To brand this new theory, no terms were found too strong even by the religious periodicals of the day. Unwilling to bide their time, to test its soundness by its strength and duration, its opponents rested not. It was confidently predicted that the movement would influence its followers to skepticism and atheism. The accusation of the sixteenth century was revived, and St. Bernards cried from pulpit and press, 'The limits of the forefathers have been transgressed!' To the great mass of the opposition, the horror was not that Trinitarianism had been assailed, but that men had been found so bold as to question it. The crime with the unlearned and the majority of the professors was not heresy, but daring. But Christians, fervent and earnest, were not wanting who denounced the movement in its anticipated consequences. The young and adventurous, the men of impulse and daring, would drift, it was feared, to the very borders of open infidelity. But the contrary was the result. A pietism the very reverse was developed, which, aided by the beloved Channing, was disseminated through New England. Justice Story even asserted that in Unitarianism he found refuge from the skepticism to which in youth he had tended. Permitted, by the liberal character of the welcome substitute for a theology that had become too stringent for the age, to prosecute their researches into fields hitherto forbidden to the orthodox, thinkers, economists, statesmen and theologians gathered round the standard, and a new impulse was given to the intellectual character of the times. A revolution in Thought was impending.