UNITARIANS (ante), first appeared, organically, in the United States in King's chapel (now " Stone chapel"), Boston, the first Episcopal church established in New England—where Mr. James Freeman, having been appointed a " lay reader" avowed Unitarian sentiments, inducing the congregation to declare themselves independent, alter the liturgy (1785), and ordain him, by the action of their wardens and vestry, as their pas tor (1787). He ministered to them about fifty years. During this time other ministers, some of them in Harvard college, embraced and preached different shades of the same views, until in 1812 a controversy on the subject arose, between Dr. Worcester and professor Stuart on the one side, and Dr. Channing and prof. Ware on the other. This produced a crisis among the churches of Boston and the vicinity' that had remained nominally evangelical; many of them were rent asunder, and congregations avowedly Unitarian were formed. The American Unitarian association, organized in Boston, 1825, was designed principally to publish and circulate tracts and books. It has also given aid in building churches and sustaining preachers in this country, and has maintained a mis sionary in India in communication with the Brama Somaj and its thousand congrega tions. The first general gathering of American Unitarian ministers was at New York in 1865, where the question of adopting a creed was debated, but met with very little favor. Except the single tenet which their name indicates, there is little in which they are agreed. While some of their churches and ministers are divided from the evangelical by a scarcely visible line, others stand at the extreme of rationalism and naturalism. Their history, they say, is "a history of individual opinions rather than of organizations, or methods of action; it is biographical, not national; it takes the form of heresies, as they are called, rather than creeds; it is marked by protests rather than professions. It has been called by its opponents a system of negations; yet every nega
tion implies an affirmation. The affirmations of the conference were that every man has a right to judge for himself, unbound by any set of articles ; that while professing itself to be a Christian body, it left every one to decide for himself what Christianity is, i.e. to choose among the conflicting views of Christian doctrine and statement that which seemed to him to be true and right." "The stand taken by Unitarians," they say, ‘• is for nature, for human nature, for everything that God has made, as being the manifesta tion of his will as truly as anything written in the Bible. Righteousness and not dogma is the everlasting condition of all welfare in this world and the next; the acceptance of Christianity is not the believing in a creed, but believing with the heart; Jesus Christ, himself, in his life and death, all dogmatizing apart, is the embodiment of his religion ; he holds that supremacy in the beauty and power of his life which makes it of all that has appeared upon earth, the fittest to be imitated and followed; and the man who comes nearest to that is the best Christian." According to the Unitarian Year Book, there were in 1878, 358 churches and 401 ministers. Nearly 100 of the churches were without pastors. The denomination has Much literary culture and wealth; it is socially select, but shows no such rapid growth as characterizes several of the evangelical denomina tions. This is due doubtless to its continual attitude of negation and protest, still the influence of this protest is traceable beyond the Unitarian bounds