UNITARIANISM, a system of Christian thought and re ligious observance, deriving its name from its doctrine of the single personality of God the Father, in contrast with the Trini tarian conception of His threefold being as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But the significance of the movement is imperfectly in dicated by its name. Its real importance lies in its teachings concerning mankind and the nature and work of Jesus Christ.
Free Study of the Bible.—The movement cannot be traced to any single teacher or any specific date; it had its sources in the thoughts of many minds in many lands.
During the 17th century separate religious communities arose in Poland (now extinct) and in Hungary (Transylvania, now part of Rumania), standing for Unitarian Christianity, though not under that name; and afterwards in England and in America, when the name came into general use. These societies took seriously the rule of "the Bible and the Bible only." And at the end of the following century we find the English Unitarians, in the petition presented to parliament in 1792, explaining their position by saying that they conceived it to be "their duty to examine into and interpret the Holy Scriptures for themselves, and their right publicly to declare the result of their enquiries." A Two-fold Tradition.—In the history of the movement two factors stand out as equally characteristic, distinctive and essen tial: the demand for personal religious freedom, and the demand for clear, distinct and coherent religious thought and teaching.
(I) The demand for personal religious freedom, so far as Eng land is concerned, can be traced directly to the Act of Uniformity (1662), under which 2,000 clergymen were deprived of their livings. Richard Baxter (q.v.) represents the spirit of the ejected ministers at its best. He had no idea of complete toleration; but he stood for the endeavour to find a basis of agreement by reduc ing the number of the essentials and fundamentals. The influence of this endeavour, with its implied comprehensiveness and recog nition of degrees of certainty, went on working after his death, and led to results undreamt of in his day. This history of a large number of Churches in England, whose members now profess Unitarianism, begins with the ejection of 1662.
(2) Some of the ejected clergy, in the exercise of their free dom, arrived at the conviction that "the Trinitarian scheme" (by which they meant the whole scheme of salvation, with its doc trines of inherited guilt, eternal punishment, and vicarious atone ment) was no part of essential Christianity. The advocacy of
Joseph Priestley (q.v.), and the withdrawal of Theophilus Lind sey (1723-1808) from the Church of England to establish a Unitarian church in London (Essex street, Strand, 1774) aroused the liberal dissenters to consider their position, and to a large extent they found that they had grown into Unitarian Christianity.
There were also various interests which they had in common, in which they were threatened with serious injury. The penal laws against deniers of the Trinity were not repealed until 1813, and the Corporation and Test Acts (against all dissenters from the National Church) not until 1828. The general desire for more united and effective action led to the formation of the British and Foreign Unitarian Association in 1825, by the amal gamation of three older societies for literature (1791), mission work (1806), and civil rights (1818).