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THE NEMESIS OF UNITARIANISM.

THAT goddess whose ensigns are the wheel and the rudder, indicating her power to overtake the evil-doer by land and by sea, - has not tired with the flight of the ages: when the smoke of battles has cleared away, when the conflicts of Truth and Error, Right and Wrong, have paused, there she sits in serene triumph, and the false thing bites the dust. It is an error to suppose that Nemesis was a Destroyer: rather, as the word indicates, she was a Divider, one who ever proved and sifted each thing, and severed the transient from the permanent. She was as much pledged to preserve the good as to destroy the evil; a daughter of Erebus, she yet bore her progeny to Zeus, or Life.

Unitarianism — a thing is an ism so long as its aim is private, not universal in the stem, not the flower-began its struggle in America about forty years ago. In these days, when thought is to some extent coördinate with the steamer and the telegraph, forty years is a pretty long life; besides, it is to be remembered that Unitarianism was the result of many ages of gestation. It was called new, but it was the oldest of movements, and rested upon some æons of experience and investigation. It came into a world which was athirst for purer spiritual fountains; indeed, it was evoked by the spirit of the age to supply a demand which the liberal conditions of Western Society for the first time suffered to be distinctly announced. What has Unitarianism done for man? What would the world say if steam should be to-day confining its blessings to a few companies, or if the telegraph should be called "a Boston notion," which is the best name Dr. Bellows could give to old-fashioned Unitarianism? What would a philosopher say if a considerable number of cities, which had been furnishing themselves with water on the principle that water rises to its level everywhere, should conclude to tear up their works and try the system of ancient aqueducts? Surely the great movement for free-thought, the conception of God as a Father, the idea of the emancipation of man from superstition and wrong, were no less magnificent than their contemporaneous physical studies; and yet the Unitarian movement is filled with doubt and confusion. Never was there such a cry of Lo here, and Lo there. One is

rushing back to Calvinism, another to Romanism, another to Swedenborgianism: Spiritualism reaps its harvest, and Atheism also, we fear. The masses no more think of identifying their spiritual fortunes with the church than of taking stock in the projects for a line of aërial ships to Europe.

We have many and plausible excuses for this. It is said that "most people are not fit for anything but Orthodoxy," and "Catholicism is the best thing for such and such a class."* Of course, Orthodoxy or Catholicism is best for its adherent, until a higher thing has the grace to create and answer a higher want; but that a religion of Freedom, Justice, Reason, and Love, is a religion for any one set or class, is a purblind and fatal conceit. Rather is it certain that there is a Free Unitarian in every man's heart; very few of our orthodox brothers are there who are not troubled with this inevitable inmate. "The very marrow of this accursed human nature is saturated in heresy," exclaimed Father Ryder. We welcome the impatient confession, believing as we do in the divinity of Human Nature, and knowing that for the highest religion nothing higher could be said than that it is the light that enlighteneth every man. Let any one read St. Austin and Calvin, and afterward Dr. Channing, and he will see that it is impossible that the yearning hearts of men could be separated from the beautiful faith of the latter but by some misunderstanding or trick. Men are not constituted to be satisfied with the terrible tenets of Calvin, any more than they are to assuage their thirst with melted lead. We are not deceived by the vehement utterances of the revival; we have long recognized man as the Inconsistent Animal. We have seen a minister who had grown red in the face with declaring that all men were born in a state of utter corruption, go home and take his little mass of corruption from its cradle and call it an angel. We do not believe his people went home to bewail and repent of Adam's transgression. The people have long since been divorced from the old theology; they do not care to fight the fight of dissent, but they will flock about any Beecher who laughs at it, and preaches about freedom. Thus the great audience of the Unitarian movement was already prepared for it; and it was adapted in its essence to the hunger to appease which it was sent. Also its success, so long as it was a real thing,

* The inference is that Unitarianism must be the religion of the enlightened few; that being the modern translation of the doctrine of election.

was equal to that of the preceding real movements, as those of Fox and Wesley. Its effect was not so apparent, for ideas are not so demonstrative as nerves and emotions; but the warning voice had been heard by all Churches, and we suppose that a thoroughly and logically Calvinistic sermon was not afterwards preached in New England. Edwards, Emmons, and Hopkins have become an extinct clerical species.

Again, in estimating the dimensions of Unitarianism at the present, we are loudly warned not to be deceived by size, nor imagine it a guage of power, to remember that a pyramid is not so great as a watch. It is true that it is only the religious fillibusters who imagine that the power of a Church consists in quantity rather than quality; and yet there is a great deal in the old Jeffersonian motto, "The greatest good of the greatest number." There is something in expansion, something in the democracy of Ideas: they are a trust for Humanity, and their place is not under a bushel, but under a candlestick, where they may give light to all who are in the house. This radiation is an attribute of quality more than of quantity.

The plain fact concerning Unitarianism is this: before it was placed the alternatives to be free and human, and have an expansion equal to the ever-growing thought of Man, which had already sent up the wave which prophesied that level for its flood; or to become an additional sect and inherit Boston. It selected the latter, so far as a personality is permitted to limit itself. Then Nemesis proceeded to her work.

It began about fifteen years ago, when Theodore Parker, a legitimate child of the movement, preached a discourse in South Boston, at the ordination of a brother minister, on "The transient and the permanent in Christianity." At that time, and in preaching that discourse, Mr. Parker was par excellence the representative Unitarian; for, if a man has knocked his father down, the son most like him is the one that knocks him down. It was plain to the orthodox that Parker was a logical chip of the old block which Freeman and Channing had introduced into Boston; so they began with fierce joy to put questions to Unitarianism. "Is this man Parker one of you? Will you acknowledge him or disown him? Under which King, Bezonian? Speak, or die!" Then the Unitarians with one accord began to curse and to swear, saying, "We know not the man." Ralph Waldo Emerson, of the Hanover

Street Church, had been excommunicated, some time before, on account of his heresy, for he, after all, was the first of the Unitarian heretics, but he was treated gently, on account of a certain saintliness about him, because of which "no man durst lay hands on him." Parker was no saint, but an earnest and upright Puritan, with a willingness to fight the good fight,- a kind of theological John Brown.

The verdict of Unitarianism on the tendencies which itself had legitimated, soon began to be renlered in facts which were much louder than words. Dr. Channing, even, during his life had seen some in lications of what he called "a Unitarian orthodoxy," bent only on "keeping the groun it had gained;" and thus soon after his death did this orthodoxy come with lock and bolt to close up the glorious portals he had flung open. In November, 1844, Rev. Mr. Sargent, then minister of Suffolk-Street Church, was unsophisticated enough to exchange pulpits with Theodore Parker! The Fraternity of Churches made a formal protest; the city was set on fire, theologically; Sargent lost his Church. Soon after, the Rev. James Freeman Clarke, not having the fear of the Churches before his eyes, and the affliction of his brother Sargent not having been sanctified to his good, made the rash proposition to the said Parker that they also should exchange pulpits, as they had been in the habit of doing before this Boston trouble. Immediately Mr. Clarke's Church was divided into halves, and the seceders built the Bedford-Street Church. Thenceforth we have in this Jerusalem of the Unitarians two distinct classes: the old lock-andbolt set, and the open-communion set. Parker stood alone under the Unitarian tent, so far as theological opinion went; but a goodly number stood by him who had not bowed the knee to the new dogmatic Baal. These would have it that Parker, though an egregious heretic, was a faithful and an honest man, and should be allowed to think his thought and say his say. There is reason to think that Parker did so.

Then the wheel of Nemesis was swift on those who disowned the old Unitarian principle, and closed their pulpits against the Heresiarch. The life of their Churches had oozed out. The Hanover-Street Church, which excommunicated Emerson, has passed under the hammer to the Methodists. The Suffolk-Street Church, which drove away Mr. Sargent for exchanging with Parker, has passed, in the same way, to the Baptists. The I. - 23

Bedford-Street Church (Church of the Savior), which was built out of spite to James Freeman Clarke, was obliged to disband and merge its remnants with the Old Second Church. The Indiana-Street Church, once under the ministry of Mr. Fox, who has since avoided any settlement, became so reduced that they had to unite with James Freeman Clarke's Church of the Disciples. King's Chapel, the very cradle of Unitarianism, the Faneuil Hall of religious liberty, consecrated by the nobility of James Freeman, can not now settle a minister because of its recreancy to that progressive spirit which bore the Unitarian movement. The Thirteenth Church, foremost in its denunciations of the more liberal tendency, has lost its minister, (Mr. Coolidge,) by his conversion to Episcopacy. Boston presents, to-day, a series of stranded Unitarian Churches, high and dry, awaiting the tide which will never reach them. They have galvanized, for a pastime, the bodies of dead questions the Trinity, Eternal Punishment, and the like, talk of them as if they were talking to live men of live things. Their darling ministers, Huntington and Sears, have become disgusted, and have fled, one to the Episcopal, the other to the Swedenborgian Church, for dear life.

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-All this owing, rhetorically speaking, to a "Suspense of Faith; in sober fact, it is the result of the growth of a Great Principle beyond the limitations which sought to confine it. The acorn grew in the small jar quietly enough at first; but the cry came for a larger jar, nay, that the sapling should be transplanted from any conceivable jar out into the field, which is the world, where under the free light and winds of Heaven it might rise to the possible stature of the germ that was in it. But Boston Unitarianism would persist in retaining the oak in its jar; and the jar lies in fragments about its roots.

But what did Conservative Nemesis preserve? She established in Boston a Central Broad Church, into which the life of all the rest passed; a Church whose average congregation is nearly as numerous as all the rest put together. She has brought the stones which the builders rejected to the head of the corner. Emerson has become the intellectual teacher of their teachers. The Unitarian Association, when at length it lay all becalmed, must needs call on the once ignored J. F. Clarke to bring the currents of his genial and catholic spirit to its sails: there he is passing from the Secretary's Chair to minister to Theodore Parker's people! What has

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