Our Unitarian Gospel | Page 4

old church, which
I will pause long enough to repeat, because there is a principle in it as
well as a great deal of wit. They kept there the old English church
service, except that it was purged, according to their point of view,
from all Trinitarian belief. It is said that Dr. Bellows, who was
attending a service there some years ago, had with him an English
gentleman as a visitor. This man picked up the service, looked it over,
and, turning to Dr. Bellows, with a sarcastic look on his face, said, "Ah
I see that you have here the Church of England service watered."
Whereupon Dr. Bellows, with his power of ready wit, replied, No, my
dear sir, not watered, washed. King's Chapel, then, was the first
Unitarian church in this country. But the number grew rapidly, and in a
few years perhaps half, or more than half, of the old historic Puritan
and Pilgrim churches in New England had become Unitarian, including
in that number the old First Church of Plymouth.
Now, before I go on to discuss the principles underlying our movement,
I wish to call your attention to a few more names; and I trust you will
pardon me for this. There is no desire for vain-glory in the enumeration.
I simply wish that people should know, what only a few do know, who
have been Unitarians in the past, and what great names, leading
authoritative names in the world's literature and science and art, find
here their place.
Among the Fathers of the Revolution, all the Adamses, Dr. Franklin,

Thomas Jefferson, and many another were avowed Unitarians. And,
when we come to modern times, it is worth your noting that all our
great poets in this country, Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes,
Lowell, and in this city Stedman, are Unitarian names.
Then the leading historians, Bancroft, Motley, Prescott, Sparks, Palfrey,
Parkman, and John Fiske, are Unitarians. Educators, like Horace Mann,
like the last seven presidents of Harvard University, Unitarians. Great
scientists, like Agassiz, Peirce, Bowditch, Professor Draper, Unitarians.
Statesmen and public men, like Webster, Calhoun, the Adamses, the
Hoars, Curtis. Two of our great chief justices, Marshall and Parsons.
Supreme Court Judges, Story and Miller. Literary men, like Whipple,
Hawthorne, Ripley, and Bayard Taylor; and eminent women, such as
Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, Helen Hunt
Jackson, Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe.
I mention these, that you may know the kind of men, ethical, scientific,
judicial, political, literary, who have been distinguished, as we think
from our point of view, by being followers of this grand faith of ours.
And now I wish you to note again, what I hinted at a moment ago, that
it is not an accident that Unitarianism should spring into being in the
modern world coincidently with the great movements of liberty in
France and England, and the outburst that culminated in our own
Revolution and the establishment here of a State without a king as well
as of a church without a bishop.
Wherever you have liberty and education, there you have the raw
materials out of which to make the free, forward looker in religious
thought and life.
Now what are the three principles out of which Unitarianism is born?
First, I have already intimated it, but I wish to emphasize it again for a
moment with an addition, Liberty. Humanity at last had come to a time
in its history when it had asserted its right to be free; not only to cast
off fetters that hampered the body, not only to dethrone the despots that
made liberty impossible in the State, but to think in the realm of
religion, to believe it more honorable to God to think than to cringe and

be afraid in his presence.
Second, coincident with the birth of Unitarianism is an enlargement
and a reassertion of the conscience of mankind. A demand for justice.
Just think for a moment, and take it home to your hearts, that up to the
time when this free religious life was born, according to the teaching of
all the old creeds, justice and right had been one thing here among men
and another thing enthroned in the heavens. The idea has always been
that might made right, that God, because he was God, had a right to do
anything, though it controverted and contradicted all the ideas of
human righteousness; and that we still must bow in the dust, and accept
it as true.
If I could be absolutely sure that God had done something which
contradicted my conscience, I should say that probably my conscience
was wrong. I should wait at any rate, and try to find out. But, when I
find that the condition of things is simply