UNITARIANS. It has been claimed with justice that Unitarianism is older than the Christian Church. The Jews themselves, of course, were Unitarians, and it can hardly be doubted that the Jewish Christians remained such for a long time. No emphasis is laid on Trini tarianism (see TRINITY) in the writings of the New Testament. The doctrine is one that was developed gradually by the Church. And it was not accepted with out protest. The stubborn resistence of Arius, which brought him into conflict with Athanasius, is famous (see ARIANISM). Unitarianism is the more modern form of protest, and it is not identical with that of Arius. In any case, the early movement failed, and a Trinitarian Creed was formulated, which became the authoritative religion of the Christian Church. For some centuries Trinitarianisui was too strongly entrenched and too powerfully supported to be resisted with any hope of success. A change came at the time of the Reformation, not because the Reformers were anti-Trinitarian, but because criticism and questioning along one line led to criticism and questioning along others. The time was ripe for the birth of Modern Unitarianism. Among the students who were seized by the ardour of the Reforma tion was Servetus, the Spaniard. He is commonly re garded as a Unitarian. In some respects he was, but his system has been described by M. Reville as a crude mixture of rationalism, pantheism, materialism, and theosophy. His teaching was so little to the taste of the Reformers that in 1553 he was burned at the instance of John Calvin. More in the line of direct development of Unitarianism were L(elius Socinus and his nephew Faustus Socinus (1539-1604), though Unitarians are not described correctly as Socinians (q.v.). J. W. Chadwick thinks there is no name of which Unitarians have more reason to be proud than that of Socinus, so great a leap did the uncle and nephew of this name make " out of the darkness of the ancient and the medieval. into the light and beauty of the modern world." But the first organised Unitarian Church arose in 1565 in Poland. a country remarkable at that time for its religious liberty, whither Socinus and Georgio Blandrata had fled. " The history of Polish Unitarianism is a history of efficient organization, and a success so positive that it drew upon Itself the arm of persecution with its utmost strength, a decree of expulsion marking the first centennial of Blandrata's arrival in Poland " (Chadwick). From Poland Unitarianism spread to Transylvania, where It met with remarkable success. In 1660 the Unitarians were driven out of Poland. In Transylvania also great efforts were made to repress them, but though the number of their churches was greatly reduced, they succeeded in maintaining themselves. After 1857 they began to revive, and they are now growing stronger continually. Their Church government is partly Episcopalian, partly Congregational. In England a number of persons were burned in the sixteenth century for holding views similar to those of the Unitarians. In 1654 all the anti trinitarian books of John Biddle (1615-1662) were ordered to be burned by the common hangman. But in the seven teenth century such efforts at repression had little chance of success, for the objectionable views were largely shared by such men as John Milton, John Locke, and Sir Isaac Newton. Nevertheless, the first Unitarian Church in England was not established until 1774. Its founder was Theophilus Liiidsey (1723-1808), a clergyman of the Church of England, " one of the holiest of men, one of the gentlest, purest, truest that the world has ever known " (Chadwick). He resigned his living, and started the first Unitarian Church in Essex Street, Strand. The chapel was afterwards removed to Kensing ton, and the Essex Street establishment was converted into Essex Hall, the headquarters of the British and Foreign Unitarian Association. In 1787, under James Freeman (1759-1833), who also had changed his views, King's Chapel, Boston, " the oldest Episcopal Church in New England, became the first Unitarian Church of America " (Schaff-Herzog). In England a great impetus was given to the movement by Joseph Priestley (1733 1804). Priestley, famous both as a man of science and as a theologian, was educated for the presbyterian ministry, and had charge of various churches. But his views on the inspiration of the Bible and on the doctrines of the Church became very liberal, and in 1791 for these, as well as for liberal views In politics, his house in Birmingham was destroyed by a mob. in 1794 he emigrated to New York. In Philadelphia he was instru
mental in organising a Unitarian Church. In America nearly all the members of the new Church were drawn from the Congregationalists, just as in England they were from the Presbyterians. Here a great leader arose in the person of William Ellery Channing (17S0-1S42). Greater as a preacher and a practical reformer than as a theologian, his preaching was " so fervent that about half the churches in Massachusetts accepted Uni tarianism, and it numbered among its adherents many statesmen. writers, and thinkers, eminent throughout the world " (Brooke Herford). These included Longfellow, Lowell, and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). At Lexington, Massachusetts, was born Theodore Parker (1810-1860), a leader who had studied well all the philo sophical and critical literature of the time. J. W. Chad wick thinks that, compared with the philosophy of Schelling or Fichte, that of Theodore Parker was as a mountain to a cloud. To him " God, Immortality, the Moral Law were intuitional certainties of irrefragable stability. It was as if he had set aside a public super natural revelation only to substitute for it a private one in each several mind and heart." He was too out spoken to please even the Unitarians of his own time, but he is now regarded as one of the chief representatives of modern Unitarianism. In England the greatest modern representative of Unitarianism has been James Martineau (1805-1900), a philosopher as well as a theologian. The Unitarians do not impose a creed or dogmatic articles of faith on the members of their con gregations or on their ministers. Their churches for the most part have free and open trusts. This accounts for considerable differences of belief among them. " Some Unitarians believe that Jesus Christ wrought miracles; others reject as legendary those parts of the Bible which record such ' wonderful works,' and yet claim to be 'Christians'; some pray to their God through Christ '; others humbly seek direct access to the spirit of their Heavenly Father, and in the most solemn moments of their lives would be ' alone with the Alone '; some call themselves Christian Theists,' or simply Theists '; others cherish a firm faith that a special and peculiar revelation of the will of God was made through an accredited and supernaturally endowed ' Messiah' " (H. W. Crosskey). It is a principle with all alike that the human intellect must be free to reject what is un reasonable. And reason requires them, they hold, to believe in one God, whose one supreme demand of them is a noble life, and in a Kingdom of Heaven the realiza tion of which is possible In the present life. It requires them to believe in the rise rather than in the fall of man. It requires them above all to believe in the goodness of God. " Parker's great premise, from which flowed forth the sum of his religion. was God is absolutely good.' And by that he meant good with the same goodness that man strives after and can admire. For did he not find in all men, and in himself most deeply, a wondrous spiritual sense by which, when the brave, the noble, the pure, the generous, the holy, was once •set before them, they admired and revered, and by which, conversely, when baseness and cowardice, and avarice, and cor ruption, were truly painted for them, they dissented and abhorred? And how could such sense lie so deeply engrained in man, unless it came to him, an inalienable gift and inheritance, from Him who created man? Parker knew in this way that, whatever more that awful Power which men name God might be, by whatsoever immensity he might transcend the scope of the bounded understanding of mankind, that, at least God must be; he knew that any theology which made God act in such fashion as an enlightened conscience would condemn in the human father of children, capriciously, cruelly, revengefully, must be by that very fact a lie, and that they who thought to hold off such criticisms by rebuking the man that would dare judge God, quibbled with con science, and aimed a death-blow at true religion " (R. A. Armstrong). Theodore Parker liked to speak of God not only as " Our Father," but also as " Father and Mother " (compare the " Father-mother God " of Christ ian Scientists). See R. A. Armstrong, Latter Day Teachers, 1881 (the quotation is from a reprint for the Theodore Parker Centenary, 1910); J. W. Chadwick. " The Unitarian Church in England and America," in Common-Sense Theology, 1893; Brooke Herford, A Brief Account of Unitarianism, 1903; Schaff-Herzog; J. H. Blunt; Henry W. Crosskey, "The Unitarians " in R.S.W.