CHAPTER XV.

THE UNITARIAN DEPARTURE.

HE positive beginnings of Unitarianism in Massa

THE

chusetts must be sought for in the reaction which followed the Great Awakening of 1740. Signs of its coming may have appeared earlier. Many ministers of that and the following generation regarded the revival of that period as throughout a work of the Holy Spirit. A smaller number believed it to be a work of God, but deplored the excesses which accompanied it. Others, like Dr. Chauncey, though they still believed and preached the doctrines of the fathers, spoke of the revival only with disapproval. A few cared more for their intellectual freedom than for any creed, and were cold at heart toward emotional demonstrations of spiritual life.

It was considerably more than half a century before these different classes gathered into two distinct opposing parties. But during the whole of that period the effect of the peculiar doctrines of Calvinism, as the fathers had maintained them, was developing opposing tendencies. One class, devoutly holding these doctrines but realizing the difficulties which the human reason encountered in accepting them, became increasingly interested in philosophical and metaphysical attempts to justify the ways of God to men. of God to men. The other class was increasingly disposed to deny the authority

of creeds and confessions and to praise the spirit of free inquiry. While the latter class would naturally be regarded with suspicion, in the first class were the accepted leaders in the churches. Some of them exerted wide influence through the pupils who came, as was the custom in those days, to study with them in preparation for the ministry. They developed distinguishing features of theological teaching, which their pupils reproduced and defended with loyalty to their instructors. Joseph Bellamy of Bethlehem, Conn., and Samuel Hopkins of Newport, R. I., had studied theology with Jonathan Edwards. Each founded a modified system of theology and taught it to his pupils. The Edwardean system evolved into the Hopkinsian, and this in later years passed through further changes in the hands of Nathaniel Emmons. of Franklin, Mass., and in the earlier part of the present century was again modified by Nathaniel W. Taylor of New Haven, by Lyman Beecher and others, till it came to be known as "The New Divinity." Some of its expounders, men of great and trained powers of reasoning, became sometimes more interested in discussing the philosophy of the change by which a soul is born into the kingdom of God than in pressing home with fervid appeal the truth which the Holy Spirit uses to bring about that change. For example, Hopkins demonstrated, as he believed, that sinners had natural power but not moral power to believe in Christ; that in the process of the new birth repentance precedes faith; that God exerted His power in such a manner that He purposed it to be followed by the existence of sin, but that He overrules sin to promote good; and that it is a test

of the renewed man that he must be willing to lose his own soul for the glory of God. Discussions on themes like these gathered prejudices against the gospel as it was preached which waited a favorable time for expression.

It must not be supposed that these noted teachers were merely metaphysical theologians. They were also reformers, the vanguard of that army which has wrought the greatest moral advances of this age. Hopkins, settled at Newport in 1770, when a number of his parishioners owned slaves, boldly denounced slavery as a crime. He did this with such effect that his people were induced to free their slaves. Whittier has said of the day when Hopkins preached against slavery: "It may well be doubted whether on that Sabbath day the angels of God in their wide survey looked upon a nobler spectacle than that of the minister of Newport rising up before his slaveholding congregation and demanding in the name of the Highest the deliverance of the captive and the opening of prison doors to them that were bound." Emmons also was an abolitionist and a stanch defender of various reforms, as well as an illustrious expounder and defender of the Congregational polity. Lyman Beecher's famous six sermons against intemperance made him the pioneer in the great work for temperance in this country. The leadership which these men and their compeers maintained in theology was greatly strengthened by their interest in practical reforms.

But on the other hand there was an increasing number of ministers whose impatience with metaphysical subtleties strengthened their indifference to essential

doctrines of the gospel.

Some of these were able men, whose earnestness in the time of civil conflict with England found more frequent expression in impassioned love of liberty than in the language of adoration to God. Jonathan Mayhew, of the West Church, Boston, who died in 1766, was one of the earliest of this type of ministers. He was a bold, liberal thinker, as impatient of theological as he was of monarchical restraints. He was not adverse to startling people by extreme statements. He made some allusions to the deity of Christ which even he was ready to acknowledge as too rash. Bellamy said of him, "He boldly ridicules the doctrine of the Trinity and denies the doctrine of justification by faith alone." Yet he would probably never have admitted the truth of such a charge. So far as he did deny these doctrines, he stood almost alone among New England ministers previous to the Revolutionary War. Dr. Chauncey of the First Church, Mayhew's contemporary and his survivor till 1781, bold, unimaginative, with little reverence for the past, carried his bitter opposition to the great revival in later years to like opposition to some of the doctrines prominently preached in that revival. Especially he preached and wrote against the doctrine of eternal retribution, and defended the doctrine of the final restoration of all men. Thacher, pastor of the Brattle Street Church from 1785-1802, declared: "For myself I can say that I believe the true and proper divinity of Jesus Christ; the awful depravity of human nature; the necessity of regeneration and of the agency of the Divine Spirit in effecting the change; the insufficiency of our own works to justify us in the sight of God; the necessity of holiness in heart and life in

order to fit us for heaven; and the utter futility of the hope that in the future state we shall have the opportunity of rectifying the mistakes as to our own religious character which we make in the present. . . But great and good men, men much greater and better than I am, have materially differed from me in their ideas on these subjects." Such divergent lines of thinking as were represented by Hopkins and Emmons on one side and Chauncey and Thacher on the other could not but have their legitimate effect on thinking people in the pews. Men turned to one kind of preachers to find themselves met by metaphysical distinctions which they could not understand, and to another kind to find the mysterious and the supernatural set aside as unedifying, with a plea for simplicity which was often only another name for spiritual barrenness. One cannot read the record of these years without earnestly wishing that a wise, consecrated, zealous evangelist might have appeared, with trumpet voice calling the churches to their knees and the unconverted to repentance.

Yet though two opposing parties were forming in the Massachusetts churches for more than fifty years, the division did not distinctly appear till the beginning of the present century. The first church which avowed itself to be Unitarian was not Congregational but Episcopal. For two years after the outbreak of the Revolution, King's Chapel was without a rector. Then for five years it was lent to the Old South Church, whose meeting house had been made unfit for use by British troops. In 1782 the remnant of the organization called James Freeman to be their rector, a brilliant young student from Harvard. The Revolution had made it necessary that the prayer book should be