubt would turn from every outward evidence, and look in upon the mystery and wonder of their own throbbing hearts.

What passions surging there, what infinite desires, what unconquerable love ! and, calm and strong amid the turmoil and the conflict, the moral will, the conscience pronouncing its inexorable laws, issuing its imperial mandates, proclaiming its imperishable satisfactions and rewards.

I hold with one in whom the dignity of human nature found a splendid illustration, Orville Dewey, that there is no greatness of fame, no splendor of reputation, that is worth a millionth part of what we all possess in our 92

own powers of thought and love and consecrated will. The humblest man has that within him greater than the greatest name. “Fear not: thy vessel carries Caesar," said the conqueror to his captain, when the winds were loosed and fearful was the sea.

And whatever storms of science and philosophy, and whatever black experience of

others' wickedness, may smite our sense of human dignity and worth, we need not fear if with us sails that greatest conqueror, that righteous will, in whose captive train rebellious passions walk with downcast eyes, and in the grandeur of whose triumphs emperors and kings have been abased below the level of the poorest creatures subject to their sway.

93

BOOK REVIEW Belief in God in the Age of Science New Haven and London Yale University Press 1998.

The Rev Dr. John C. Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS (DOB:16 October 1930) is a British theoretical physicist. He was a professor of mathematical physics at the University of Cambridge (1968- 1979). He resigned his position and commenced study for the Anglican priesthood, becoming ordained in 1982. He has since become a well-known advocate of dialogue about the relationship between science and religion. He is the author of five books on physics, and 26

on the relationship between science and religion; his publications includeThe Quantum World, Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship, Exploring Reality: The intertwining of Science and Religion, and Questions of Truth. He was knighted in 1997 and in 2002 received the ÂŁ1M templeton Prize for exceptional contributions to affirming life's spiritual dimension.

The author of this review, Seeking Purpose in a Universe of Chance (1998), is Victor J. Stenger

Victor John Stenger was an American particle physicist, philosopher, author,

and religious skeptic who has been called the thinking atheist.. He 94

published twelve books for general audiences on physics, quantum mechanics, cosmology, philosophy, religion, atheism, and pseudoscience, including the 2007 best-seller God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist.

Others of his provocative books were God and the Atom: From Democritus to the Higgs Boson (2013) and God and the Multiverse: Humanity's Expanding

View of the Cosmos (September 9, 2014) Stenger was a strong advocate for removing the influence of religion from scientific research, commercial activity, and the political decision process. coined such phrases as, "Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings; Skepticism is not a position; it is an approach to claims; Science is not a subject, but a method.

....Victor John Stenger (January, 1935 - August, 2014)

95

Review of Belief in God in the Age of Science

by John Polkinghorne.

This book is taken from a series of lectures given at Yale by a well-known elementary particle physicist who took up the cloth to become an Anglican priest and theologian. He is a uniquely equipped and frequent participant in the dialogues between theology and science.

I am inclined to suggest that Chapter 5, “Critical Realism in Science and Religion,” be read first. There Polkinghorne motivates much of what he presents earlier. He shows how the problem of determining “truth” in religion has many similarities with that in science. Both engage in a rhetorical process he calls “critical realism.”

Polkinghorne claims that much of what we do in science is “the creative interpretation of experience, not rigorous deduction from it.” Science is not the search for truth but for “verisimilitude,” the quality of having the appearance of truth or reality.

Scientists can never know when they have absolute truth (104).

Neither can theologians. All scientists and theologians can do is mount their best possible arguments and try to convince each other and everyone else. This does not mean that reality is subjective or relative.

Polkinghorne is very much a realist, expressing no doubts that quarks and electrons are real. He calls the period 195080, when both he and I were active workers in particle physics, “a substantial episode in

the history of discovery” (103). How could I disagree with that?

Polkinghorne is a refreshing contrast to Hugh Ross, another physicist turnedtheologian. Ross writes from the framework that he already knows the truth – what's in the Bible – and does his best to make the data conform to that truth. (See my review of Ross's Creator and the Cosmos at <URL:/library/modern/vic_stenger/ross.html>) Don't get me wrong. Polkinghorne is a True Believer. While he acknowledges the greater power of science to test its beliefs against observation, he thinks that theology also has a legitimate claim on verisimilitude.

He does not accept the account of God as some abstract Platonic concept of perfection and order. Although he views the religious experiences of the “conflicting variety of the world faith religions” as “authentic,” he stands on his own conviction that the Christian revelation is superior to them and to science. Science has a “circularity” that is mutually sustaining while theology offers the means to break this circle.

“One must believe in order to understand” (113).

Chapter 1 presents reasons from human experience that Polkinghorne says encourage belief in a divine mind and purpose behind the history of the world. He 96

refrains from talking about “proofs” and is content with looking for insights from theology on “what is going on” (10). But Polkinghorne offers no new insights here, referring in typical fashion to our moral, aesthetic, and religious intuitions. Here, as throughout the book, he falls back on his personal convictions. He “cannot believe” that life “simply came into being when hominid brains had acquired sufficient complexity to accommodate such thoughts” (20). He laments: “If cosmic history is no more than the temporary flourishing of remarkable fruitfulness followed by its subsequent decay and disappearance, then I think Macbeth was right and it is indeed a tale told by an idiot” (21). Perhaps it is, whether we like it or not.

Chapter 2 considers the “Christ event” and its aftermath, claiming it provides insights of reason and revelation, with further information provided by tradition. The point is to take a case from theology, namely the development of attitudes about the nature of Christ and compare it with scientific method.

He likens the Pauline formula to Bohr's theory of the hydrogen atom, “highly instructive as a heuristic device” (37). He argues that Christology is not the “height of metaphysical speculation” but an “attempt to give a coherent and adequate account of the fact of [the Church's] encounter with Christ” (47).

In chapter 3, Polkinghorne indulges in some interesting speculation about how God acts on the physical world. Most people would simply say God performs miracles, doing whatever he wants to do whenever he wants to do it. If God wants to violate energy conservation, he does it. If he wants to nudge evolution a certain way, he does it.

Polkinghorne, good physicist that he is, wants to find a mechanism that is consistent with the laws of physics and not require blatant miracles. This makes sense, since science has never found evidence for a miracle of any shape or form, blatant or not.

Although Galileo had been condemned by the Church, Newton restored God to the throne of Heaven even as Charles II was being restored to the throne of England. Newton believed that his laws of mechanics and gravity were those set down by the great lawgiver in the sky. Using the modern catchy phrase of Stephen Hawking, Newton had succeeded in reading the “mind of God.” The only miracle God need to have ever performed was the one of creating the universe and its laws.

The quantum revolution undermines the notion of a Newtonian clockwork universe operating deterministically according to a divine plan. Random chance appears to play a significant role in events. And, if quantum mechanics indeed indicates that chance is inherent in nature, chaos theory and the other new sciences of complexity have demonstrated how chance processes in sufficiently complex systems can generate order and beauty with no preexistent design.

Structure and beauty can be simulated on a computer running the simple algorithm of the Mandelbrot set or other nonlinear procedures. Genetic algorithms can produce artificial life in a computer with completely unpredictable structure and form.

This has left theology in a quandary.

How can we live in a purposeful universe when a good part of that universe seems to be the product of chance? Where can God exert his influence in such a universe?

Polkinghorne thinks that God probably 97

cannot control things on the macroscopic scale by simply acting microscopically on each elementary particle in the universe. As far as we know from current, conventional physics, these particles and the laws they obey do not fully determine the development of macroscopic complexity. Complexity seems to evolve by processes of selforganization that include an unpredictable element of chance. We are very unlikely ever to find an equation that shows DNA developing from the motion of quarks and electrons. At best, elementary processes place broad limits upon what can develop.

Our present best guess is that the behaviors of macroscopic systems are “emergent phenomena” that result from a combination of chance and constraint, not necessity.

Polkinghorne, and other scientist-believers such as biochemist and fellow Anglican priest Arthur Peacock, have found room for God to act within the framework of chaos theory. God does not selectively inject energy into various places in the universe needing his intervention. Rather, as “pure spirit,” he injects information. Thus, as the complex nonlinear systems of life oscillate back and forth trying to decide which strange attractor to move towards, God intervenes with a gentle nudge in the direction that moves the system where he wishes it to go.

Polkinghorne speculates that the possible mechanism may be related to one proposed by Nobel laureate chemist Ilya Prigogine. Prigogine has advanced the notion that macroscopic, many-body processes are able to act down to the elementary particle level and provide a “top-down” causality that violates the longstanding reductionist, “bottom-up” causality of conventional physics. This idea has had a wide and enthusiastic reception among new age holists who, like Christians and other more

traditional theists, hate the thought of mindless chance playing such a crucial role in the universe. Indeed, those who search for religion in science are allied with those who seek evidence for top-down causality in a system where virtually all explanations are bottom-up. No surprise, then, that both efforts are tinged with mysticism.

Prigogine has shown that it is possible to enlarge the class of solutions of certain equations in statistical mechanics to contain ones that cannot be reduced to sums of localized particle trajectories. This is presumed to leave the door open for holistic, top-down causality. However, no evidence has been found to support this notion. All that evidence continues to be consistent with bottom-up causality tempered by chance.

In Chapter 4, Polkinghorne considers other modern developments in the dialogue between science and religion. He dismisses what he calls the polemical scientific writings of authors like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett as a problem for the secular academy, not the Church. He asserts that biologists are still intellectually inebriated by their success in unraveling the basis of molecular genetics, a victory comparable to the physicists' earlier elucidation of the laws of motion and gravity. Physicists have now gone beyond reductionism and are so more congenial to religious notions (79).

Polkinghorne argues that many physical notions, such as conservation laws and fields, have been asked to carry too much metaphysical freight. He knows from his physics that conservation laws are virtual tautologies. They are “consequences of the symmetries of creation and can easily be understood as expression of the Creator's will rather than impositions on it.” Similarly, 98

he finds the common use of the field as a metaphor for omniscient spirit “quaint” and “distinctly limited” (82).

Polkinghorne claims he is not engaged in “an apologetic exercise, trying to make the faith appear acceptable in a scientific age. He warns against a “scientific takeover bid, offering no more than a religious gloss on a basically naturalistic account.” He rejects Spinoza's deus sive natura.”That was Einstein's God, but it is certainly not mine” (85-86).

Polkinghorne finds science writers who “garnish their wares” with references to God and big bang cosmology as tiresome.

He insists that “theology is concerned with . . . ontological questions . . . and gains little from science's fascinating, but largely theologically irrelevant, talk of temporal origins.” This places him outside the large group of theistic scientists who are obsessed with cosmology and what they see as evidence that the universe has been finetuned for life. Far more important to Polkinghorne is “the most significant event in cosmic history to date – the dawn of consciousness” (88).

Once again Polkinghorne calls on chaos and complexity theory. He argues that “holistic and relational concepts are coming to play an increasing role in science.” These are regarded as “congenial to theological thinking,” as exemplified by “much Trinitarian discussion that emphasizes relationship (communion) as the ground of being” (97,98).

Chapter 6 is a “Mathematical Postscript” which takes the Platonic line promoted by mathematician Roger Penrose and others that “mathematics is the exploration of an existing noetic realm.” In a book that contains many expressions of his

personal beliefs, Polkinghorne winds up by saying “I believe there is a much more persuasive case for believing in the reality of the Mandelbrot set than in the reality of the Idea of a lion.” The realm of physical and mental experience are “parts of an interlinked complementary created reality” (128-130).

In his 1994 book The Faith of a Physicist, Polkinghorne was quite explicit in rejecting even the remotest chance that we live in a purely natural, purposeless universe: “The strategy of the materialist atheists is usually to claim that science is all, and that beauty and the rest are merely human constructs arising from the hard-wiring in our brains. I cannot accept so grotesquely impoverished a view of reality.” But there, as here, he insists on interpreting the world from an anthropocentric, theocentric perspective.

Nonbelieving scientists such as Feynman and Sagan looked at the material universe with wonder and found material reality to be anything but grotesquely impoverished.

Theologians and scientists each seek understanding. But theologians rely on the mythical tales and subjective human experiences that emanate from the insignificant point in spacetime that encloses human history. Scientists, by contrast, view a range of space from inside atomic nuclei to the farthest quasar, and a range of time from a tiny fraction of a second after the big bang to the present. They see a universe more vast and with far more potential for development than has ever been imagined in any scripture or mystical trance.

I was greatly aided in this review by comments from Jean Bricmont, Scott Dalton, Keith Douglas, Peter Fimmel, Jim Humphreys, Norm Levitt, Ricardo Alder Mur, Clay Stinson, and Ed Weinmann.

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Editor's Commentary It seems to me that, in contrast to the position that many Unitarians take to the effect that we are comfortable with ambiguity and neither demand nor need absolute certainty or comfortable assurances, theologians - even such as Polkinghorn, whom I admire immensely - and scientists, even such as Stenger - whom I equally admire – are unable to accept that there is a Great Mystery. It is hubris for either Scientists or theologians to assume that that Great Mystery will ever be completely understood and, even if understood in some collective fashion, it it unlikely that we will be able to know or that it can ever be articulated. Scientists are so specialized that they, even now, cannot understand each other's work, that once out of their field of expertise they are little better off than the normal halfway intelligent layman who likes to read some of the scientific literature simply to catch the flavour of what is happening in scientific research. So, at what point, even if enough scientists collectively have the various pieces of the puzzle, will we be able to fit the pieces together?

Unitarians, to reiterate, are quite comfortable with the ambiguity both scientific and

theological phenomena and have no difficulty accepting the notion of the Great Mystery, and we, likewise, have no difficulty using the word, God, as the metaphor for that Great Mystery.

I have read some of Polkinghorn's work, as well as that of Stenger. If I were asked who is the most forthright, I would have to say that my understanding, such as it is, would lead me to vote for Stenger.

Polkinghorn stands ready to explain the “miracles” as God suspending the laws of nature.

If so, then Polkinghorn, a physicist, is being disingenuous, and God, capricious ...and, thus, untrustworthy. If God is able to suspend the laws of nature, as God supposedly did on a few occasions, back in Bible times, many people – particularly some battling terminal diseases would ask why God is not similarly able or willing to do so now. Or are we so afraid to question God that we let God off the hook? What a depressing basis for a religion!

There is an alternative. Both our religion and our science demands more maturity and more willingness to embrace, to cherish and to celebrate the Great Mystery!

Responses and challenges are welcomed.

100

Mariam Ronald Lloyd Ryan, DA., PhD Down a dusty clay path between rows of mud brick walls sauntered a girl, a pretty girl, a girl with long black braids, and a clean, if much-patched, blue cotton dress. The dusky skin of her calves were briefly revealed as she happily skipped along, seemingly without a care in the world. Her snapping black eyes contrasted with the youthful bloom of her cheeks. The cut of her features indicated to any man who wished to notice that here was a girl who, in a few years, would be beautiful and very desirable.

Mariam was already going on thirteen.

She was returning from market where she had sold a basket of peppers, another of tomatoes, and a third of corn. Moreover, she had purchased a piece of cloth from which her mother was to make her a new dress.

She was old enough, now, to undertake such responsibilities. She could read rather well, having earned the congratulations of many of her synagogue congregation for her readings from Torah, upon becoming bat mitzvah.

She was also quite adroit at making change. She knew that a Lepton was the bronze coin of smallest value, 32 of which would equal one Drachma. The two-Lepton bronze coin (called a Quadrans) was sufficient to purchase a sparrow, although why anyone would want a sparrow was beyond her comprehension. There were sparrows apleanty around her parents’ house.

In fact they were a veritable nuisance.

Maybe she should devise a sparrow

snare and trap some of the small birds and sell at market. Her parents could sure use the money!

Mariam had counted her coins before she left the market. She had carefully placed them in a little goatskin sack tied with a drawstring and was now concealed beneath her clothing just below her budding breasts. It would be an offense of the gravest order for anyone to touch her in that location. Some of the female “others” of her age used to go around with their upper bodies bare, but she was a good Jewish girl. She had never been permitted to have her flesh exposed, except when very little and within the confines of her own home.

Mariam knew that, today, she had coins of both Greek and Roman origin in her goatskin bag. She had one Assarius, worth eight Liptons, and three Quadrans, all together having a value of 14 Liptons, besides a half-dozen or so of the smallest value coins. She had had a remarkably successful morning.

Although she knew that there were other coins of much higher value, she had never seen any of them. Sometimes, several times a year, her father would help a carpenter in the town. He would bring home the value of a Drachma for a day’s work. It was never one coin but, rather, always a handful of coins.

She had heard her father talk with other village men about Shekels and Agurion and Denarii and Minas and Talents, but she knew 101

only that these were enormous amounts of money, the value of which she could not comprehend. She had heard that a good, young, pretty slave girl of the “others” could be purchased for five shekels.

Dorcas, a girl of a disreputable family who hardly ever went to Synagogue, had also been at the market this morning. Dorcas had complimented Mariam on her beauty and suggested that, if Mariam wanted to, Dorcas could arrange for her to earn some money, sometimes as much as half a Drachma at a time. All that Mariam had to do was slip out of her parents’ home after dark and meet Dorcas by the old Olive grove, a now littleused orchard that had gone to ruin generations ago. The old Olive Grove, about 600 cubits away to the eastern side of the village gate, was surrounded by a rock wall, now partially disintegrated.

Mariam knew about the old Olive Grove but had never been there. In fact, both her parents had warned her never to go there, either by herself or even accompanied by any of her friends. Although Mariam didn’t quite understand why it was such a dangerous place, she would never think of disobeying her gentle, and now-ailing, mother and her doting father.

Mariam had inquired of Dorcas how she could earn money at the Olive Grove.

Would she pick olives to sell? Dorcas had laughed at Mariam and suggested that she was still a baby. Mariam had protested that she was, indeed, not a baby, that she was already bat mitzvah, that her blood had already flown several times, and that her mother had told her that she was almost a woman.

Dorcas had stared at her. “Mariam, all you have to do is lie on your back, close your

eyes, and do nothing. A pretty girl like you can make a lot of money.”

Mariam didn’t believe Dorcas. How could she earn money that way?

The girl shook her head, causing her braids to fly off in semicircles, and proceeded down the village path, mystified at how she might earn money at the suggestion of her uncouth friend.

As she skipped and sauntered, kicking up dust, enjoying her life as a girl, she could sometimes see over the mud brick walls of the villagers’ garden plots, seeing peppers there, spices somewhere else. She could smell the familiar and unmistakable aromas of anise, cinnamon, dill, mint, mustard and others. She also saw vines of tomatoes, lentils and beans; rows of garlic, onion and leeks; others of cucumbers and gourds; small fields of barley, corn, millet and wheat. In the small orchards that she passed, she recognized fig trees, grape arbors, rows of melons, sycamore and pomegranate trees, and various kinds of olive and nut groves.

On the other side of the village, on the green hillsides, not very far away, she saw shepherd boys caring for herds of sheep and goats. Several of the boys recognized her, waved to her, made gestures that she knew were inappropriate, and whistled to her. She tried to ignore them. But, that was becoming increasingly difficult to do.

She had taken furtive glances at one boy in particular: Philip, several years older than Mariam, was the son of Simon the Pharisee.

This Simon the Pharisee was an austere man who was also one of the elders of their congregation. Simon, who was known to strictly observe the laws of Torah and adhere faithfully to Jewish traditions, was constantly haranguing the congregation about their lax 102

lives which he declared to be sinful.

Simon’s God, in contrast to the God that most of the congregation believed in, and whom they celebrated during Yom Kippur every autumn, seemed to be neither very loving nor very forgiving.This Simon appeared to be afraid of his God. Mariam saw Philip almost every Sabbath at synagogue. Every time the boy glanced at her, she felt weak in her knees. It seemed as if her legs were turning to water.

She knew that she wanted the boy to touch her. She used to lie in bed and imagine that Philip was lying with her in his embrace. She was confused. She didn’t understand why she felt that way.

As Mariam passed other properties, she detected the foul smells of swine and sheep and goat pens, as well as that of cages of Partridge, pigeon, quail and doves.

The swine, of course, belonged to the Others. No self-respecting Jewish family would have anything do to with swine, an animal they considered to be unclean and contrary to their faith. Over some of the walls she could see people at work, men and women, pressing grapes in order to make wine, olives to acquire oil for cooking and for lamps, women making butter, curds and cheeses.

The sour smells of wine and vinegar wafted over one wall in particular, and the unmistakable smell of honey from another. As she approached her own house, she heard some of the neighbour women chatting.

Some of the voices she recognized, because these were devout Jewish women who were regulars at Synagogue. She knew that these women were now engaged in spinning yarn and weaving cloth.

In its own way, it was a prosperous

village. Although people had to work hard and constantly, there was little or no hunger.

She couldn’t understand why there were beggars near the synagogue almost every time she accompanied her parents to service.

Her father always had several Liptons to give away and was always careful not to favour the same beggars all the time.

Mariam knew that her parents had already been approached by a merchant of the town, inquiring whether Mariam might come as a servant.

The parents had demurred.

Somehow, Dorcas had known this information and had told Mariam that, had she gone to that particular house to work, that when she served at table, she might have to wear no clothes whatsoever, or maybe a simple loincloth, and that her little nipples would have been stained by pomegranate juice in order to make them more noticeable. Mariam understood why her parents would not permit her to work as a domestic, at least not in that sort of house.

Mariam was also curious about a man whose name seemed to be on everyone’s lips. Even when at her stall, and overheard at the neighbouring stalls of the market, women and men were arguing about some man with the name Jessie, or Jesus, or Yesuah, or Esau. The strange man seemed to have many names.

Although it wasn’t clear which was correct it was, clearly, the same man. One woman loudly declared that Yesuah could cast out devils; another claimed that he could heal the sick, another that he could restore sight, enable a woman who had never been able to have children now to have children.

One man even claimed that he had heard that this Yesuah had even restored to life a 103

child that had been dead for several hours.

One woman claimed that she had heard that another woman in the village of Samaria had been healed from a profound disfigurement simply by putting out her hand and touching the robe of this Jessie, or whatever his name was, as he passed by.

There were even those townsfolk who whispered, but loud enough to hear, that Yesuah even forgave people of their sins.

Mariam ponderd this last piece of information. She wondered how many times she had sinned today. She understood the concept of Het, the straying that humans sometimes were inclined to, sometimes failing to achieve their target of morality, sometimes by their own weakness or wilfulness, when their yetzer ha-ra, one’s evil inclinations, overcame their yetzer ha-tov, one’s good inclination as taught by the rabbis at the synagogue.

It was true that she had spoken sharply to Dorcas and had doubted the older girl’s motivations. But Mariam had also adhered to the warnings of her Mom and Dad. She wasn’t sure if she had sinned. She also understood that God was merciful and forgiving as their synagogue Rabbi often quoted from the Torah the lesson from Yahweh, “I have pardoned as you have asked.”

She was nearing her home and realized that she was hungry. She rushed into her own mud-walled compound, anticipating a hot meal after a long tiring morning, eager to show her mother the money that she had acquired during the market activities, replete with the theatrics of haggling with almost every customer who tried to find fault with her mother’s almost

perfect peppers. ***************************************** Fourteen year old Mariam was no longer the care-free girl of several years ago.

Her mother was now too ill to work in the fields and was confined to doing what little she could in their mud-brick home. Mariam’s father was also showing his age and had to pass up, on several recent occasions, the opportunity to work for the carpenter in the town. It was now becoming a struggle for the little family to make ends meet. Her father had difficulty sleeping and would now drink wine almost every evening in order to sleep sufficiently in order to work the next day.

Mariam was lonely. Most girls her age were now either married, at work in the town as domestics or, like her, confined to their homes engaged in domestic drudgery.

Dorcas had married. That bold girl had repeatedly taunted Mariam about her cowardice in not going to the old Olive Grove and about the money that she might make there. Many of the older boys would find excuses to approach her stall at the market and would call to her and suggest to her that she might meet them at the old Olive Grove.

One tall boy, Thomas by name, was the son of the scribe, Peter. The latter was an older man with a young wife who was Thomas’ step-mother, a woman not much older than Thomas himself.

Thomas had snatched Mariam’s basket of Tomatoes had had refused to return it until Mariam had agreed to meet him at the Olive Grove.

That evening, with Father in a wineinduced slumber, and with Mother tossing 104

and mumbling in her sleep, Mariam quietly slipped out of the house, silently closed the door and, by the light of the just rising moon, headed towards the Olive Grove, keeping to the shadows as much as possible.

Thomas startled her. Just as she had entered the precincts of the old orchard, she had heard giggles and whispers and other noises that she couldn’t identify. Just as she was about to turn around and flee, somebody grabbed her, pulled her body harshly to theirs and kissed her on the mouth. She was too startled to resist. Moreover, the sensations that flooded her body was so delightful that she didn’t want to resist. Thomas’ hands were on her, groping her most intimate places, drawing her into the deepest shadows.

As Mariam found her way home by the light of the risen moon, she wondered about what had happened.

Thomas had not actually hurt her, except for that one very short pain, and had, in fact, provided her with a pleasure she had not known a person could have. She knew enough, however, to realize that she had sinned with Thomas, and he with her. She had disobeyed her parents; she had gone to a place where she had been repeatedly told not to go; she had not pulled away from Thomas’ embrace; she had not resisted when Thomas had lain her on the grass in the shadows; she had not resisted when Thomas had pushed up her dress; she had not resisted when Thomas had gently – but insistently - opened her legs and lain on her.

She now acknowledged to herself that she had not wanted to resist. She now acknowledged to herself that on this night, maybe for the first time in her life, her yetzer ha-ra had won out over her yetzer ha-tov.

She acknowledged to herself that she was now a sinful young woman. She wondered if her God would forgive her. *************************** Fifteen year old Mariam was troubled.

Her father, after rousing himself from his wine-induced slumber, was readying himself for the day’s labour in his garden plots. He sat by his sick wife, now knowing that she would soon die. He caressed her brow and stooped to kiss her cheek. She moved slightly, and tried to raise her hand.

He took her hand and placed it on his grizzled face. She was able to caress his face as long as he held her hand there. She smiled weakly but didn’t open her eyes. She said faintly, in hardly more than a whisper, “I love you. Please care for Mariam.”

Mariam, watching from her bed, having drawn back her modesty curtain, looked into her father’s paining eyes. “I’ll get some breakfast for her, Dad. You go on to the fields.”

Her father said something about needing a tool - although Mariam knew that he was really intent on buying a jug of wine and retrieved from a box the goatskin bag in which they kept the family lucre. He seemed surprised. He looked up at Mariam. “I didn’t think there was that much ?”

“Market sales have been good, my Father. Many people in the town believe that you grow the very best tomatoes and peppers.

They vie with each other to purchase from me. I get very high prices.”

Having taken what he needed for his purchase, Father left the humble abode while Mariam got out of bed, washed her hands and face and began to tend to her mother.

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Meanwhile, she wondered when she had developed the capacity to lie so glibly to her, maybe wilfully gullible, father. Maybe her father had some idea where the money came from. Maybe, as long as nobody said so, he would ignore the source. He had to live!

Mariam was pleased, in a way, that her mother was dying. The news that was being bandied about the village about her treasured daughter would have killed her, anyway.

Thomas was much too immature to appreciate the love of such a girl as Mariam.

She had not anticipated that when she had given her body freely to Thomas that he would crow about his conquest to the other boys of the village. It was only a matter of days when the boys would gather around her market stall, and even follow her in the street, suggesting where she might meet them. She was heartbroken that Thomas had betrayed her trust.

Initially, she had resisted the many invitations, becoming aware that the women in the neighbouring stalls were very much aware what was happening. It was virtually impossible to ignore their loud whisperings of scandal and their dark disapproving looks.

When she and her father went to synagogue, she was also aware that she was the object of much derision. Thankfully, her father, in his devotions to Yahweh, seemed not to notice anything amiss.

It was when her father had been unable to take the jobs proffered by the carpenter in the town that Mariam realised that her family was rapidly facing destitution, her mother not being able to help at all and the many tasks of their modest garden plot requiring the energies and time of both Mariam and her father. There were, now, too

many tasks, too few hands, and too little time. Besides, her father was spending more and more of their limited money on wine to help him sleep.

That was when she succumbed to Calebâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s invitation to lie with him in the Olive Grove, in consideration of a handful of coins.

It was not long before Mariamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s availability became generally known and much sought after. The money in the goatskin bag came more from Mariamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nightly endeavours than from her sales in the market. Her father continued to live the delusion that Mariam spun for him.

Mariam learned many ways to please her customers, now being able to ask higher prices for her services. From the comments of her partners in her sometimes nightly trysts, she learned that not only was she the talk of the village but that she was being compared to the other available lasses, and that the others did not even come close to her reputation. She also realized that she was able to demand higher payments.

After several months she was surprised, one night, as she slowly wended her way to the Olive Grove, that she was intercepted by a servant of one of the most prominent men of the village. The servant offered her a half shekel if she would accompany him to a small house at the edge of the town. Upon entering the house, she was at first frightened, then amazed to identify the man sitting in a chair, barely visible by the light of a small candle. There was none other than Simon the Pharisee.

She stood, quaking, wondering if she had been entrapped by this man, the most holy man of God in the village, having used the servant of one of his friends to ensnare her. She knew that this Simon could easily 106

have her brought before the elders of the synagogue, have her accused of adultery, and have her stoned to death.

It turned out that Simon the Pharisee had in mind activities much more earthy and less esoteric than courts of any description.

This night, Simon was nothing more than a man, a creature dictated to by his lusts.

Simon the Pharisee slowly raised himself from his chair, doffing his robes, greeted the maiden kindly, drew her to him and extracted her compliance.

With lusts slaked, the old hypocrite left the still fearful Mariam on the bed, again dressed himself in his respectful attire, and departed into the night, but not before kissing the girl on the forehead, caressing her breasts one last time, and leaving a quantity of money in her damp palm.

It was later that Mariam began to realise that she was no longer going to be the plaything of the boys of the village, but that the small house at the edge of the town became a regular place of activity for her, her customers slowly including almost every man of stature and dignity in the village and the town. Simon the Pharisee was a regular.

Mother died. Mariam was now not only housekeeper but primary breadwinner because Father had fallen into despair and was almost incapable to doing any useful work. Mariam worked during the day as well as at night. Had it not been for her services to the gentrified of the town and village, she was sure that she and her father would have long since starved. She was, sure, now, from the way that he sometimes looked at her that her father knew where their wherewithal of life came from, and that his daughter was a harlot even if he was now dependent on her sinful activity.

Mariam also became aware that many of the women of the village were angry at what they supposed was happening and began to clamour that a woman caught in adultery should be stoned to death as was their ancient custom. Mariam lived in fear of her life, expecting, at almost any minute, to be hauled before the elders of the synagogue and summarily stoned to death.

Mariam quaked and quailed, now, every time that a messenger arrived at her house, tapped lightly at her door, and waited as she stepped out into the night to discover when and where she was expected to go.

Frequently, now, there would be a chariot waiting to whisk her away to some of the most sumptuous dwellings of the town.

One exception surprised her. She felt that one Malachi, the most prosperous merchant of the town and any of the surrounding towns, must surely have heard of her. Yet, no invitation had come from him.

She had heard that the wife of this Malachi had recently died.

Rumour had it that Malachi had loved his wife deeply. Maybe Malachi was in seclusion and in mourning.

Malachi was revered, feared, and despised in the village and town. It was reported that money seemed to stick to him.

Almost regardless what he did, so the rumours went, this Malachi was able to turn a profit, sometimes rather handsome profits.

He, for example, had purchased some bolts of cloth that had been soiled and was considered almost worthless. He had the cloth soaked in some solution only he seemed to understand, and had the cloth redyed. The result was a cloth of the deepest blue so that almost all of the wealthiest ladies of the area demanded new dresses to be made forthwith from this new and rare fabric.

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Malachi had purchased the runts from a litter of lambs, thus saving them from immediate slaughter. He recognized that, somehow, something had caused some of the sheep to produce unusual lambs. After several years, everyone acknowledged that Malachi’s flocks were of the most hardy of the region, much better at foraging than their ancestors, and that they provided sumptuous meat and exceptional cheeses from their excellent milk Malachi seemed to be able to see gold in what everyone else was prepared to reject.

People hated him for it. ************************************** Throughout the years, Mariam kept hearing about the man Yesuah, whom some called Jessie and some Jesus and others esau. The stories continued to be even more fantastic and unbelievable. One story had it that this rabbi, if that’s what he was, had created quite a commotion in one synagogue or temple when he overturned the tables of money changers and sparrow sellers and had used a whip to drive the merchants from the precincts claiming that they were an abomination to Yahweh. Other stories claimed that this man had cast out devils from possessed people, that he had changed ordinary water into the finest wine at some village called Cana.

Some claimed that he was a magician, others a necromancer, able to raise people from the dead as did the Witch of Endor who called up the ghost of the prophet Samuel at King Saul’s behest. Others said that he was a devil; others, a charlatan; still others, nothing but a rabble rouser.

The Jewish population of the village was divided over the nature of this man and

who he was. Some claimed that he was God’s anointed; some said that he had been baptised by John; other’s that he was a leader of the Zealots; some more that he was going to be a military leader and free the Jewish nation from the yoke of the hated Roman horde.

There were others who tried to explain that the many stories were actually about several men of the same name, at least two, maybe three or more, that the man who drove the money changers form the temple was not the man who had forgiven people their sins. They said that the one was a zealot in rebellion against Rome and that the other, the spiritual man, was Jesus Barabas.

But the issue that seemed to inflame most passion, and threatened to split the congregation of the village synagogue was the suggesting that this man could forgive people of their sin. The wise men who understood such things declared that forgiving people of their sins was the farthest thing from the mind of the Zealots.

Indeed, they declared, the Zealot, Jesus, – or whatever his name was – was, at least according to some people, the expected messiah who would lead the Jewish nation to freedom from the hated Romans. The other Jesus was a gentle man, a rabbi, a teacher, not a zealot. It was the latter man who forgave people their sins and healed their troubled minds .... and, maybe, even their bodies. Who knew? Stories had a way of magnifying, sometime out of all recognizable proportion compared to the original incident from which it arose. But, rumour was rumour, and myth was myth, and people were people.

People didn't care what the original incident was; they simply wanted a good story, good gossip.

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********************* And, then, there was the exciting news that, on the morrow, this Yesuah, or Esau, would be passing their town, whether it was the Jesus the Zealot or the rabbi, Jesus Barabas, or another man by the same name, who knew?. Some of the elders of the village had gone out of their way to invite this Yesuah to visit their synagogue. Simon the Pharisee and several of his friends opposed the invitation and determined to place this charlatan on trial for blasphemy and sacriledge, using the treatise of Me’liah in Talmud as their pious theological foundation and argument. Most of the Sadducees supported Simon; most of the Pharisees wanted to see the man and to listen to what he had to say.

Mariam, however, had a more focused interest. She had acknowledged to herself that she had grievously sinned, even if it had been in the interest of keeping her little family out of debt, and keeping her father’s little subsistence plots out of the clutches of such as the merchant Malachi. Mariam wanted forgiveness. She didn’t know what she would do after she was forgiven.

She acknowledged that she was an unclean woman. She knew that no man in the village or town or surrounding villages would ever take her to wife. What would or could possibly become of a woman such as her?

Despite her anxieties and confusion, like any and all who know that they have done wrong, she yearned to be forgiven. The Almighty one, the Holy One who could not be named, their Yahweh, seemed so distant, so inaccessible to such a one as her. Her sins now were multiple. Was it possible that she could not be forgiven?

Could this Yeshua forgive her of her sins? Or would even he turn his holy face away from such as her? *************************** Mariam was astounded! She wasn’t sure just what she was expecting. He was not in the least handsome! His face was rugged and etched with sand and sun. He appeared, even, not to be very clean. His robe was dusty if not downright dirty! She could see, however, that he was not very old, maybe 27 or 28. That surprised her also.

She was expecting the strange man to be in his forties, at least. How could she ask this young man to forgive her sins? He was more likely to expect her to marry him. He was about the right age.

Then … he looked at her. She was shocked! She gasped! She saw recognition in his eyes! That was impossible! She had never seen him before! Yet, when she looked into those sharp black eyes - eyes like her own - deep eyes that had immeasurable depths, she felt herself falling, falling, being drawn in, as into a deep well. Involuntarily, she reached out to stop herself from falling and discovered that she had touched one of her neighbours, a man who had enjoyed her body several times in exchange for a few coins, but who now shrank from her as if she had set him aflame with her touch.

Yesuah was looking at her again. She blushed. Again his olive brown face, burned almost black by the sun, indicated recognition. She looked around. Nobody else seemed to detect that this man was looking so intently at her. Yet, he was looking at her, at her alone, and there was a smirk on his lips.

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No! It was not a smirk! It was a smile.

He was smiling at her, a smile just for her.

The man had read her heart. He had felt her yearning for forgiveness, even though not a word had passed between them and even though he was at least five or six cubits away from her, over to the far side of the synagogue.

She had arrived at the assembly somewhat late, debating with herself whether the congregation would even admit her to the meeting.

Clearly, some hot words had already been exchanged between the two opposing factions – but not about her. For the moment, at least, she was insignificant. How she hoped that it would remain so!

This Yesuah, however, seemed, as yet, not to have said very much if, in fact, he had said anything. His attention was now directed toward Simon the Pharasee who had accused him of blasphemy because he claimed to forgive people their sins. Yesuah was responding, “Simon of the Pharisees, “ he addressed the much older man, “I, like you, am a Pharisee.

If we search our scriptures as of old, we find not only that God forgave his people at their petition, together and severally, but that people forgave each other. Do you not recall how King Saul asked Samuel for forgiveness and that Samuel forgave him before they worshipped the Lord together?

Saul’s sin was against God, according to Samuel, yet it was Samuel whom Saul asked for forgiveness, and Samuel forgave him.”

Simon was dumfounded.

His discomfiture was palpable. Had this Yesuah outwitted the most famous scholar in the whole region? It could not be so! It was intolerable!

Simon jumped to his feet, pointing his

finger at the dark swarthy man, but before he could compose himself sufficiently to direct his verbal attacks against Yesuah, the young man simply smiled, held out his hand as if to placate Simon, and said, somewhat gently, slowly and deliberately, “Simon, in our ancient tradition, we have always emphasized, from ancient times, that before we seek God’s forgiveness, we must seek each other’s forgiveness. Just as God will forgive, even at the first sign of repentance, as the prophet Haggai teaches us, so must we walk in His ways by imitating God. We also have the wise men of our tradition giving us the example of Abraham who not only forgave Abmelech, but even took it upon himself to pray to God on that offender’s behalf. Indeed, we believe that if one of us, followers of our Yahweh, refuse to forgive, then we ourselves are considered to have sinned. So, of course, if someone asks me to forgive them, then I will do so. It is forgiveness from me. I am not claiming to forgive on behalf of Yahweh.“ Simon sat, clearly frustrated and confused. He looked around for support from his faction, but his friends would not meet his eyes, neither would the Saducees be drawn out of their private reveries.

Yesuah was still speaking, looking around the room, looking deep into people’s eyes and into their souls. Just as he started to speak, he gazed into the far corner of the room. Mariam followed his gaze and, for the second time that afternoon, inwardly gasped.

Yesuah was staring directly at Malachi the Merchant.

What was the merchant doing here?

He had never been to this synagogue before.

If Malachi were here, then something was afoot. As people had said so often about 110

Malachi that it was almost a mantra, Mariam was recalling, “Malachi can smell out good where everyone else perceived rot.”

What was Malachi discerning now?

She wondered.

Yesuah slowly looked away from Malachi as he continued to speak, ”Also, in our tradition, on the evening before our Day of Atonement rituals, it is our custom to humbly approach those whom we have wronged in order to make amends and seek their forgiveness before we even dare beg Yahweh for forgiveness. Our wise men of old have emphasized that the one sinned against be soft as a reed and not hard as cedar. We are enjoined to be as ready to forgive each other as we believe Yahweh is ready to forgive us.”

Hearing muttering in several corners of the room and seeing the looks of vitriol directed against the young woman who was quailing under the onslaught, Yesuah turned his gaze to the young woman. Mariam was blushing furiously and had turned, ready to leave the scene of her shame, noticing, now, that she was standing alone; that everyone had moved away from her, had abandoned her.

She was already before the court of her people. She knew that she would be stoned. She knew that she was living her last hour. She hesitated as the voice of Yesuah, a voice as gentle as a mother’s toward an errant child, began to enclose and fill the room. Even though he still spoke with a low voice, it seemed as if the very rafters hung on his words. “There is among you, one whom you would condemn. You would even take one of your own to a place of stoning, even though I have just finished explaining

that Yahweh demands that we forgive each other.”

He looked around the room. People’s voices had hushed.

“Do you believe yourselves to be righteous? “ He paused.

“Do you not recall that one of our sages of old, the prophet Isaiah, declared that we are all unclean; that all our righteousness is as filthy rags?”

He paused and continued, “You would participate in the stoning of a woman of your own tribe, of your own village, of your own ancestry, your cousin. You say to each other that this woman has sinned.” He paused.

“Would you stone another to expiate your own guilt?”

Mariam stood with her head down.

Unwittingly, she had willingly come to her own trial for adultery. She couldn’t run. There was no point in running. There was nowhere to run. Tears were running down her cheek and splashing on the wooden floor of the sacred building.

“You have among you a family who is in need, a family who is not now able to help themselves; you have refused to see their need.

You cry to God for manna for yourselves, but you would allow your own to starve while you, yourselves, have plenty!”

He waited. Nobody spoke. Almost everyone was looking at the floor. All that could be heard was the bleating of the sheep and goats on the nearby hillside.

Mariam was able to see Malachi without moving her head.

Malachi the merchant was probably the only one in the room, other than Yesuah, who was not trying to hide. Malachi let his gaze rest on Mariam, then on Yesuah, then again on Mariam.

Yesuah continued, ”We have our 111

commandments that Yahweh gave to Moses; we have our traditions. But we do not have one code of laws for women and another code of laws for men.” There was movement in the congregation. Many people were looking at Yesuah, slacked jawed, shocked!

He continued to speak, “If there is a woman among you who has sinned, she did not sin alone. There are those among you who would stand in judgment of her who have been the cause of her sin even if you did not sin with her.” He paused. “Which of you have carried even so much as a loaf of bread to the household of the woman you now scorn? Which of you tried to help this woman in order that she need not sin in order to eat?” He paused again.

“If this woman is to be stoned, then is it not right and just that every person who has sinned with her, or who has sinned against her by your neglect, also be stoned?”

“Sinners! Hypocrites!” He shouted.

The roof of the synagogue reverberated with the unexpected energy of his bellow.

“If this woman is to be stoned, then let he – or she - who has not sinned – with her or against her - stand up! Now! And declare yourself as righteous. Then, go and get a stone and bring here, and cast the first stone.

But, indeed, you do not have to go outside for a stone. You are already prepared.

Indeed, just as our prophet has declared: Why should I forgive you?

Your children have forsaken me and sworn by gods that are not gods.

I supplied all their needs, yet they committed adultery and thronged to the houses of prostitutes.

They are well-fed, lusty stallions,

each neighing for another man’s wife.

“Indeed! Again, I say,” and the voice of Yesuah rose higher and filled every nook and cranny of the old structure, “Just as not one righteous person could be found in Sodom of old, neither does this village have one righteous person.” He paused again. Then his voice became deliberate and calculating.

“But, if one of you considers yourself to be just and righteous, then come! Stand beside this woman whom you have condemned, and let the whole congregation decide if you are righteous. Then if this congregation finds you righteous, then go get the stone and I will cast it at this woman!”

“But,” and he dropped his voice by an octave, “ if you stand and receive the judgment of your congregation, and if this congregation finds that you are not just and righteous, then you, yourself, will submit yourself to the will of this congregation and will be taken to the place of stoning. And, “ he shouted, “ I will cast the first stone!”

The congregation gasped!

Yesuah, glared around the room. Only Malachi, that old sinner, dared to meet the eyes of the travelling preacher. Malachi gazed gently at Yesuah and smiled. Yesuah stared back, but didn’t linger. Was that a smile on the lips of Yesuah? If it was, then only Malachi and Mariam saw it.

Nobody spoke.

Then, Yesuah addressed Mariam, “Woman, this congregation does not condemn you. Neither do I condemn you.

You have been forgiven.”

Then, Yesuah sat down between two of the men who were accompanying him.

They were his disciples, said some.

Slowly, the people began to drift, 112

silently, out of the synagogue. Mariam was carried along with the the throng.

Just as she was hastening toward her home, a man touched her arm. She stopped.

“My master would like to speak with you.”

She looked at the well-dressed servant. “And who is your master?”

“Malachi the merchant.”

“So, it has come to this,” said Mariam to herself. “Now that I have been forgiven, even the great Malachi wants me in his bed. I wonder how much money he is going to offer me? But what has to be, has to be. I have to eat.”

“Take me to your master.”

“The master is here.”

She looked up. Sure enough, she was staring directly into the eyes of the man that some people hated. She expected to see scorn, there; she expected to see haughtiness, smugness, self-righteousness.

She expected to see everything that contradicted the sermon that Yesuah had just preached.

“What do you want of me?” Her voice was not as firm as she had wanted it to be.

She was intimidated by this tall, sumptuously dressed man.“ I want you to come to my house.”He said it so matter of factly, loud enough for the passing villagers to hear. They stopped to listen.

Here was the hated merchant propositioning the source of the village’s shame, in open daylight, in the open square.

The villagers were aghast.

Mariam was astounded. This man was, effectively, calling her a whore, a harlot, in front of her neighbours. She was about to aquesce. Instead, she resolved to stand her

ground. “I have been forgiven. I do not do that any more. “ “Do not do what, my girl?”

The crowd had gathered and was silent.

Some were nudging each other, smirking, enjoying Mariam’s discomfort.

“I no longer sin against God. I no longer sin against the village. I no longer sin against my people. I no longer sin against myself. I would rather starve to death!” She had surprised herself. When had she taken that resolve?

“I would never ask you to sin, Mariam.”

His voice was gentle. “I am asking that you come to my house and be its mistress.”

Mariam looked up at the tall austere man. He was smiling at her. The villagers stood in shocked amazement.

“You would take a sinner into your home to work?”

“You have been forgiven, Mariam. You are no more sinner than any of us. As this Yesuah so rightly observed, if I were to reject you, now, on moral grounds, then it will be I who have sinned.”

Mariam stared at him. What was he trying to say?

Responding to the unspoken question in her eyes, Malachi the merchant continued to speak with her in his gentle voice, “Yes, Mariam, I want you to come to my house.

Other than possibly this Yesuah himself - and even he doesn’t claim it for himself - you are the only righteous one here. You are the only one who has not claimed self-righteousness.

You were the only one who came acknowledging your sin and seeking forgiveness. You, my Mariam, are the only righteous one here.”

There was silence. The villagers were not even shuffling their sandals in the dusty 113

pathway. They strained to listen. What would happen next?

Then, gently, “I want you to come to my house, Mariam, to be my wife. You will

be the richest woman in the region!“ Malachi caught the woman in his arms when she fainted.

The end (Author's note: Many people have read this story. They were all devout Christians. Nobody likes it! One Christian gentleman said that it was arrogance of me to put words in Jesus' mouth. Another scoffed at the idea that Malachi would be so forgiving. Others declared that if this is the way that I think, then I am no Christian. The story was, in its bound form, for a period of time in the library of a seniors' home but met with such opposition that it was removed.

The version of the story that met with such opposition did not include the two-Jesus information. Curiously, until very recent time (say, up to 300 years ago, the two-Jesus story – Jesus the crucified, Jesus Barabbas – was included in most versions of the Bible. The fact that Barabbas' name was Jesus was dropped from most Bibles. Today, only the New International Version (Matthew 27:17) retains that story.)

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