The Boston Religion

THE horns of a dilemma are weapons upon which the controversialist places a high value. Early in the nineteenth century the thoughtful citizens of Boston found themselves confronted with two pairs of these dangerous implements. In successive pamphlets they were called upon to choose either between “ the Boston religion ” and the Christian religion, on the one hand, or, on the other, between Christianity and Calvinism. The call would fall upon deafer ears to-day. When it came, and for some years thereafter, it was a twofold challenge to which the need of some response could not be ignored. What did it mean, and how was it answered ?

It is a fact worth noticing that the Boston minister who in 1750 preached a political sermon which has frequently been called “the morning gun of the Revolution ” was, after Roger Williams, the first prominent dissenter from the established church of New England. Both the Unitarians and the Universalists claim the Rev. Jonathan Mayhew as their first representative in the Boston ministry. A person is often the best illustration of a tendency ; and that which the minister of the West Church illustrates is the parallelism of freedom in political and in religious thought. The American revolt from the established civil authority began and amazingly throve in Boston. It was but natural, therefore, that the first and most conspicuous departure from the accepted order of things in religion should have the same local background. The fact that the severity of the Puritan order of New England gave wider room for reaction than could be found elsewhere only enhances the fitness of the scene. Local in its causes and conditions, the ecclesiastical revolution which followed the political belongs yet more intimately to local history. But it is so intermingled with the history of religious progress in the last century that once again the local records take on a broader significance.

How truly the Calvinistic Congregationalism of New England was the established church we hardly need remind ourselves. It was the faith once delivered to the saints, the Puritan fathers, and duly received from them; it was guarded by civil laws taxing the whole community for church support, and dealing with ecclesiastical affairs as they are treated only where church and state are one. Into the ministry of this order gradually crept during the closing years of the eighteenth century many doubts regarding doctrines hitherto accepted without question, — especially the doctrines of the Trinity and of human depravity. From the “ Great Awakening ” before the middle of the century there must needs have been a reawakening, with revulsions of feeling. Free political inquiry doubtless played its own part in the change. Perhaps, too, the general emancipation of thought which the first burst of sympathy with the French Revolution brought to many Americans had its indirect influence. The similar change of sentiment in Salem has been said to have come “ through its navigators even more than through its critics and theologians. As soon as they came into those warm latitudes, their crusts of prejudice melted and cracked from them like films of ice ; and in place of the narrow tradition they carried out with them they brought home the germs of a broad religion of humanity.” The conservatism of the inland towns as compared with the seaports — Boston even more than Salem — lends some color to this theory of a Unitarian writer. Whatever the total influences may have been, it is declared that by the year 1800 there was hardly a single occupant of a Congregational pulpit in Boston whose orthodoxy would have stood unchallenged fifty years later. The zeal of the minority in the open division soon to come between the old and the new theology is the more remarkable when these unequal numbers are remembered.

When the nineteenth century began there was but one church in Boston avowedly Unitarian. That was King’s Chapel, and its case was anomalous. The mere statement that “ the first Episcopal Church in New England became the first Unitarian Church in America ” sums up the strange situation. With the departure of the Tories, who before the Revolution had formed a large part of its congregation, its use for the services of the Church of England seemed to come to a natural end. Even its name of King’s Chapel was changed by the people of Boston — though never by vote of the parish — to “ the Stone Chapel ; ” and so it was commonly called well into the nineteenth century. For five years before 1782 it was used by the Old South congregation. Then the young James Freeman took charge of the reassembled flock as “reader.” But the strong Unitarian influences of the time rendered many formulæ of the Book of Common Prayer difficult for him and his people to repeat with sincerity. Accordingly they authorized him to revise the Prayer-book.

Revision was in the air. Only a few years later a minister vigilant for the ancient faith discovered in a Boston bookstore a version of the Divine and Moral Songs of Dr. Watts, out of which the doctrines of the Trinity and of the divinity of Christ had been carefully edited. The good man promptly exposed it in a newspaper article under the title Beware of Counterfeits.

Of the Prayer-book revision it may be said that the Protestant Episcopal Church of America had as yet no definite organization, and the King’s Chapel congregation — always in dissent from the established church of New England — felt itself under no obligation to wait till the new Episcopal Church adapted the English Prayer-book to American use. This was not accomplished till 1789. Mr. Freeman, however, did wish to remain in the Anglican communion, and applied for episcopal ordination both to Bishop Seabury of Connecticut and to Bishop Provoost of New York. Their only course was to refuse his application ; for revising the Trinity out of the liturgy which they were sworn to support was not atoned for even by so commendable an addition to the Catechism as the question, “ In what manner should we treat the inferior animals ? ” Denied episcopal ordination, Mr. Freeman did not find it difficult to persuade himself and his congregation that laymen could ordain him with equal validity. Whereupon, in 1787, certain members of the Chapel congregation handed him a Bible, with appropriate words, and he became their minister, —the first professedly Unitarian minister in America. There were protests from Episcopal clergymen and from some of the proprietors of the church ; protests in which a sense of loss and defeat, not yet entirely removed, made itself clearly felt. Later on, there were complications, both serious and amusing, in the administering of moneys bequeathed by loyal churchmen before the Revolution. But Mr. Freeman’s step was never retraced: indeed, subsequent revisions have removed the Chapel liturgy even farther than he carried it from that of the King.

What the constant use of a liturgy, with a fixed form of words, obliged Mr. Freeman to do openly, the other ministers of Boston, left to their own devices in the conduct of public worship, could and did achieve almost unnoticed. Instead of denying the doctrine of the Trinity and other tenets of Calvinism, it became their practice to ignore such matters. There were still many points upon which teachers of Christianity were agreed, and on them the emphasis was laid. So it might have gone on in peace and quietness for years to come — but for the fatal propensity of small causes to lead to great effects.

The filling of the vacant Hollis Professorship of Divinity at Harvard in 1805 was one of these causes. The election of the Rev. Henry Ware, whose spoken and written words had shown him a pronounced Unitarian, was bitterly contested, but without avail. The Orthodox Overseers and friends of the college saw in Mr. Ware’s appointment nothing but danger and disaster. Their spokesman was the Rev. Jedidiah Morse of Charlestown, father of the inventor of the Morse alphabet of telegraphy. His pamphlet on The True Reasons for opposing Mr. Ware’s Election set forth the undoubted Calvinistic orthodoxy of Mr. Hollis, the London merchant whose bequest supported the professorship, and the particular pains he took, even to receiving a bond from the Corporation, to insure the administration of the fund in accordance with his views. Dr. Morse further complained that he was not permitted to present these reasons to the Overseers, and that, in spite of Mr. Ware’s known antagonism to the theology specified in the Hollis bequest, the college did not trouble itself to examine into his views.

The pamphlet was the first of many trumpet calls ringing with the question, “ Who is on the Lord’s side ? ” Thenceforth it was hard for the neutral-minded to escape taking some definite position. Ten years after the pamphlet was written, Dr. Morse wrote of it: “It was then, and has been ever since, considered by one class of people as my unpardonable offense, and by another class as the best thing I ever did. One of the former party is said to have declared soon after its publication that it was so bad a thing that it would more than counterbalance all the good I had done or should do if I lived ever so long; and one of the other party said, if I had never done any good before I made that publication nor should do any afterward, that single deed would of itself produce effects of sufficient importance and utility to mankind to be worth living for.”

When an atmosphere is charged with opposing convictions of such positiveness, the next disturbance is merely a question of time. Meanwhile, in natural sequence from the Hollis Professorship dispute, came the founding of the Andover Seminary (1808) and of the Park Street Church (1809) as strong pillars of Orthodoxy. The explosion that soon followed, in 1815, was due in large measure, again, to the hand of Dr. Morse. In Belsham’s Life of the English Unitarian Lindsey appeared a chapter on American Unitarianism, containing letters from Boston which showed how many of the ministers outwardly Orthodox were at heart Unitarian,—and in this word, as used by an Englishman, there was implied a much lower conception of the divine nature of Christ than that which really prevailed in Boston. Here, thought Dr. Morse, was damaging testimony. He caused the chapter to be reprinted in Boston as a pamphlet, which he proceeded to review in his magazine, The Panoplist. The upshot of his contention was that the time had come for calling things by their right names : if the Boston ministers were Unitarian, let them be known as such, and let the Orthodox deny them Christian fellowship, which up to this time had expressed itself chiefly in pulpit exchanges. Then came the pamphlets to which allusion has already been made. “ Are you of the Boston religion or of the Christian religion ? ” was Dr. Morse’s crucial question ; to which, after the Yankee fashion, a Boston layman, John Lowell, made answer by a counter-question in the pamphlet, “ Are you a Christian or a Calvinist ? ”

Thus the dividing lines were clearly drawn at last, and those who most wished to avoid partisanship and controversy found themselves involved in both. To the Unitarians, especially, a controversy was unwelcome. They objected to the very name of Unitarian. As Dr. G. E. Ellis has expressed their feeling : “ The term Orthodoxy covers the whole faith of one party; the term Unitarian is at best but a definition of one of the doctrinal tenets of the other party.” There were those who preferred and used the name of “ Liberal Christians.” Against this term stood the feeling of those for whom Dr. N. L. Frothingham said : “ To insinuate that others are illiberal is certainly a strange way of proving one’s generosity.” To set themselves off as a sect at all was indeed the last thing they wanted. Their very pride was in individual judgment, — the protestant’s right to everlasting protest. “ If any two of us, walking arm in arm on one side of a street,” said their historian, “ should find that we perfectly accorded in opinion, we should feel bound to separate instantly, and the strife would be as to which should get the start in crossing,” If these differing brothers were drawn into controversy against their will, our sympathy must not be all with them ; the more united body which had to contend with so elusive a foe is also to be remembered. To them, the sermon which William Ellery Channing, the recognized leader of the “ liberals,” preached at the ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore in 1819 must have been a welcome production. It gave them something definite to attack. Under the characteristic text, “ Prove all things ; hold fast that which is good,” it stated clearly the beliefs and disbeliefs of Unitarian Christianity ; — though it does not appear that the name by which his sect was to be known once passed the preacher’s lips.

None had been more reluctant than Dr. Channing to see a new sect founded. As Wesley at first would have kept Methodism within the Church of England, so Channing would have preferred to see the Congregational body undivided, but leavened by Unitarianism. To his opponents, on the other hand, the Baltimore sermon served as the signal gun of a pamphlet war. The Andover professors Leonard Woods and Moses Stuart came briskly on the field with Letters to Unitarians and Letters to Dr. Channing. To Dr. Woods, the Rev. Henry Ware made prompt reply, and typical of the persistency of the combatants stand the titles in Dr. Woods’s collected works of a Reply to Dr. Ware’s Letters (1821) and Remarks on Dr. Ware’s Answer (1822). To follow the warfare — even in such lists of battlefields — would be no small task. Of its rancorous temper on both sides there is too abundant testimony. As in most religious disputes, there was no initial agreement upon the terms of controversy. Each side maintained that the other misrepresented its views, and treated as its own peculiar attributes beliefs and merits common to all Christians. The Unitarians complained especially that the Calvinists refused to interpret fairly or abide by the words of Calvin. On the other hand, a Unitarian historian has written even of the gentle, honest Channing’s Baltimore sermon: “No believer in the Trinity that ever lived, it may be, would admit his statement of it to be correct.” Still another historian, Dr. Ellis, admits with regret “the superciliousness and effrontery, even, with which some Unitarians took for granted that the great change in religious opinions and methods advocated by them could perfect and establish itself in this community as a matter of course. . . . The most assured and confident of the new party did not scruple to declare that Orthodoxy was past apologizing for, and ought to retire gracefully with the bats and owls.”

All this was disturbing enough to a town in which the church, the clergy, and religious matters had been from the first of paramount importance. But to the theological odium and ill - temper were added the complications of the civil law. If there was ground for Orthodox complaint in the administration of the Hollis legacy, there was ample provocation to action at law when the conservatives saw the church buildings, lands, and plate pass into the hands of the liberals. The process of change from the old to the new faith came about in various ways, — frequently through the death or retirement of the old and more conservative minister, and the election of a young apostle of the new school from Cambridge. Thus Lyman Beecher saw and described the means by which the Unitarians won their ends : “ They have sowed tares while men slept, and grafted heretical churches on orthodox stumps, and this is still their favorite plan. Everywhere, when the minister dies, some society’s committee will be cut and dried, ready to call in a Cambridge student, split the church, get a majority of the society, and take house, funds and all.” The minority defeated in such divisions resisted and sometimes established a new parish. To this they felt that the property of the church should pass. But the courts of Massachusetts thought otherwise. In the test case of the Dedham parish (1820), which provided precedents for future decisions, the Supreme Court put itself on record with a ruling highly favorable to the claims generally made by the Unitarian party in such disputes. In 1830 Chief Justice Shaw handed down a decision, in the case of a country parish, that although only two church members remained with the church when the Orthodox minister and all the rest of his people seceded, those two were the church, and retained all its property. Thus Harriet Beecher Stowe, writing of the period of Lyman Beecher’s Boston ministry, regarded such verdicts : “The judges on the bench were Unitarian, giving decisions by which the peculiar features of church organization, so carefully ordained by the Pilgrim Fathers, had been nullified.” Even after the middle of the century an Orthodox critic of the controversy wrote : “ Church after church was plundered of its property, even to its communion furniture and records. We called this proceeding plunder thirty years ago. We call it by the same hard name now. And we solemnly call upon those Unitarian churches which are still in possession of this plunder to restore it. They cannot prosper with it. And we call upon the courts of Massachusetts to revoke these unrighteous decisions, and put the Congregational churches of the state upon their original and proper basis.”

In 1833 the Massachusetts law formally separated the functions of church and town. Thus the disestablishment which had already been virtually accomplished in Boston became a fact throughout the commonwealth. Of course the believers in the old order regarded the whole change with genuine pain and sorrow. How could it be otherwise ? In every process of evolution it is the fate of the minority to suffer something at the hands of the greater number. Here the simple fact — in Boston and the towns most directly under its influence, rather than in the state at large — was that the majority of those who inherited the best traditions of Puritanism had come to prefer a less rigid system of faith, which took its form natural to the time and place, in Unitarianism. It was not through any infusion of new blood into the community that the change came about. In the straitest sect of New Englanders the liberals found their best strength. From whatever cause, they “ looked about them,” as Professor Wendell has said, “ and honestly found human nature reassuring.” It was not in their Calvinistic neighbors that they discovered any such encouragement. Dr. Channing in his Baltimore sermon delivered the following opinion of the Orthodox theology : “ By shocking, as it does, the fundamental principles of morality, and hy 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 consciousness, bitterness, and persecution for a tender and impartial charity. ” Nearly forty years later we find Dr. Ellis making what he justly calls a “ frank assertion : ” “We do not like the strictly Orthodox type of character, certainly not till it has been modified, humanized, and liberalized. We deem it harsh, ungenial, narrow, repulsive, not winning, gracious, expansive, or attractive. It is in our view but an inadequate expression of our ideal of a Christian character.” Here are words as uncompromising as the Orthodox attitude toward “plunder.” They are worth recalling if only as evidences of the honest conviction held by each party, that the other was hopelessly in the wrong. Furthermore, by learning where the reassuring qualities of human nature were not found, we may readily infer where they were.

There is no doubt that as the Boston Unitarians — say of the third decade of the century — looked upon their clergy, they beheld admirable types of Christian gentlemen. They were in an important sense leaders in the community, men of that personal distinction which is due both to breeding and to scholarship, carrying names long identified with the best things of New England life, — Channing, Frothingham, Palfrey, Lothrop, Parkman, Gannett, Pierpont, Lowell, Ripley, — true representatives of Dr. Holmes’s “ Brahmin caste.” In Josiah Quincy’s Figures of the Past it is said : “ On the topmost round of the social ladder stood the clergy ; for although the lines of theological separation among themselves were deeply cut, the void between them and the laity was even more impassable.” From the same source we learn that Dr. Channing deeply regretted this obstacle to familiar intercourse, and envied those who could know men just as they are. “ My profession,” he said, “requires me to deal with such men as actually exist, yet I can never see them except in disguise.”

It was this very desire to get at the essential man which found its expression in the Unitarian sermons of the time. The ministers are described as “ absorbed in the endeavor to apply Christianity to personal conduct, taking men and women one by one and trusting to their influence for the regeneration of society.” The preaching, therefore, was strongly ethical rather than doctrinal; the dignity, not the depravity, of human nature was — as it has since more generally become — the quality which every listener must be taught to recognize in himself, to the end that individual excellence might by degrees redeem the world. Withal, a supernatural element in religion, a divine revelation of Christian truth, were by no means discarded.

Under such teaching — to which the laity really gave attention — a definite type of character was produced. It is described by Dr. O. B. Frothingham in his Boston Unitarianism, and, making all allowance for the fact that he wrote of the men who shared most intimately the influences of his own training, it would probably be hard to frame a more accurate description : “ In meditating on the characters of these men, one is reminded of the good Samuel Sewall. Of course, the softening influence of one hundred and fifty years had produced its effect. There was less reference to divine interposition, less literalism in interpreting Scripture, less bluntness, less superstition, if we may use so harsh a word in speaking of that sweet soul. But there was the same integrity, the same conscientiousness, the same directness of dealing, the same respect for learning, the same reverence for piety, the same punctiliousness of demeanor, the same urbanity. They were not reformers, or ascetics, or devotees. All idealists were visionaries, in their esteem. Those who looked for a ' Kingdom of heaven ’ were dreamers. They went to church; they had family prayers as a rule, though by no means universally. It was customary to say grace at meat. They wished they were holy enough to adorn the communion ; they believed the narratives in the Bible, Old Testament and New.”

That these nineteenth century Samuel Sewalls and their spiritual teachers believed they had attained the best and ultimate form of religion is perhaps not surprising. The most respectable local opinion did everything to confirm this belief. Harvard College and nearly all the influences of wealth and fashion in Boston were powerful allies of the new faith. “ When Dr. Beecher came to Boston,” wrote his daughter, Mrs. Stowe, “ Calvinism or Orthodoxy was the despised and persecuted form of faith. It was the dethroned royal family wandering like a permitted mendicant in the city where once it had held court, and Unitarianism reigned in its stead.” The ministry of Lyman Beecher at the Hanover Street Church, from 1826 to 1832, during the first half of which time his son Edward had charge of the Park Street Church, may be taken to mark the end of the active controversy between the conservatives and the liberals. The spirit with which this “ Philistine giant ” came out of Connecticut to fight for the old order is best expressed in his own words : “ It is here,” he wrote of Boston in 1826, “ that New England is to be regenerated, the enemy driven out of the temple they have usurped and polluted, the college to be rescued, the public sentiment to be revolutionized and restored to the evangelical tone.” It was a difficult task he set himself. “The Unitarians,” he declared, “ with all their principles of toleration, were as really a persecuting power while they had the ascendency as ever existed. Wives and daughters were forbidden to attend our meetings ; and the whole weight of political, literary, and social influence was turned against us, and the lash of ridicule laid on without stint.” Against these obstacles he labored manfully, with sermons, writings, and revival meetings. How terribly vital was the faith for which he contended, one may realize by reading the letters which passed between him and his children struggling toward a full acceptance of that faith. Yet with all his zeal and brilliant gifts it was beyond his power to stem the tide, — to expel the enemy, save the college, and turn public sentiment into its old channels. No single man, or band of men, could have accomplished such results. Even before he came to Boston, the Unitarians, many of them reluctantly, had set up the machinery of a sect, — a name, periodicals of their own, and a definite organization. Less than ten years after his departure Dr. Channing is found lamenting the fact that the denomination, pledged originally to progress, had grown stationary, that at last there was a Unitarian orthodoxy.

The discovery that one set of opinions is orthodox and another not is never made till some new protestant arises with his fresh protest. So the “ Unitarian controversy ” had begun ; so the second controversy — this time within the denomination itself — was introduced by Emerson and Theodore Parker. In 1838 Emerson delivered his Divinity School Address at Harvard, — a declaration of individualism which was held heretical even at the headquarters of heterodoxy. A year later the Rev. Andrews Norton, the interpreter of Scripture whose scholarly word was almost authoritative in the Unitarian body, deplored, in a discourse on The Latest Form of Infidelity, the current tendencies of theological thought. But Emerson, by reason of an imperfect sympathy with his Boston parishioners regarding the administration of the Lord’s Supper, had already separated himself from the Unitarian ministry. He could speak, therefore, as one somewhat outside the fold. Not so Theodore Parker, in 1841 minister of the First Church in West Roxbury. In this year he delivered his South Boston sermon on The Transient and Permanent in Christianity. Parker had been known hitherto chiefly as the most practical and ethical of preachers. He had even taken for his theme on one occasion the Duties, Temptations, and Trials peculiar to Milkmen. In the South Boston sermon, fairly entering the field of doctrinal controversy, he startled all conservative Unitarians by the bold declaration that Christianity needed no support from miracles, and that it could still stand firm, as the absolute religion, even if it could be proved that its founder had never lived.

The disestablishment of the Puritan church in Boston was of course a thing of the past at the time of Theodore Parker’s South Boston sermon. Yet the treatment his radicalism received presents so close a parallel to the effects of the original dissent from Calvinism as to afford a significant sequel to the earlier story. Indeed the very phrases of the outcry of twenty and thirty years before repeat themselves. Channing doubted whether Parker could even be called a Christian. “ Without miracles,” he declared, “ the historical Christ is gone.” From Dr. Frothingham came the complaint: “The difference between Trinitarians and Unitarians is a difference in Christianity ; the difference between Mr. Parker and the Association [of Unitarian ministers] is a difference between no Christianity and Christianity.” A Unitarian layman wrote to a secular paper: “ I would rather see every Unitarian congregation in our land dissolved and every one of our churches occupied by other denominations or razed to the ground than to assist in placing a man entertaining the sentiments of Theodore Parker in one of our pulpits.” The Orthodox looked on, no doubt with a certain natural satisfaction, and asked, “What could you expect?” Some of his fellow ministers raised the question of expelling Parker from their local Association. This was not carried, but, forced to recognize the strong feeling within the Association that he should withdraw, Parker absented himself from the meetings. Meanwhile the old familiar method of “ denying Christian fellowship,” and refusing pulpit exchanges, came into play, and Parker found himself standing practically alone. When James Freeman Clarke showed the independence to exchange pulpits with him, it was with the result that fifteen of his most influential parishioners, with their families, joined themselves to another church.

The Orthodox question, What could you expect? had more reason behind it than the conservative Unitarians, in the security of what they believed an ultimate faith, would have been willing to admit. Theodore Parker, with his indifference to all bonds of tradition and his inability to hold a strong belief without uttering it, needed only the atmosphere in which he lived to make him just what he was. The same conditions which made him, in the telling local phrase, a “ come-outer,” had prepared a very considerable body of come - outers eager to hear and follow him. If the Unitarian movement in Boston stood for any one thing above all others, it was for liberty of thought and speech, the “ dissidence of dissent ” carried over from the time of Burke into the nineteenth century. So it was that Theodore Parker was an entirely characteristic local figure, adding freedom of political thought, when the slavery question became paramount, to his freedom of religious discussion. So it was that the independent Sunday services which he held in Music Hall filled an important place in the lives of the large radical following drawn by his fervid personality to desert the orthodox Unitarianism. Heretic of heretics as he was in his day, his latest biographer, the Rev. John White Chadwick, who may be held to speak as authoritatively as any individual can for his denomination, declares : “ From then till now Unitarian progress has been along the line illuminated by his beacon-light.”

To follow that line would be to depart far from the chief theme of this paper, — the disestablishment of the Puritan church. A full treatment of that theme alone would demand a volume. Here it has seemed sufficient to point out some of its most significant facts and aspects. They belong peculiarly to Boston history. The whole Unitarian movement, in its outward manifestations, has meant much more to Boston than to any other community, in America or elsewhere. With Boston must be reckoned also the eastern part of Massachusetts: much that has been said about the disestablishment applies to the surrounding towns quite as truly as to the city itself. In the remoter parts of Massachusetts, as in the country at large, the movement, judged by outward results, has gone on rather as an eddy by the side of the stream than as the main action of the tide.

The Unitarian controversy itself is now far enough in the past for men to ask and answer the question, Which party won ? If to win means to persuade your antagonist that he is wrong, then we must call it a drawn battle; for it is certain that those who argued for and against the Calvinistic faith ended practically where they began. The very process of arguments served to strengthen their convictions. If Channing could have had his way, to let the liberal leaven work within the established fold, we may well imagine that there never would have been that stiffening of Orthodoxy which only in recent years has begun to relax. How far, on the other hand, the progress of liberalism would have been checked, no man can say.

If victory or defeat is to be measured by denominational growth — a development which had only a secondary interest for those who formed the Unitarian denomination — our later view must differ from that which the middle of the nineteenth century would have presented. In 1850 there were within the limits of what is now Boston thirty-two Unitarian churches; there are in this year (1903) twenty-seven. In 1850 there were within the same limits twenty-one Congregational Trinitarian churches ; to-day there are thirty-three. The rapid growth of the Episcopal and other Trinitarian Protestant churches might also fairly be added to the reckoning. Thus it appears that the Unitarian body was no richer in the seeds of outward growth than its opponents and some of its friends predicted.

But these are all external and arbitrary methods of counting success or failure. Mrs. Stowe herself suggested a truer way of regarding the matter when she wrote : “ This party, called for convenience Unitarian, was, in fact, a whole generation in the process of reaction.” The process has been one in which all Protestant denominations have, in greater and less degree, shared. From the Unitarians few will now withhold the credit of framing the concrete form in which this influence had made itself most effectively felt. Their early claim that Calvinism soon showed signs of modifying itself was duly resented by the Orthodox. In the Commemorative Discourse at the fiftieth anniversary of the Andover Seminary, Dr. Leonard Bacon, looking back upon the divisions which had rent the church, expressed pity for the comfort the Unitarians took in the changes of Calvinistic belief. “ Orthodoxy,” they say, “ has become liberal and has renounced the horrid dogmas which it was charged with holding : and therefore Unitarianism may be regarded as having accomplished its mission. Well, if they are satisfied with this result, let us be thankful for them that they are so easily satisfied. ... If now, at last, our Unitarian friends have really learned, to their own satisfaction, that the New England Orthodoxy does not hold the obnoxious and oft repudiated dogmas which they have so long imputed to it, we may thankfully accept that fact as one more proof that the world moves.” It is in quite a different spirit that the present minister of the New Old South speaks, nearly fifty years later, of “ the vast service that Unitarianism has rendered to the Christian belief of the century ; ” and he writes : “ This overdone sense of depravity, hardened into dogma, stood for centuries against the truth that the morality of God in Christ is the morality for mankind. The truth has at last prevailed, and at this point of belief Christian people everywhere are under an immense debt to the great Unitarian leaders.” It is in admissions, or rather in hearty acknowledgments, of this sort that the true outcome of the Unitarian controversy may be said to lie. And to those who are glad to associate Boston with the progress of mankind, there is satisfaction in the thought that these great Unitarian leaders were eminently the product of local conditions.

M. A. De Wolfe Howe .