There is nevertheless a Unitarian faith which binds Unitarians together in a common pur pose and a sort of common understanding of religious matters. It has been expressed thus: "Just as an association of scientists is consti tuted and sustained not by the adoption of a theory, however certain, but by a common pur pose or aim, so a church is possible by virtue of the common purpose to seek contact with the divine life and to find mutual expression of the experience.° Although Unitarians are free to formulate each his own conclusion there runs through all the consequent 'diversity of opinion strands of a common faith and on all great religious issues there is among them a quite strong agreement. There is space for only a few brief hints on this point.
Unitarians are very modest when it comes to speaking of the Infinite Spirit "in whom we live and move and have our being." To believe in, to have a lively consciousness of God, they do not consider it needful to assume a detailed familiarity. They shrink from frequent repi tition of the name and also from using any word or phrase that suggests an anthropomor phic conception. Unitarians most commonly speak of God as Father, not because that is an adequate or exact term, but because it sug gests the finest, the most universal, the most unselfish elements a man can conceive of or aspire to. Perhaps the term is generally used by them because it suggests that this over shadowing, transfusing spirit is all the time prompting, tempting man to grow up into the divine likeness, just as the noblest of human fathers prompts his child to grow up in the likeness of the father's noblest self. Whether a distinct personality shall be ascribed to the idea of the Divine Fatherhood is a matter which each must decide for himself. They incline to the belief that a definite idea about God cannot be communicated from one to the other by a series of words or by a formula as is a law of science or a principle in mathematics, but that the idea must come from one's intuitive or ac quired understanding. In thinking and speak ing of God Unitarians are guided by the revela tions of science no matter how recent, because they hold that if God is the living principle in things, that spirit which seems to be forever shaping the world of human life toward ever finer issues, then plainly a more accurate under standing of the Divine Spirit will come with every new discovery, every step toward the ulti mate truth of things. Unitarians prefer to speak of their thought of God rather than of a belief in God, for the reason that the former phrase indicates that God is becoming more clearly re vealed and that future generations will know more than is yet known concerning the Divine Spirit. While Unitarians do not believe it pos sible to express their thought or consciousness of God in a phrase there are two Biblical ut terances which they frequently quote as ex pressing their idea. "Hear 0 Israel: the Lord our God is One Lord" (Deus. vi, 4) and "God is Spirit and they that worship Him must wor ship Him in spirit and in truth" (John iv, 24).
The Unitarian idea of Jesus is that he is in all respects a human being. They hold that the idea that Jesus was Ca man and something more" makes his "life of singular purity, eleva tion, courage, sanity and devotion" worthless as an example to beings who are only men.
Also a Christ "conceived of the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary" adds no dis tinction or force to anything Jesus said or did or was. That idea simply makes him one of many mythological beings which form the cen tre of many religions. Unitarians contend that the Christ of miraculous birth is not the histori cal figure of the Gospels, but an imaginary being created by theologians, in the days when there was no knowledge of science or history, for the purpose of meeting the necessities of a very elaborate scheme of saving man from (the wrath to come." They insist, without any sort of reservation, that Jesus was an historical person; that he was the son of Joseph and Mary. This they set forth not • as a dogma but as belief imposed upon them by such facts as are known. They point out that while there are great and irreconcilable differences between the two New Testament stories of Jesus' birth, the only two Gospel narratives that include these stories fully agree in regarding Jesus as the son of Joseph. Thus in the genealogies, Matt. i, 2-6 and Luke iii, 23 ff, the lineage of Jesus is traced through the male line, the au thor of Luke iii, 23, going so far as to say that Jesus °was, as people supposed, the son of Joseph." Then there is the testimony of Ter tullian (cir. A.D. 200) that at that period (the common people think of Christ as a man." The Unitarians accept the verdict of his tory that Jesus was a man. They agree that he may have manifested an unusual degree of divinity or godlikeness — divin ity as they understand it refers to the quality of a person's character and not to the nature of the body— that he may have pos sessed unusual spiritual gifts and psychical powers but they hold this does not warrant them in regarding him as being other than human. There is no disposition among Uni tarians to take each and every idea ascribed by the Gospel writers to Jesus and attribute something like infallible authority to such ideas. It is less the words of Jesus than the spirit he put into all his deeds and relationships which they revere and accept as constituting the (leadership of Jesus." Unitarians hold that the abiding and growing influence of Jesus upon the world proceeds from the excellency of his manhood. His name is an increasing inspira tion because he himself was man enough to stand for wonderfully fine ideals of life in this world and abated not one jot of his devotion to those ideals even when the cross was the penalty for such devotion. The popular idea that Jesus died on the cross as a divine sacrifice finds no place in Unitarian belief. He is Leader rather than Saviour. Instead of believing that by his death he opens the way to a heaven above they believe that the ethical principles according to which Jesus lived point the way whereby man may make this world heavenly. Because the life of Jesus was a man's life, his gospel a man's gospel, Unitarians insist that it is a gospel which every man can and ought to live.