Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
social sympathies. In Channing’s excellent phrase, it discovered the
apotheosis of religion in “the adoration of goodness.” It issued in
conduct because it developed character. The highest testimony to the
excellence of the faith is the noble company of men and women who
subscribed to its creed. And yet after all, Unitarianism was rather
an attitude of mind than a creed. It was the recovery of the original
principle of New England Separatism, lost during the long years of
orthodox conformity--the principle of the open mind and free inquiry.
Let each devout soul, each group of fellow believers, Unitarianism
announced, seek the truth where it may be found; let each give to it
such outward form as best reveals its divine nature; not seeking to
impose a particular interpretation upon others, but each taking upon
himself full responsibility for his spiritual welfare. Authority it
regarded as the prop of the weak; dogma, as the body of a faith that
is dead. As free souls, mature and self-reliant, the Unitarians would
be their own authority, would fashion their own creed. The Scriptures
lie open and the heedful eye will discover God’s revelation in their
pages. The deeper spirit of Unitarianism is not inadequately embodied
in the text, “Search the Scriptures, for they are they which testify
of me.” No abler or more devout Scripturists ever preached in America
than the Unitarian ministers, and if bolder souls like Theodore Parker
went further than others, if their free handling of old interpretations
gave offense to the timid, that fact provided no sanction to coerce or
stifle free inquiry. Toleration of differences, respect for devout free
thought--this return to the position of Roger Williams two centuries
before was the vital principle of Unitarianism. Like him, the Unitarian
was a seeker, open-minded and free. Others might be intolerant, others
might regard themselves as the sole custodians of truth, but not he.
But if the Unitarians who followed Channing were liberals in
religion, they were conservatives in well-nigh everything else.
Amongst the laity the adoration of goodness was sufficiently tempered
by Yankee thrift to keep it from interfering seriously with the
practical business of getting on in the world; and in consequence
the new faith gathered its supporters from amongst the prosperous
rather than the needy, from Federalists rather than Democrats. The
commercial dominated the intellectual and emotional in their prim
and somewhat cold congregations. “The Unitarians,” it was commonly
said, “were the cult of the arrived.” As successful men, these Boston
merchants and manufacturers did not believe that they were the sons
of Adam, children of iniquity. They thought better of themselves and
of God than Calvinism permitted them to think; “one who was born in
Boston,” the current jest put it, “had no need to be born again.”
Generous in all approved philanthropies these Unitarian laymen might
be, but emotionally religious they were temperamentally incapable of
being. Until the infusion of the rich sap of transcendentalism, that
gave it new life and brought it to bloom, Unitarianism was in grave
danger of dying at the root. But with the spread of the philosophy
of intuitionalism, the negative individualism of Unitarianism became
positive, broke with the respectable conservatism of commercial
congregations, and overflowed in a rich and generous faith. Authority,
dogma, creed, were swept away by this new faith in an indwelling
divinity, with its intuitive sanctions, and Unitarianism merged in the
larger movement of the renaissance.
II • William Ellery Channing
To the austerely spiritual Channing the guiding principle of
Unitarianism was identical with the spirit of primitive New England
separatism--the principle of freedom in religious matters, the
individual speaking his mind frankly, shepherd and flock feeding as
they would, without fear and without coercion. The soul is responsible
to itself and its own conscience; there are no orthodoxies and no
heterodoxies, but a duty is laid upon the individual to seek truth
with an open mind and be steadfast in its service. It was this spirit
of open-minded liberalism that led him along the path of unmilitant
individualism, seeking freedom only to the end of righteousness, and
counting righteousness the fine flower of freedom; desiring peace and
universal fellowship; loath to found a sect; yet driven by those who
denied freedom to themselves as well as others to become the champion
and leader of a great schism that sundered the traditional unity of
Congregationalism, and erected a new faith on the altars of the old.
Channing’s heritage was drawn from the deepest wells of New England
idealism; and filtered through his finely ethical mind it emerged pure
and limpid, the living waters of the new faith. His noble preëminence
was due to the simple spirituality of his nature. Intellectually,
he was neither great nor original. In scholarship he was distinctly
inferior to academic theologians like Andrews Norton and to omnivorous
students like Theodore Parker. Almost wholly introspective he was
influenced slowly by world-currents of thought, and such alien ideas
as found lodgment in his mind took on a native form and color from
his own convictions. Nevertheless though his meditations revolved
about the pole-star of his own experience, his theology cautiously
took shape under the pressure of two ideas that came to him from the
latter years of the eighteenth century--the ideas of God’s beneficence
and of man’s excellence. Once lodged in his mind, those ideas led to
quite revolutionary consequences, not only in their disintegrating
effect upon the Calvinistic dogmas in which he had been reared,
but in the generous romanticism which they bequeathed to Unitarian
theology. His intellectual development was late and halting, yet that
he liberated himself at all was remarkable considering the world that
bred him--Newport, frequented by wealthy planters and enriched by the
slave trade, Cambridge and Boston then in the stagnancy of Federalist
complacency. Of the same generation with Robert Treat Paine and Josiah
Quincy, only a few years older than Rufus Choate and Edward Everett,
as a boy sitting under the preaching of Samuel Hopkins--the rugged
expounder of the Hopkinsian doctrine of willing to be damned for the
glory of God, a doctrine so repugnant to the major tenets of Channing’s
theology--he belonged by temperament and training to the parochial
world that accounted Fisher Ames a great orator, and looked with
suspicion on the new century that was crowding in on its comfortable
preserves.
From the deep New England ruts Channing pulled himself with incredible
difficulty. His frequent reactions almost kept pace with his progress.
For years he oscillated between freedom and dogma, now dominated by
the Hopkinsian influence and thrown back upon a morbid Calvinism by
ill health; then resolutely casting off the evil spell; until the year
1815, when the conservative wing declaring war upon the liberals,
he was drawn into the controversy and took upon himself the burden
of defending the liberal cause. He was then thirty-five, but it was
not till four years later, in the celebrated Baltimore sermon at the
ordination of Jared Sparks, that he offered a definitive statement
of the new theology. The sermon brought him wide fame and fastened
upon him the leadership of the Unitarian movement. Comment upon the
new doctrines was widespread, and the circulation of the sermon in
pamphlet form, according to a late biographer, “was not exceeded by any
American publication until in 1830 Webster made his memorable reply
to Hayne” (John White Chadwick, _William Ellery Channing_, p. 147).
The creative influence of that sermon in clarifying certain doctrines
of Unitarianism and integrating the society should not blind us to
the fact that it embodies only a portion of Channing’s theology--the
idea of God’s beneficence. It is a reasoned attack upon Trinitarian
Calvinism, upon those dogmas which reveal--in Channing’s expressive
phrase--“how mournfully the human mind may misrepresent the Deity”; but
it takes no account of the idea which later he came to place first--the
idea of man’s excellence.
Finer than the Baltimore sermon in its restrained eloquence--an
eloquence that burns with an intensity rare in Channing--and in its
dramatic exposition of the doctrine of the atonement, is the sermon
entitled _Unitarian Christianity most Favourable to Piety_, delivered
in 1826 at the dedication of the second Unitarian church in New York
City. In this sermon Channing made use of a daring comparison which
startled his friends and gave mortal offense to orthodox Calvinists. It
is probably the most dramatic passage to be found in his writings, and
it so well exemplifies the temper of the controversy that it deserves
quotation. After discussing the Edwardean philosophy of infinite
punishment and the nature of atonement, he proceeded:
Let me, then, set it before you, in new terms, and by a new
illustration; and if in so doing, I may wound the feelings of some
who hear me, I beg them to believe, that I do it with pain, and
from no impulse but a desire to serve the cause of truth.--Suppose,
then, that a teacher should come among you, and should tell
you, that the Creator, in order to pardon his own children, had
erected a gallows in the centre of the universe, and had publicly
executed upon it, in room of the offenders, an Infinite Being, the
partaker of his own Supreme Divinity; suppose him to declare, that
this execution was appointed, as a most conspicuous and terrible
manifestation of God’s justice, and of the infinite woe denounced
by his law; and suppose him to add, that all beings in heaven and
earth are required to fix their eyes on this fearful sight, as the
most powerful enforcement of obedience and virtue. Would you not
tell him, that he calumniated his Maker? Would you not say to him,
that this central gallows threw gloom over the universe; that the
spirit of a government, whose very acts of pardon were written in
such blood, was terror, not paternal love; and that the obedience
which needed to be upheld by this horrid spectacle, was nothing
worth? Would you not say to him, that even you, in this infancy and
imperfection of your being, were capable of being wrought upon by
nobler motives, and of hating sin through more generous views; and
that much more the angels, those pure flames of love, need not the
gallows and an executed God to confirm their loyalty? You would all
so feel, at such teaching as I have supposed; and yet how does this
differ from the popular doctrine of atonement? (_Works_, Vol. III,
pp. 197-198.)
In seeking an explanation of Channing’s break with New England
orthodoxy--a breach that widened greatly with years, coming to embrace
politics and economics as well as theology, alienating many of his
own congregation and bringing acute grief to him--one can scarcely
over-emphasize the influence of his Virginia experience. During
the twenty-one months that he spent on the southern plantation,
painfully isolated and lonely, he grappled seriously with a body of
thought from which the environment of his youth had pretty much shut
him away. Virginia in 1798 was ardently Jeffersonian, and French
romantic philosophy was a commonplace in Virginia libraries. While
Channing never went over wholly to Jeffersonianism, but retained
certain Federalist prejudices after the old foundations had turned to
quicksand under his feet, he there began a long process of speculative
brooding that was to carry him far from the political principles of
Boston. French revolutionary thought provided his chief intellectual