Unitarian thought

Front matter

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME PROM THE

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Preface

This little book is intended for three classes of readers : first, for those to whom Unitarianism is only a name belonging to a body of Christians insignificantly small, but, rather curiously, iacluding a remarkable proportion of men who have been distinguished in English and American life and letters ; second, for those who have distinct, but unfavorable impressions of Unitarians as hostile to most of the cherished beliefs of Christians, perhaps even as wicked and dangerous persons not safely to be intrusted with important private or public duties; third, for Unitarians themselves, to remind them once again of the treasure they have received from their fathers and their obligation to see that it be not diminished. Its purpose is neither to excite controversy nor to settle it, but only to state fairly its own constructive propositions. If in so doing it suggests antagonisms, it does so only to make its own positions clear. The right to differ, the most precious right of the thinking man, which it claims for Unitarians, it recognizes in fuUest measure for all honest minds,

vii viii PREFACE

' Three friends, one a Unitarian theologian, one a Trinitarian theologian, and one a man of pure science without formulated religious opinions, have had the great kindness to read the manuscript of these pages and have approved their publication. To these and to one or two others who have shown an interest in the progress of the work, especially to my colleague, Professor William Wallace Fenn, Dean of the Harvard Divinity School, I beg to express my deepest obligations.

E.E.

Cambiudge, Ociobee, 1910.

Contents

FACE

Preface vii

Introduction i

Introduction

In these days of religious ferment, when the perpetual conflicts of faith and knowledge, of tradition and experience, of authority and independence, of unity and diversity, are being revived and re-fought with increasing energy, it is the part of every community of religious men to give account to themselves anew of the faith that is in them. Only as they can do this can they properly claim the allegiance of their followers or attract inquiring minds from other sources. There is indeed abroad in the religious world as elsewhere a spirit of charity and toleration which we must heartily welcome. No one would openly and consciously invite the early zeal of persecution to work its holy mission again in our modem society. However much the persecuting spirit may still be lying latent in the hearts of men, their tongues are quick to repudiate any such charge. Everywhere we hear the persuasive cry of indifference to details, of surrender of non-esssentials, of modifying the creeds, even of reforming the ancient mechanisms of authority.

All this is well. We are united in a conviction that former times erred in too greatly emphasizing slight and temporary differences in men's thought. We are all glad to-day to believe that such imimportant distinctions are vanishing or at least losing something of their value. We look forward to seeing them diminish still more in number and in importance. But, meanwhile, it is easy to read in the signs of the time a growing impatience with all these peace-making, compromising processes. Together with the cry against over-emphasis on the unimportant there sounds also the deeper note of warning lest we forget the important. In our anxiety not to exalt the temporary we are in danger, so we are being warned, of losing sight of the permanent. For very dread of non-essentials we must not diminish in any way the really and truly essential. In a word, the conflict of our day is not so much whether we are to be sticklers for precious trifles or nobly superior to them; whether we are to reject science or accept it; whether we are to exalt the individual thinker or show him his place under the beneficent direction of authority. It is rather to determine what things are trifles, precious or otherwise. It is to determine the^* true relation between exact knowledge and a worthy faith. It is to fix, as carefully as may be, a just proportion between the freedom of the individual and the

INTRODUCTION 3

claim of authority, iinder whatever form it may be disguised.

The hope of the future does not lie in banishing conflict from the world of religious thought. That endcould be accomplished oniy in one of two ways : either by a decline into general indifference, or by subjecting aU thought to the dictation of an unquestioned authority. Either of these solutions is a solution of despair. In the last analysis they work out to the same dismal result ; for the blind acceptance of an authority is only another expression of personal indifference. No, the hope of the future is not in banishing conflict. It is in the clearing and sharpening of the greater antagonisms, in such a fixing of what are the real essentials, that every thinking man can recognize them and give his allegiance accordingly. In this clearing process the lesser and the fictitious antagonisms will disappear. They will be absorbed in the really great distinctions, which do not rest upon mere logical argument or upon a higher or lower culture, but upon the few fimdamental ideas which have always determined, in the last resort, the attitude of religious parties. Men will learn that when they discuss whether a Christian ought to be baptized by putting water on his head or by plunging him in all over, they are wasting their time in a futile game of words, but that when they argue over again the old question of infant or adult baptism they are dealing with a point of living, vital, and permanent interest.

As this clarifying process goes on it is to be expected that the number of possible groupings of men in religious affairs will diminish. As occurs in political life when old lines of party division have become obliterated by the growth of many new interests that do not fit into the normal scheme of working parties, — after long years of confusion, in some new crisis of the nation's life, the great, permanent issues lead again to new and more significant re-formations, — so it must be with the movement of rehgious thought. After the present long interval of petty sectarian strife, there must come a readjustment along the lines of real and permanent oppositions. Men wiU see that after aU the minor compromises have been made there remain issues on which no compromise is possible. After all the non-essentials have been eliminated, there remain a few things on which men will insist as essentials, and they will insist with all the more zeal because these things are few.

It is too early as yet to be certain as to the signs of this approaching readjustment. It is customary to point to the conscious efforts at Christian unity which many spokesmen of many sects have been urging ; but

INTRODUCTION 5

it must be confessed that so far the actual results of such activity have been meagre enough, — a j" union church" here and there in the country, a softening of the language of controversy, a greater readiness to cooperate in works of himianity, but not much more. Far more obvious is the attempt on the part of existing sects to define their attitude on some few burning questions in such a way as to hold the doubtful allegiance of their members, or, in extreme cases, even to force a severing of that allegiance. Recent heresy trials have been of real service in showing where the controlling powers in several of the most important American religious bodies are willing to make their stand against the rising tide of serious scientific thought. They have done more than this. They have made clear how large and respectable a fraction of the membership in all the "orthodox" sects is retained only by sacrifices of Sincerity which cannot be made forever with impvmity. While on the one hand they have given to the dominant powers within the sects a security they have long been lacking, they have, on the other hand, shown to the hesitating minority the nature of the sacrifices they have been making and have put before them with imperative clearness the question how long they are willing to go on making them.

It is in the hope of contributing a little to the solution of this problem in some individual minds that these pages have been written. They are an attempt to state clearly the attitude of mind in which one of the smallest of the Christian bodies that have come into existence with the Protestant Reformation, stands with reference to present-day religious questions. This vplume cannot in any sense of the word be regarded as an ofl&cial utterance. No person connected with the administration of the Unitarian body has known of its preparation. It has been one of the boasts of Unitarianism that it has never authorized any person or any body of persons to speak for it in any formal or determinate fashion. It shares with Christianity itself the proud claim of being ever incomplete and therefore ever ready to try new aspects of truth to see whether they be in harmony with the old truths. It is only as an individual, a layman of the third generation of American Unitarians, that the author ventures to give expression to what he believes to be, on the whole, the consensus of Unitarians on the main topics of religious discussion.

It is probably true that there are few statements of opinion made here, to which some Unitarians would not take exception. There are certainly many statements with which many non-Unitarians would be heartily in accord. In saying, therefore, as must frequently be said, "Unitarians believe this, or that," it

INTRODUCTION 7

is not implied that all Unitarians believe this in precisely this way, nor is it suggested that only Unitarians so beUeve. What is meant is that, so far as the author can judge, the aggregate of the views and states of mind here described is held by Unitarians more generally, more completely, and more frankly than by any one else. It is this general agreement that forms the excuse for being of the religious association which tries to perpetuate and to extend these views and to maintain these states of mind.

There are two criticisms of Unitarianism so frequently and so confidently made that they have come to be the commonplaces of remark whenever the word is mentioned. One of these criticisms is that Unitarianism is merely a kind of reHgious philosophy. The other is that it is merely a system of morals. Kindly critics are willing to add that it is a philosophy in which they find much to admire and that they are perfectly willing to live by its moral system. What they cannot admit is, that it has any claim whatever upon them as a form of religion. "Unitarianism," it has often been said, "is a very good thing to Uve by, but a very poor thing to die by," the implication being, we may suppose, that the crisis of physical death brings a man into some relation with God essentially different from that which he held during his earthly life. It is like the feeling?;of the child who regularly omitted his morning prayer on the ground that he could take care of himself in the daytime. The Unitarian, beHeving as he does that he is as much bound by the law and the love of God during the daytime of life as he can be in the tender darkness of death, draws no line between the religion by which he will live and that by which he is ready to die. He needs no critic to inform him that neither philosophy nor morality makes a religion. Only, he can accept no religion which goes against a sovmd philosophy or which tries to be independent of an imperative morality.

A third criticism of Unitarianism is that it is a mere bundle of negatives, — that its spirit is " that which ever denies," — that it has nothing positive to offer, but must content itself with always being in the opposition. It is gently admitted that in fact it has done good service in this kind. Just as the opposition in a Parliament serves the nation by wise and continuous criticism of the power actually responsible for government, so, it is admitted, Unitarianism has put a finger on many a weak spot in the doctrine and the practice of other Christian bodies greatly to their advantage and to its own credit. With this negative praise Unitarians have been fain to be content, but it in no way expresses their own view of themselves. It is true that they have been compelled by the very nature of

INTRODUCTION 9

the case to express themselves often in the language of negation. They have done this because it was the only way in which they could make their position clear. Their opponents had possession of the field. It was they, the opponents, who had tied themselves up in a tangle of ideas largely negations of primitive and simple Christianity; so that there was no other way of reasserting great positive truths than to deny these. The truths asserted and reasserted were none the less positive on this accoimt. Unitarians know perfectly well that nothing can live upon negations. No organization can serve even as a refuge from others unless it can show its right to exist by offering positive and permanent principles, by which it is ready to stand or fall. The following pages have been written with these three criticisms constantly before the author's mind. He hopes to have shown that Unitarianism is so truly a form of religion that it ought to satisfy those who make the highest demand upon the religious life. By religion the Unitarian means a recognized dependence of man upon the power greater than himself which he feels at the heart of things, animating, guiding, reconciling all by the action of a will that is neither above law nor subject to it, but is itself Law. If he stopped here, he would indeed incur the charge of being satisfied with a rather abstract philosophical scheme. He lO UNITARIAN THOUGHT

adds to his definition the element of personal service. Toward this power he feels those sentiments of devotion, of gratitude, of duty, of dependence, which lead to rational worship on the one hand and to right dealing with his feUow-man on the other. Thus his philosophy and his morals grow rationally and essentially out of his religion. In it they find their explanation and their support. Lacking this purely religious element, philosophy would be to him a barren abstraction and morality a heartless code.

CHAPTER I How happy is he born and taught

That serve th not another's will, Whose armour is his honest thought

And simple truth his utmost skill.

— Sir Henry WoUon.

If there is anything peculiar in the mental attitude of Unitarians toward religious questions, it is to be found in their understanding of what constitutes belief. There is no word that we use more readily or less carefully. We say we "believe" things that vary so widely in their nature and content as to have no common ground on which belief in them can be based. We believe in our own existence ; we believe the sun will rise to-morrow ; we believe in virtue and in a high tariff. We believe that Napoleon invaded Russia, that Alexander was a great general, that aU men were created free and equal, that Jesus turned water into wine, and so on indefinitely. If we inquire into the reasons for these several " beliefs, " we discover at once that they rest upon the widest diversity of evidence. The mental process which assures us that the sim will rise to-morrow will give us no comfort as to the certainty of our own existence, nor as to the blessings of a protective tarifif. We may establish to our satisfaction the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, but the kind of evidence that satisfies us here will not convince us of the freedom and equality of aU men. Belief, as we loosely employ the word, seems to rest upon an almost infinite variety of kinds of evidence having little or no relation with each other. The only thing common to them is the certainty of the conviction they bring. If the particular evidence is only strong enough, we can, for practical purposes, be just as sure of one kind of fact as of another.

We are concerned here with religious beliefs, and it is therefore of the first importance that we should be clear at the outset what we mean by belief as applied to religious matters. We are inclined to say at first thought that all belief must rest upon evidence, but it needs only a moment's observation to convince us that in fact this is not true. An immense proportion of the most cherished beliefs of mankind rest, not upon evidence, but upon a great variety of other sanctions. Chief of these is the force of tradition. We believe things because persons in whom we "believe" have taught us that they are true. By far the larger part of this teaching is impersonal and involuntary. We get such ideas, we say, by inheritance or by suggestion, and this suggestion comes largely from the same persons from whom we may inherit our instincts. Or, we take our beliefs from the human society in which we happen to be placed. There are family beliefs, race beliefs, national beliefs, intense often in proportion to the absence of any reflection on our own part. When we begin to reflect upon or inquire into such beliefs, we almost certainly weaken their hold on our allegiance.

This is eminently true of religious beliefs. Religion in many of its most impressive forms has been a thing of traditions. It has belonged to races and nations as a part of their common possession. It was theirs, not by virtue of any personal conviction on the part of individuals that this religion was "true," but because of its divine institution certified by signs and wonders, declared by prophetic utterance, demonstrated by success in war and prosperity in peace. Not to accept it would be to declare oneself outside the racial bond within which alone a proper relation with the gods was possible. But then have come times when men began to speculate about the foundations of their religious beliefs, when traditions have no longer sufficed, and when leaders of thought have arisen to remind men that, after all, back of all racial claims there lay deep, permanent instincts of the individual man calling upon him to make clear to himself his own personal relation to the unseen world of spirit. It is on such individual appeal that the great universal religions have based their hold upon the allegiance of mankind. They begin by challenging the claims of the existing racial systems through their bold assertion of certain principles for which they ask acceptance from individuals. With them there comes an entirely new idea into the world, — the idea of personal religious conviction. Whoever accepts their teaching must do so on the groimd of some individual satisfaction he finds in it and which he does not find elsewhere. The Buddhist, the Mohammedan, and the Christian alike reject all religions but their own, because in each case the appeal is absolute. What gives it its peculiar force is precisely that it addresses itself to the individual soul. It is not possible for the true follower of a universal religion to shelter himself behind racial or national institutions. He must, especially in every moment of stress, stand out for himself from the mass of his fellow-believers and confess himself individually to the following of the principles on which the religion he professes is founded. For the Christian it was the following of the Cross.

But now, when a man stands out thus naked and alone to confess his belief in a religious system, how shall he give account to himself and to others of the belief that is in him? It must rest upon something.

It is never quite enough that he repeat the formula: "I believe." It cannot long satisfy even himself; for it hes in the very nature of a belief of conviction that it shall have some means of accounting for itself. That is what constitutes the difference between such belief and the merely accepted forms of tribal worship. True, the martyr of the Cross might go steadily to his death for the mere glory of "The Name." It was his business, not to define, but to suffer. But meanwhile, wherever the Christian message had gone, other men were elaborating its defence, giving the grounds of their adherence to it, and thus preparing the way for thousands more who might be won by their appeal. That is the Christian "Apology," the definition of what Christians in the growing period of the Church's life were willing to stand by and the declaration of the bases on which that willingness rested. It is a curious literature, singularly mingled of wide learning, glowing faith in the highest spiritual truth, childish credulity, fanatical enthusiasm, and plain common sense. The grounds upon which the writers based their faith are manifold in their variety, but they may readily be reduced to two. The appeal is made either to the support of authority or to the witness of the "Spirit." As a rule the two are hopelessly entangled in the argument, but we can generally segarate them sufl&ciently to make it clear to ourselves that the minds of men were working along these two lines.

Even from the very beginning this mingling of the two processes is clearly to be seen. The teaching of Jesus was accepted, not on its merits alone. It was true, because in Jesus men saw the fulfilment of Jewish prophecy, or because it was accompanied by miraculous occurrences, or because it promised relief from the miseries of life. The test of its real power came when men began to see that Jewish prophecy was not being fulfilled, that the working of natural law was not permanently to be interfered with, and that Hfe had as many miseries as ever. Then it became evident that back of all these superficial motives there lay and had lain from the beginning a profound appeal to that other witness for which we have no other name than the witness of the Spirit. So it has been ever since. As soon as there was an accepted record of the sayings of Jesus, these were pointed to as authority. Even earlier perhaps there were writings of his first followers, that served the same purpose of appeal. Then these were repeated and commented upon, and each generation of comment added so much to the volume of evidence that could be quoted in support of the faith. Then there grew along with this body of written authority an organization of men, at first for the guidance and protection of the scattered and doubtful followers of the Master, but soon also for their government. The interpretation of the written and oral tradition passed into the hands of this organization, and when this had been done there was henceforth a visible and tangible human authority to which appeal might be taken on every doubtftil point.

That is in a word the history of the growth within Christianity of the principle of authority in belief. It was a process only too fatally easy to justify. It was supported, honestly and eagerly, by all that element in the Christian society which valued above all else order and regularity. "Canonicity" became a word of supreme importance. Canons of belief, canons of discipline, canons of worship, were piled up one upon another iato a portentous system, the limits of which no man could define or foresee. Out of the wide-open democracy of the earliest Church there was developed the oligarchy of the episcopate and then, in the Roman world, the monarchy of the Papacy, as the most concrete expression of the principle of authority. There was no point of doctrine or of organization upon which an absolute decision could not be reached through an appeal to the supreme disposer of all the interests of Christianity.

The Great Release of the Protestant Reformation did not, on its formal side, produce any immediate or decided change. The appeal to authority was necessary to give countenance to the Reformers as being men of caution and prudence rather than men 'of turmoil and rebellion. The only immediate difference was that they substituted for the authority of a human ruler the authority of an unchanging book. It seemed as if the minds of men were to be bound again in a slavery as much worse than the former as the authority was more rigid. So far as the formal attitude of the reformed churches went, there was certainly little cause for congratulation. But then came out what had always been latent in the principle of Christianity itself. Deep under all the bitter conflicts of the two confessions as to the merits of their respective authorities there ran now an ever-widening and strengthening current of thought independent of them both. More and more men began to caU upon the silent witness of the "Spirit" as the true basis of religious faith. And, as they sought to work themselves out into clearness along this road, they found, looking back, that they were only the latest prophets in a series unbroken from the beginning. The authorities had tried in vain to quench the Spirit. Their seductions and their terrors aUke^^had failed to repress the invincible instinct of the human soul to seek its deepest satisfactions in its own way.

Thus the attitude of Unitarians toward the whole subject of belief is historically prepared for. They confess themselves in the fellowship of those who in all ages have tried to maintain the rights of the Spirit as against the claims of authority, no matter by what name this may have been called. They realize perfectly how appealing the claim of authority is, how it helps to solve all doubts, reconcile all oppositions, and leave the individual free to devote himself to. the practical sides of religion without troubling himself about tlie real bases of his faith. They see all this, but it appears to them to be a subtle form of temptation to intellectual and spiritual sloth. Those who 3deld to it seem to them to be seeking the lower kinds of satisfaction, to be evading a responsibility that is laid upon them by the possession of an intellectual and spiritual nature of their own, a nature so emphatically their own that they cannot entrust its highest satisfactions to the care of any one else. This is what they mean by the sanctions of the Spirit. This word "Spirit" is a large word, comprehending so much that it may readily be mistmderstood as expressing little or nothing. It is open to the charge of vagueness, and it is therefore incumbent upon those who use it to make it as definite as they can.

The more general definition of the Spirit, as we are now using the word, has already been given. It is the opposite of authority. It is that silent witness to the truth whereby we become certain of things that we cannot otherwise prove. We are, indeed, helped and comforted if we can find that others are impressed by these same truths. Especially if we can find ourselves supported by a long series of similar experiences, we are so much the more confident that the witness we are bound to believe is not a false witness and that we ourselves are not abnormal in our ways of reaching truth. But, if such support fails us, if we have to stand alone in our own day and can find no fellowship in the past, still we are none the less bound. We may revise our own thought as often and as carefully as we will. We may humble ourselves as much as we can before the teaching of those who ought to be better and wiser than we ; but, after all, if it comes to standing alone with the witness of the Spirit on our side, we dare not shelter ourselves behind the wisdom or the virtue of all the ages. The armor of our honest thought must suffice for us against all temptations to the comforts of conformity. This independence of all formal authority is thus the Unitarian's first demand as he approaches the subject of religious belief.

The second is that religious truth shall not conflict with any other, or with all other forms of truth. He does not mean by this that it shall be subject to the same kind of tests. He is quite aware that it cannot be demonstrated like a proposition in mathematics. It cannot be illustrated by experiment or observation like an alleged fact of natural science. It cannot be proved by syllogisms like a thesis in formal logic. It cannot be established by himian witness like an event in history or a document in law. The witness of the Spirit is something different from all these. And yet we have a right to demand that it shall not contradict any one or all of them. The Unitarian could not accept a religious statement which would imply that two and two made five, or that the same matter could be in two places at the same time. He caimot believe that from sound premises there can foUow a false conclusion, nor woidd he accept a statement of fact within the range of human competency if it were contradicted by credible human evidence. To do any of these thiags would be to act against his fundamental conviction of the unity of all truth. As he approaches any given proposition in religion he tests it by its agreement with this basic law. If it violates this, then, no matter how strongly it may appeal to his sentiment, he must reject or modify it.