Joseph Stevens Buckminster, the first, and while he lived the most influential, of these preachers, began his career in 1805 by accepting a call from one of the old Boston churches. He died in 1812 at the close of his twenty-eighth year. His influence was rather social and literary than theological or controversial. During his lifetime the Unitarian movement took no definite shape, except as a centre of revived interest in all that was then supposed to be best and purest in religious, literary, and artistic feeling. After his death, Unitarians learned to regard William Ellery Channing as their most promising leader. Channing had accepted the charge of a Boston church as early as 1803, and was about four years older than Buckminster. A third active member of the Boston clergy was Samuel Cooper Thacher, who took charge of a Boston parish in 1811, and was five years younger than Channing. In all, some seven or eight churches were then called Unitarian; but they professed no uniform creed, and probably no two clergymen or parishes agreed in their understanding of the precise difference between them and the Orthodox church. Shades of difference distinguished each Unitarian parish from every other, and the degree of their divergence from the old creed was a subject of constant interest and private discussion, although the whole body of churches, Congregational as well as Unitarian, remained in external repose. The calm was not broken until the close of the war relieved New England from a political anxiety which for fifteen years had restrained internal dissensions. No sooner did peace restore to New England the natural course of its intellectual movement than the inevitable schism broke out. In June, 1815, the “Panoplist,” the mouthpiece of the Congregational clergy, published an article charging the Unitarians with pursuing an unavowed propaganda, and calling upon the Church to refuse them communion. Channing and his friends thought the attack to require reply, and, after consultation, Channing published a “Letter to the Rev. Samuel C. Thacher,” which began a discussion and a theological movement of no slight interest to American history.