Unitarianism in America | Page 5

written by one Leonard Busher, a
poor laborer, and a member of the Baptist church that had recently been
organized there. The writer addressed the King and Parliament with a
statement of his conviction "that by fire and sword to constrain princes
and peoples to receive that one true religion of the Gospel is wholly
against the mind and merciful law of Christ."[6] He went on to say that
no king or bishop is able to command faith, that it is monstrous for
Christians to vex and destroy each other on account of religious
differences. The leading Protestant bodies, especially the established
churches, still held to the corporate idea of the nature of religious
institutions; and, although they had rejected the domination of the
Roman Church, they accepted the control of the state as essential to the
purity of the church. This half-way retention of the corporate spirit
made it impossible for any of the leading churches to give recognition
to the full meaning of the Protestant idea of the worth of the individual

soul, and its right to communicate directly with God. It remained for
the persecuted Baptists and Independents, too feeble and despised to
aspire to state influence, to work out the Protestant principle to its full
expression in the spirit of toleration, to declare for liberty of conscience,
the voluntary maintenance of worship, and the separation of church and
state.
After the Restoration, and again after the enthronement of William and
Mary, it became a serious practical problem to establish satisfactory
relations between the various sects. All who were not sectarian fanatics
saw that some kind of compromise was desirable, and the more liberal
wished to include all but the most extreme phases of belief within the
national church. When that national church was finally established on
the lines which it has since retained, and numerous bodies of dissenters
found themselves compelled to remain outside, toleration became more
and more essential, in order that the nation might live at peace with
itself. From generation to generation the dissenters were able to secure
for themselves a larger recognition, disabilities were removed as men
of all sects saw that restrictions were useless, and toleration became the
established law in the relations of the various religious bodies to each
other.
[Sidenote: Arminianism.]
The conditions which led to toleration also developed a liberal
interpretation of the relations of the church to the people, a broader
explanation of doctrines, and a rational insight into the problems of the
religious life. One phase of this more comprehensive religious spirit
was shown in Arminianism, which was nothing more than an assertion
of individualism in the sphere of man's relations to God. Calvinism
maintained that man cannot act freely for himself, that he is strictly
under the sovereignty of the Divine Will. The democratic tendency in
Holland, where Arminianism had its origin, expressed itself in the
declaration that every man is free to accept or to reject religious truth,
that the will is individual and self-assertive, and that the conscience is
not bound. Arminius and his coworkers accepted what the early
Protestant movement had regarded as essential, that religion should be
always obedient to the rational spirit, that nature should be the test in
regard to all which affects human conduct, and that the critical spirit
ought to be applied to dogma and Bible. Arminius reasserted this

freedom of the human spirit, and vindicated the right of the individual
mind to seek God and his truth wherever they may be found.
As Protestantism became firmly established in England, and the nation
accepted its mental and moral attitude without reserve, what is known
as Arminianism came to be more and more prevalent. This was not a
body of doctrines, and it was in no sense a sectarian movement: it was
rather a mental temper of openness and freedom. In a word,
Arminianism became a method of religious inquiry that appealed to
reason, nature, and the needs of man. It put new emphasis on the
intellectual side of religion, and it developed as a moral protest against
the harsher features of Calvinism. It gave to human feelings the right to
express themselves as elements in the problem of man's relations to
God, and vindicated for God the right to be deemed as sympathetic and
loving as the men who worship him.
While the Arminians accepted the Bible as an authoritative standard as
fully as did the Calvinists, they were more critical in its study: they
applied literary and historical standards in its interpretation, and they
submitted it to the vindication of reason. They sought to escape from
the tyranny of the Bible, and yet to make it a living force in the world
of conduct and character. They not only declared anew the right of
private judgment, but they