Unitarianism in America: A History of its Origin and Development Part 29

In his biography of George Ticknor, George S. Hilliard says that "the strong religious impressions which Mr. Ticknor received in early years deepened as his character matured into personal convictions, the confirmed and ruling principles of his life. He had been brought up in the doctrines of Calvinistic orthodoxy, but later serious reflection led him to reject those doctrines; and soon after his return from Europe he joined Dr.

Channing's church, of which he continued through life a faithful member. He was a sincere Liberal Christian, and his convictions were firm, but they were held without bigotry, and he never allowed them to interfere with kindliness and courtesy." It may be added that Ticknor was an active member of the church with which he was connected, that in 1822 he took charge of a cla.s.s of boys in the Sunday-school, which he kept for eight years. In 1839 and the next year he gave a course of instruction in the history and contents of the Bible to a cla.s.s of young girls, for which he prepared himself carefully.[3]

The influence exerted by the historians in teaching love of country and a true patriotism may be accounted as very large. That men thoroughly grounded in principles of religious liberty, in high ideals of justice and humanity, in the broadest spirit of toleration and freedom of opinion, should have written our histories, is of no small importance in the formation of American character. That they have made many Unitarians we cannot suppose, but that their influence has been large in the development of a true spirit of nationality we have a right to think. They have indicated concretely the effects of bigotry and intolerance, and they have not failed to point out the defects in the practices of the Puritans. In so far as they have had to deal with religious subjects, they have taught the true Unitarian idea of liberty of conscience and freedom of opinion. They have wisely helped to make it possible for many religions to live kindly side by side, and to give every creed the right of utterance. These ideals had been developed before our historians began to write, but these men have helped to make them the inheritance of the whole nation. All the more effective has been their teaching that it has grown out of the events of our history, and has not been the voice of a merely personal opinion. But we owe much to them that they have seen the true meaning of our history, and that they have uttered it with clearness of interpretation and with vigorous moral emphasis.

[Sidenote: Scientific Unitarians.]

A considerable number of the leading men of science have been Unitarians.

Notable among the mathematicians were Nathaniel Bowditch, Benjamin Peirce, and Thomas Hill, who was president of Antioch College and of Harvard University. Among the astronomers have been Benjamin Gould, Maria Mitch.e.l.l, Asaph Hall, and Edward C. Picketing. Of Maria Mitch.e.l.l it was said that she "was entirely ignorant of the peculiar phrases and customs of rigid sectarians." Her biographer says she "never joined any church, but for years before she left Nantucket she attended the Unitarian church, and her sympathies, as long as she lived, were with that denomination, especially with the more liberally inclined portion."[4] James Jackson, the first physician of the Ma.s.sachusetts General Hospital, should be named in this connection. Joseph Lovering, the physicist, and Jeffries Wyman, the comparative anatomist, are also to be included. And here belongs Louis Aga.s.siz, who has had more influence than any other man in developing an interest in science among the people generally. He gave to scientific investigations the largest importance for scientific men themselves. At the same time he was a religious man and a theist. "In religion," says his biographer, "Aga.s.siz very liberal and tolerant, and respected the views and convictions of every one. In his youth and early manhood, Aga.s.siz was undoubtedly a materialist, or, more exactly, a sceptic; but in time, and little by little, his studies led him to belief in a divine Creative Power.

He was more in sympathy with Unitarianism than with any other Christian denomination."[5]

[Sidenote: Unitarian Essayists.]

A considerable number of essayists, lecturers, and general writers have been Unitarians. Among these have been Edwin P. Whipple, George Ripley, Mrs. Ednah D. Cheney, John S. Dwight, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, Henry T. Tuckerman, James T. Fields, and Professor Francis J. Child. These writers represent several phases of Unitarian opinion, but they belong to this fellows.h.i.+p by birthright or intellectual sympathies. In the same company may be placed Henry D. Th.o.r.eau and John Burroughs, not because they had any direct connection with Unitarianism, but because the religious convictions they expressed are such as most Unitarians accept.

To the Unitarian fellows.h.i.+p belong Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Caroline M. Kirkland, Grace Greenwood (Mrs. Lippincott), and Julia Ward Howe. All the early a.s.sociations of Margaret Fuller were with Unitarians; and her brother, Arthur Fuller, became a Unitarian minister. In her maturer life she was with the transcendentalists, finding in Rev. W.H. Channing and Emerson her spiritual teachers. Writing of her debt to Emerson, she said, "His influence has been more beneficial to me than that of any American; and from him I first learned what is meant by an inward life."[6] She was a p.r.o.nounced individualist, an intense lover of spiritual liberty, a friend of those who live in the spirit. This may be seen in what she called her credo, a sentence or two from which will indicate her type of thought. "I will not loathe sects, persuasions, systems," she writes, "though I cannot abide in them one moment; for I see that by most men they are still needed." "Ages may not produce one worthy to loose the shoes of the Prophet of Nazareth; yet there will surely be another manifestation of this word which was in the beginning. The very greatness of this manifestation demands a greater. We have had a Messiah to teach and reconcile. Let us now have a man to live out all the symbolical forms of human life, with the calm beauty of a Greek G.o.d, with the deep consciousness of Moses, with the holy love and purity of Jesus."[7]

[Sidenote: Unitarian Novelists.]

Among the novelists have been several who were Unitarian ministers, including Sylvester Judd, William Ware, Thomas W. Higginson, and Edward Everett Hale. Judd's Margaret was of the very essence of transcendentalism, besides being an excellent interpretation of some of the phases of New England character. Ware's historical novels were popular in their day, and are now worth going back to by modern readers, and especially by those who do not insist upon having their romances hot from the press. Catherine M.

Sedgwick is another novelist worth returning to by modern readers, and especially by those who would know of New England life in the early part of the nineteenth century. She became an ardent Unitarian, and her biography gives interesting glimpses of the early struggles of that faith in York City. Other Unitarian women novelists were Lydia Maria Child, Grace Greenwood, Helen Hunt Jackson, Louisa M. Alcott, and Harriet Prescott Spofford.

In naming John T. Trowbridge, Bayard Taylor, Bret Harte, William D.

Howells, and Nathaniel Hawthorne as Unitarians, no merely sectarian aim is in view. In the common use of the word, Hawthorne was not a religious man; for he rarely attended church, and he had no interest in ecclesiastical formalities. No man who has written in this country, however, was more deeply influenced than he by those spiritual ideas and traditions which may be properly called Unitarian. The same may be said of Howells, who is not a Unitarian in any denominational sense; but his religious interests and convictions bring him into sympathy with the movement represented by Unitarianism.

It may be said of the most popular novels of Edward Everett Hale, such as Ten Times One Is Ten, In His Name, His Level Best, that they are the best possible interpretations of the Unitarian spirit; for it is not merely a certain conception of G.o.d that characterizes Unitarianism, nor yet a particular theological att.i.tude. It is the wish to make religion real, practical, altruistic.

[Sidenote: Unitarian Artists and Poets.]

Unitarianism has been as friendly to poetry and the other arts as it has been to philosophy and science. In its early days it fostered the artistic careers of Was.h.i.+ngton Allston, the painter, and Charles Bulfinch, the architect. It has also nurtured the sculptors, William Wetmore Story, who was also poet and essayist; Harriet Hosmer, whose career shows what a woman can accomplish in opening new opportunities for her s.e.x; Larkin G. Mead and Daniel C. French. To these must be added the actors f.a.n.n.y Kemble and Charlotte Cushman.

It is as one of the earliest of our poets that Charles Sprague is to be mentioned, and one or two of his poems are deservedly remembered. Jones Very was one of the best of the transcendental poets, and a few of his religious poems have not been surpa.s.sed. The younger William Ellery Channing and Edward R. Sill belong to the same school, and deservedly keep their places with those who admire what is choice in thought and individual in artistic workmans.h.i.+p. As a biographer of O.B. Frothingham and as a member of his congregation, it may be proper to add here the name of Edmund C. Stedman.

Among our greater poets, Bryant, Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Stoddard, and Bayard Taylor were Unitarians. As being essentially of the same way of thinking and believing, Whittier and Whitman might also be so cla.s.sed. Though Whittier was a Friend by education and by conviction, he was of the liberal school that places religion above sect and interprets dogmas in the light of human needs and affections. If he had been born and bred a Unitarian, he could not have more sympathetically interpreted the Unitarian faith than he has in his poems. Whitman had in him the heart of transcendentalism, and he was informed of its inmost spirit. To the more radical Unitarians his pleas for liberty, his intense individualism, and his idealistic conceptions of nature and man would be acceptable, and, it may be, enthusiastically approved.

William Cullen Bryant early became a Unitarian; and he listened to the preaching of Follen, Dewey, Osgood, and Bellows. "A devoted lover of religious liberty," Bellows said of him, "he was an equal lover of religion itself--not in any precise, dogmatic form, but in its righteousness, reverence, and charity. He was not a dogmatist, but preferred practical piety and working virtue to all modes of faith."[8] It would be difficult to give a better definition of Unitarianism itself; and it was the large humanity of it, and its generous outlook upon the lives of individuals and nations, that made of Bryant a faithful Unitarian.

Henry W. Longfellow was educated as a Unitarian, his father having been one of the first vice-presidents of the Unitarian a.s.sociation,--a position he held for many years. Stephen Longfellow was an intimate friend of Dr.

Channing in his college years, and he followed the advance of his cla.s.smate in the growth of his liberal faith. "It was in the doctrine and the spirit of the early Unitarianism that Henry Longfellow was nurtured at church and at home," says his brother. "And there is no reason to suppose that he ever found these insufficient, or that he ever essentially departed from them.

Of his genuine religious feeling his writings, give ample testimony. His nature was at heart devout; his ideas of life, of death, and of what lies beyond, were essentially cheerful, hopeful, optimistic. He did not care to talk much on theological points; but he believed in the supremacy of good in the world and in the universe."[9]

Although Oliver Wendell Holmes was educated in the older forms of religious beliefs, he became one of the most devoted of Unitarians. His rejection of Calvinism is marked by his intense aversion to it, shown upon many a page of his prose and poetry. No other prominent Unitarian was so aggressive against the doctrines of the older time. He was a regular attendant at King's Chapel upon the preaching of Dr. F.W.P. Greenwood, Dr. Ephraim Peabody, and Rev. H.W. Foote; but, when he was in Pittsfield, for a number of years he went to the Episcopal church, and at Beverly Farms in his later years, during the summer, he attended a Baptist church. He was, therefore, a conservative Unitarian, but with a generous recognition of the good in other religious bodies. At the Unitarian Festival of 1859 Dr. Holmes was the presiding officer, and in his address he gave a statement of the Unitarian faith that clearly defines his own religious position:--

We believe in vital religion, or the religion of life, as contrasted with that of trust in hierarchies, establishments, and traditional formulae, settled by the votes of wavering majorities in old councils and convocations. We believe in evangelical religion, or the religion of glad tidings, in distinction from the schemes that make our planet the ante-chamber of the mansions of eternal woe to the vast majority of all the men, women, and children that have lived and suffered upon its surface. We believe that every age must judge the Scriptures by its own light; and we mean, by G.o.d's grace, to exercise that privilege, without asking permission of pope or bishop, or any other human tribunal. We believe that sin is the much-abused step-daughter of ignorance, and this not only from our own observation, but on the authority of him whose last prayer on earth was that the perpetrators of the greatest crime on record might be forgiven, for they knew not what they were doing. We believe, beyond all other beliefs, in the fatherly relation of the Deity to all his creatures; and, wherever there is a conflict of Scriptural or theological doctrines, we hold this to be the article of faith that stands supreme above all others. And, lastly, we know that, whether we agree precisely in these or any other articles of belief, we can meet in Christian charity and fellows.h.i.+p, in that we all agree in the love of our race, and the wors.h.i.+p of a common Father, as taught us by the Master whom we profess to follow.[10]

Educated as a Unitarian, James Russell Lowell felt none of the animosity toward Calvinism that was characteristic of Holmes; but his poetry everywhere indicates the liberality and n.o.bleness of his religious convictions. That he was not sectarian, that he felt no active interest in dogmatic theology as such, is only saying that he was a genuine Unitarian.

Writing in 1838, Lowell said, "I am an infidel to the Christianity of to-day."[11] In a letter to Longfellow written in 1845, he made a more explicit statement of his att.i.tude: "Christ has declared war against the Christianity of the world, and it must down. There is no help for it. The church, that great bulwark of our practical paganism, must be reformed from foundation to weatherc.o.c.k."[12] These pa.s.sages indicate his dissatisfaction with an external religion and with dogmatic theology. On the other hand, his letters and his poems prove that he was strongly grounded in the faith of the spirit. In that faith he lived and died; and, if in later years he gave recognition to some of the higher claims of the older types of Christianity, it was a generous concession to their rational qualities and their practical results, and in no degree an acceptance of their teachings. The definite form of Lowell's faith he expressed when he wrote, "I will never enter a church from which a prayer goes up for the prosperous only, or for the unfortunate among the oppressors, and not for the oppressed and fallen; as if G.o.d had ordained our pride of caste and our distinctions of color, and as if Christ had forgotten those that are in bonds."[13]

Emerson left the pulpit, and he withdrew from outward conformity to the church; but that there came a time when he no longer felt an interest in religion or that he even ceased to be a Christian, after his own manner of interpretation, there is no reason to a.s.sume. His radicalism was in the direction of a deeper and truer religion, a religion of the spirit. He rejected the faith that is founded on the letter, on historical evidences, that is a body without a soul. He was not the less a Unitarian because he ceased to be one outwardly, for he carried forward the Unitarian principles to their legitimate conclusion. The newer Unitarianism owes to him more than to any other man, and of him more than of any other man the older Unitarianism can boast that he was its product.

Such a survey as this indicates how great has been the influence of Unitarianism upon American literature. There can be no question that it has been one of the greatest formative forces in its development. "Almost everybody," says Professor Barrett Wendell, "who attained literary distinction in New England during the nineteenth century was either a Unitarian or closely a.s.sociated with Unitarian influences,"[14] More even than that may be said, for it is the Unitarian writers who have most truly interpreted American inst.i.tutions and American ideals.

[1] Boston Unitarianism, 168.

[2] George Ticknor, Life of William Hickling Prescott, 91, 164.

[3] George S. Hillard, Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor, 327.

[4] Phoebe Mitch.e.l.l Kendall, Life, Letters, and Journals of Maria Mitch.e.l.l, 239.

[5] Jules Marcou, Life of Aga.s.siz, II. 220.

[6] Memoirs, I. 194.

[7] Memoirs, II. 91.

[8] John Bigelow, Life of Bryant, 274, 285.

[9] Samuel Longfellow, Life of H.W. Longfellow, I. 14

[10] Quarterly Journal, VI. 359, July, 1859.

[11] Biography of James Russell Lowell, by H.E. Scudder, I. 63.

[12] Ibid., 169.

[13] Biography of James Russell Lowell, by H.E. Scudder, I. 144, quoted from Conversations on Some of the Old Poets.

[14] A Literary History of America, 289.

XX.

THE FUTURE OF UNITARIANISM.

The early Unitarians in this country did not desire to form a new sect.

They wished to remain Congregationalists, and to continue unbroken the fellows.h.i.+p that had existed from the beginning of New England. When they were compelled to separate from the older churches, they refrained from organizing a strictly defined religious body, and have called theirs a "movement." The words "denomination" and "sect" have been repellent to them; and they have attempted, not only to avoid their use, but to escape from that which they represent. They have wished to establish a broad, free fellows.h.i.+p, that would draw together all liberal thinkers and movements into one wide and inclusive religious body.

The Unitarian body accepted in theory from the first the principles of liberty, reason, and free inquiry. These were fully established, however, only as the result of discussion, agitation, and much friction. Theodore Parker was subjected to severe criticism, Emerson was regarded with distrust, and the Free Religious a.s.sociation was organized as a protest and for the sake of a freer fellows.h.i.+p. In fact, however, Parker was never disfellows.h.i.+pped; and from the first many Unitarians regarded Emerson as the teacher of a higher type of spiritual religion. Through this period of controversy, when there was much of bitter feeling engendered, no one was expelled from the Unitarian body for opinion's sake. All stayed in who did not choose to go out, there being no trials for, heresy. The result of this method has been that the Unitarian body is now one of the most united and harmonious in Christendom. The free spirit has abundantly justified itself.

When it was found that every one could think for himself, express freely his own beliefs, and live in accordance with his own convictions, controversy came to an end. When heresy was no longer sought for, heresy ceased to have an existence. The result has not been discord and distrust, but peace, harmony, and a more perfect fellows.h.i.+p.

In the Unitarian body from the first there has been a free spirit of inquiry. Criticism has had a free course. The Bible has been subjected to the most searching investigation, as have all the foundations of religion.

As a result, no religious body shows, a more rational interest in the Bible or a more confident trust in its great spiritual teachings.

The early Unitarians antic.i.p.ated that Unitarianism would soon become the popular form of religion accepted in this country. Thomas Jefferson thought that all young men of his time would die Unitarians. Others were afraid that Unitarianism would become sectarian in its methods as soon as it became popular, which they antic.i.p.ated would occur in a brief period.[1]

The cause of the slow growth of Unitarianism is to be found in the fact that it has been too modern in its spirit, too removed from the currents of popular belief, to find ready acceptance on the part of those who are largely influenced by traditional beliefs. The religion of the great majority of persons is determined by tradition or social heredity, by what they are taught in childhood or hear commonly repeated around them. Only persons who are naturally independent and self-reliant can overcome the difficulties in the way of embracing a form of religion which carries them outside of the established tradition. For these reasons it is not surprising that as yet there has not been a rapid growth of organized Unitarianism. In fact, Unitarianism has made little progress outside of New England, and those regions to which New England traditions have been carried by those who migrated westward.