held by a scholar whose knowledge of Babylonian inscriptions. is justly celebrated. Up to 1805 it had remained a stronghold of Calvinistic doctrine. In that year it was given to the Reverend Henry Ware, an avowed Unitarian, whose conceptions of human nature were introspectively confirmed by lifelong contemplation of the fact that " Ware was honest as all Wares be." The orthodox party at Harvard had opposed Ware with all their might; so when he was made Hollis Professor, the ancestral college of Puritan New England was finally handed over to Unitarianism. Until very recent years this remained its acknowledged faith. At last its liberalism became such as to make even Unitarian dogmas inconvenient; its avowed religion is now described as non-sectarian, and its chapel has long abandoned the use of the sacrament.

Defeated at Harvard, the orthodox party retreated to Andover, where they founded the Theological Seminary which until very lately forlornly defended old Calvinism in a region abandoned to its enemies. Nowadays the whole thing is fading into history, but at first the conflict was heart-breaking. There is a pathetic story of Professor Pearson, who, on the election of Ware, retired from Harvard to become one of the founders of Andover. In his last days the good man's speech was paralysed; and when toward the end of his life an old Harvard friend, who had not seen him for years, came to visit him, time had done its work. With mournful tears in his eyes the dumb old Calvinist took his friend's hand and stroked it, unable to speak his grief that their ways had parted for eternity. For on each side faith was fervent; and if the conquering Unitarians believed themselves to be destroying pernicious and ugly heresy, the Calvinists believed just as sincerely that in angelic guise the devil had possessed himself of New England. In their mood, there was a consequent depth of despair to which the Unitarians have hardly done full justice. To the Unitarian mind there has never been any valid reason why good men of other opinions than theirs should

not enjoy everlasting bliss; but the very essence of the Calvinists' creed condemned to everlasting woe every human being who rejected the divinely revealed truth of their grimly uncompromising system.

To suppose, however, that the founders of Unitarianism. meant to be unchristian would be totally to misunderstand them. They revered the Scriptures as profoundly as ever Calvinists did. The difference was that they discerned in Scripture no such teaching as the experience of old-world centuries had crystallised into Calvinistic dogma. In the first place, they found in the Bible no passages which necessarily involved the dogma of the Trinity. There might be puzzling sentences; but there were also clear, constant statements that there is one God, who made man in His image. Very good, they held; this assertion amounts to proof that men are the children of God, and that incidentally they have inherited from God the divine faculties of reason and of conscience. When in the Bible, then, there are puzzling texts, or when in life there are puzzling moments, our duty is to face them in a conscientiously reasonable temper. If we are truly made in the image of God, we shall thus reach true conclusions; and meanwhile, to guide our way, God has made that most excellent of his creatures, Jesus Christ, and has authentically recorded his career in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Search these yourself; use the light of the Scriptures; remember the example of Christ; and all will be well. If there be any such thing as damnation, it can result only from lack of self-searching, from deliberate neglect of scriptural light, or from wilful disregard of Christ's example.

From this state of faith there naturally resulted in Unitarianism a degree of spiritual freedom which allowed each minister to proclaim whatever truth presented itself to his conscience. Unitarianism has never formulated a creed. has tacitly accepted, however, certain traditions which have been classically set forth by its great apostle, William Ellery

It

Channing. He was born at Newport in 1780; he took his degree at Harvard in 1798; and from 1803 to 1840 he was minister at the Federal Street Church in Boston. He died in 1842.

In 1819, he preached at Baltimore, on the occasion of the ordination of Jared Sparks, his famous sermon on Unitarian Christianity. He took his text from 1 Thess. v. 21: "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." His first point is that "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." The Scriptures, he goes on to say, must be interpreted by the light of reason. So, applying reason to Scripture, he deduces in the first place the doctrine of God's unity, "that there is one God, and one only;" secondly, that "Jesus is one mind, one soul, one being, as truly one as we are, and equally distinct from the one God; " thirdly, that "God is morally perfect; " fourthly, that "Jesus 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;" and, fifthly, 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."

On this supreme authority of conscience Unitarianism tended to throw more and more emphasis. Toward the end of Channing's life he wrote some introductory remarks to a collected edition of his works from which the following paragraph is worth attention :

"We must start in religion from our own souls. In these is the fountain of all divine truth. An outward revelation is only possible and intelligible, on the ground of conceptions and principles, previously furnished by the soul. Here is our primitive teacher and light. Let us not disparage it. There are, indeed, philosophical schools of the present day, who tell us that we are to start in all our speculations

from the Absolute, the Infinite. But we rise to these conceptions from the contemplation of our own nature; and even if it were not so, of what avail would be the notion of an Absolute, Infinite existence, and Uncaused Unity, if stripped of all those intellectual and moral attributes, which we learn only from our own souls? What but a vague shadow, a sounding name, is the metaphysical Deity, the substance without modes, the being without properties, the naked unity, which performs such a part in some of our philosophical systems? The only God, whom our thoughts can rest on, and our hearts can cling to, and our consciences can recognise, is the God whose image dwells in our own souls. The grand ideas of Power, Reason, Wisdom, Love, Rectitude, Holiness, Blessedness, that is, of all God's attributes, come from within, from the action of our own spiritual nature. Many indeed think that they learn God from marks of design and skill in the outward world; but our ideas of design and skill, of a determining cause, of an end or purpose, are derived from consciousness, from our own souls. Thus the soul is the spring of our knowledge of God."

A more astonishing departure from all the traditions of ecclesiastical Christianity was never phrased. Human nature, Channing holds, is essentially good; man is made in the image of God, and all man need do is to follow the light which God has given him. The greatest source of that light, of course, is Christ. Whether Christ was literally the son of God or not makes no difference: he walked the earth; he was the most perfect of men; and we can follow him. He suffered little children to come unto him, and he will suffer us larger children to come likewise. He was human, and so are we. In earthly life he could avoid damnation, and all we need do if indeed there be real danger of damnation at all is to behave as nearly like him as we can. If the false teachings of a moribund heresy make all this reasonable truth seem questionable, look about you: do you find your friends damnable, or, on the whole, made in the image of God? Do they deserve, as in that sermon of Edwards's, to be held suspended by a spider-like thread over a fiery furnace into which they may justly be cast at any moment; or rather, for all their faults and errors, do they not merit eternal mercy?

So if all of us try to do our best, is there any reasonable cause for fearing that everything shall not ultimately go right? The old Unitarians looked about them and honestly found human nature reassuring.

What ultimately distinguishes early Unitarianism from the Calvinism which it so calmly dethroned, then, is this respect for what is good in human nature as contrasted with the Calvinistic insistence on what is bad. What is good needs encouragement; what is bad needs checking. What is good merits freedom; what is bad demands control. Obedience. to authority, the Calvinists held, may reveal in you the tokens of salvation; spiritual freedom, the Unitarians maintained, must result in spiritual growth. For a dogmatic dread they substituted an illimitable hope. Evil and sin, sorrow and weakness, they did not deny; but trusting in the infinite goodness of God, they could not believe evil or sin, the sorrows or the weaknesses of humanity, to be more than passing shadows. Inspired with this newly hopeful spirit, they held their way through the New England whose better sort were content for half a century to follow them.

Channing has been dead for more than fifty years, and the religious movement of which he was the central figure is no longer in the ascendant. He himself protested against doctrinal stagnation: "Unitarianism," . . . he wrote in 1841, "began as a protest against the rejection of reason,against mental slavery. It pledged itself to progress as its life's end; but it has gradually grown stationary, and now we have a Unitarian orthodoxy." The good man need not have troubled himself about that. Almost in his own time, on the one hand, the progress of personal freedom led to something like rejection of Christianity; on the other hand, it reacted into acceptance of the oldest Christian traditions. Typical examples of these tendencies may be found in the careers of Mr. George Ripley and his wife. Beginning in full sympathy, as ardent Unitarians, they so parted in faith that Mrs. Ripley