By a mere coincidence the British and Foreign Unitarian Association was
founded almost on the same day in 1825 as the American Unitarian
Association. This step evidently implies a great change in Unitarian
affairs since the times of that early Dissent towards which attention
has been previously directed. We must now endeavour to trace the change
in detail.
It will be remembered that tendencies to Anti-trinitarian thought--using
that term to cover all the varieties of heretical opinion on the
subject--were manifested both within the established Church and without.
As regards the latter phase, the evidence is clear that, whatever the
doctrinal 'subscription' was worth which Dissenting preachers had to
make, there was a decided lapse from the orthodox standard on the part
of a considerable number. This lapse, however, was for the most part
left obscure while the pulpits resounded with 'plain, moral discourses.'
Now and again, one bolder than the rest ventured to discuss controverted
points of doctrine. Such a man was _Joseph Priestley_ (1733-1804), whose
career is interesting as an illustration of the growth of opinion, and
especially important in regard to the denominational advance of
Unitarianism. He began life as a Calvinistic Independent, and became
Arminian, Arian, and Humanitarian in turn. His devotion to science is
well known, and he ranks with Lavoisier as an original discoverer of
oxygen. He was an indefatigable student, a voluminous writer, a ready
controversialist; and though his speaking was marred by imperfect
utterance he attained to considerable influence in public address. No
Unitarian leader hitherto has displayed more activity, and few, if any,
have possessed greater controversial ability than he. His opinions,
indeed, were in some respects peculiar to himself; he called himself a
Socinian, but it was with a difference, and no Unitarian to-day would
endorse some of his main positions. But his work for the cause was
invaluable, and his personal character is held in the highest esteem.
Originally he would have preferred that the Unitarians should remain as
a 'liberal leaven' in the churches; eventually he became the chief
organizer of Unitarian worship and propaganda.
The first 'Unitarian Church,' however, was due to a clergyman,
_Theophilus Lindsey_ (1723-1808). After long and arduous efforts to
secure relaxation from the doctrinal subscription imposed on the clergy,
Lindsey resigned his living at Catterick, in 1773, facing poverty and
hardship with a courage that elicited warm commendations, though few
were found to imitate the example. In spite of the terrors of the law,
now becoming a dead letter, he opened a Unitarian chapel in Essex
Street, London, in 1774. The service was on the episcopal model, but
with a liturgy adapted to 'the worship of the Father only.' This feature
has been claimed to be the distinctive characteristic of modern
Unitarianism. It will be remembered that Socinus inculcated a sort of
subordinate worship of Christ, and the Arians of course held to the same
practice, Humanitarianism, the view that Jesus Christ was truly a man
and in no sense a deity, obviously made it impossible to offer him the
adoration due to God alone. This view had been slowly spreading since
the days of Lardner; Priestley, Lindsey, and the active men of the party
generally shared it. There were exceptions still, however. _Dr. Richard
Price_ (1723-91), a London Presbyterian divine of great eminence,
remembered as one of the founders of actuarial science, held by his
Arianism to the last; this did not prevent him from lending a hand in
the organization of the Unitarian forces, but there was for a time some
difficulty on the subject. The more ardent professors of the new
doctrine of 'the sole worship of the Father' were for excluding the
Arians from fellowship, and one of the societies then formed actually
adhered to a rather offensive formula on the subject till about 1830.
A considerable number of liberal Churchmen of the laity, including some
of rank, supported Lindsey's movement. An indication of changing moods
is given in the fact that in 1770 an Act was passed permitting the
Dissenting ministers to preach provided that they made a declaration of
belief in the Scriptures as containing the revealed will of God. This
was considered by many a welcome relief from the requirement of the
Toleration Act that the minister must subscribe to the doctrinal
articles of the established Church, and it was certainly a much less
definite test. Priestley, for his part, however, regretted the change;
the old subscription was in reality ceasing to be enforced, and he was
afraid lest persecuting vigilance would set in again. As a matter of
fact, the Act of 1779, long obsolete, has never been repealed, but very
few people are aware of its existence. Priestley's many controversies
tended to excite a good deal of interest, some of it more than
unfriendly, in the new movement. In 1791, when a party of Unitarians
dined at Birmingham in celebration of the French Revolution, serious
riots broke out, and Priestley, who was then minister of the New Meeting
there, was made a principal victim though he was not one of the diners.
His house and library were burned, and he barely escaped the violence of
the mob. Other residences were also destroyed, and the Old and New
Meetings were burnt down. Ultimately, in 1794, Priestley sought asylum
in America from the ill-will that pursued him even in London. Bishop
Horsley, one of his sturdiest opponents in controversy, said, 'the
patriarch of the sect is fled.'
It was earlier in the same year that the first organized Unitarian
propaganda took shape in a _Unitarian Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge_. District unions were soon formed, and in 1806 a Unitarian
Fund was raised by means of which the first itinerant missionary of the
body, _Richard Wright_ (1764-1836), was sent literally from end to end
of Great Britain. In 1813, Unitarians were set free from legal penalties
by the repeal, so far as they were concerned, of the exceptive clauses
of the Toleration Act, this relief coming twenty years after Charles
James Fox had tried to secure it for them. The member who was successful
was Mr. William Smith, who sat for Norwich, and whose granddaughter was
Florence Nightingale. In 1819 an Association was founded to protect and
extend the Civil Rights of Unitarians. It was by combining the three
societies--the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, the Fund, and
Civil Rights Society, that the British and Foreign Unitarian Association
was formed, as has been said, in 1825.
In order to understand fairly the scope and spirit of that earlier
Unitarian period, thus at last organized in full legal recognition,
though still suffering from the prejudice inevitably created by more
than a century of legal condemnation, a few salient points should be
kept in view. First, the heterogeneous elements in the 'body,' if it
could be called such, were a source of weakness in regard to united
action. Instead of belonging, as their American brethren did, to one
ecclesiastical group, and that the dominant one, the English Unitarians
included Dissenters of different tendencies and traditions, with a few
recruits from the State Church. The 'Presbyterian' congregations, as
they were not very strictly called, were the backbone of the 'body';
many of these, however, were very weak, and in the course of a few
decades some were destined to follow those which had died out in the
eighteenth century. Converts not infrequently lent new force in the
pulpit, but at the risk of substituting an eager missionary spirit for
the usual staid decorum of the old families. In these the ideals of
breadth, simplicity, and moral excellence were stronger than the desire,
natural in a convert, to win the world to one's opinion.
Again, it must be borne in mind that then, as generally, there were men
whose thoughts ran ahead of those of the majority. Priestley, for
example, while adhering to the idea that the Christian revelation had
been guaranteed by miracles, had abandoned belief in the Virgin birth as
early as 1784, and went so far as to maintain that Jesus was not
impeccable and had certainly entertained erroneous ideas about
demoniacal possession. Probably there were very few who had arrived at
these conclusions even thirty years later; some Unitarians repudiated
them at a much later period. The miraculous element, however, was
formerly accepted by all. So was the authority of Scripture, though here
again men like Priestley were ahead of the rest in bringing to the study
of the Bible the principles of historical criticism. _Thomas Belsham_
(1750-1829), a typical Unitarian scholar and divine at this period, was
one of several who carried forward the science of Biblical
interpretation, and by the use of a vigorous and fearless intellect
anticipated views of Genesis and the Pentateuch which did not find
general acceptance till much later.
It is customary for Unitarians themselves to-day to look back on these
years of early zeal and controversy with but a qualified sympathy, so
much was still cherished in the body as a whole that is no longer
tenable, and again so much that was undreamed then is indispensable to
modern thought. One of the greatest of Unitarians, Dr. Martineau, whose
important share in the development of their ideas and life must be
considered farther on, referred in a discourse of about forty years ago
to three distinct stages in Unitarian theology. First, he pointed to the
significance of the struggle for the principle of 'Unity in the Divine
causation,' as against a doctrine which, as Unitarians maintain,
endeavours in vain by words to prevent a triplicity of 'Persons' from
sliding into a group of three Divine Beings. This struggle marks in
great part the whole track by which the reader has come thus far in the
present story. The second stage, according to Dr. Martineau, is that in
which the Conscience of Man is emphasized, in virtue of the belief in a
real responsibility and an actual power to choose the right or the
wrong. This 'Religion of Conscience' he sees especially illustrated in
the principles enunciated and the work accomplished by Channing; perhaps
it would be fair to say that many who had preceded the American leader
were imbued with a measure of his wisdom when they insisted, as we have
seen, on the adaptability of the pure Gospel message to the needs and
understanding of men everywhere, and declared that its aim was 'to make
men good and keep them so.' The third stage, which Dr. Martineau
considered to be fully begun at the time of his sermon (1869), is that
of the 'Religion of the Spirit,' in which the ideas of the Divine
Sovereignty and the Human Duty are rounded into vital beauty and
completeness by the idea of the actual relation of Man to God as a Son
to a Father.
We have referred in advance to this compendious view in order to show
whither the sequel is to lead us, but before this all-important
development can be traced there remains one more piece of external
history to be supplied. Happily it may be dealt with summarily.