Protestant Christianity claimed for its own elect. That adherents of the sensuous philosophy professed the orthodox doctrines, is a circumstance that throws the above statement into bolder relief. For these people gave to the system the hard, external, dogmatical character which in New England provoked the Unitarian reaction. The beliefs in scripture inspiration, incarnation, atonement, election, predestination, depravity, fall, regeneration, redemption, deprived of their interior meaning, became ragged heaps of dogmatism, unbeautiful, incredible, hateful. Assault came against them from the quarter of common intelligence and the rational understanding. The sensuous philosophy associated with the school of Locke,--which Edwards and the like of him scorned,--fell upon the fallen system and plucked it unmercifully. Never was easier work than that of the early Unitarian critics. The body of orthodoxy having lost its soul, was a very unsightly carcass,--so evidently, to every sense, a carcass, that they who had respected it as a celestial creation, and could not be persuaded that this was all they respected, allowed the scavengers to take it away, only protesting that the thing disposed of was not the revealed gospel, or anything but a poor effigy of it. The Unitarians as a class belonged to the school of Locke, which discarded the doctrine of innate ideas, and its kindred beliefs. Unitarianism from the beginning showed affinity with this school, and avowed it more distinctly than idealists avowed Trinitarianism. Paul of Samosata, Arius, Pelagius, Socinus, the Swiss, Polish, English advocates of the same general theology and christology were, after their several kinds, disciples of the same philosophical system. Unitarianism, it was remarked, has rarely, if ever, been taught or held by any man of eminence in the church who was a Platonist. The Unitarians of New England, good scholars, careful reasoners, clear and exact thinkers, accomplished men of letters, humane in sentiment, sincere in moral intention, belonged, of course with individual exceptions, to the class which looked without for knowledge, rather than within for inspiration. The Unitarian in religion was a whig in politics, a conservative in literature, art and social ethics. The Unitarian divine was more familiar with Tillotson than with Cudworth, and more in love with William Paley than with Joseph Butler. He was strong in the "Old English" classics, and though a confessed devotee to no school in philosophy, was addicted to the prevailing fashion of intelligent, cultivated good sense. The Unitarian was disquieted by mysticism, enthusiasm and rapture. Henry More was unintelligible to him, and Robert Fludd disgusting. He had no sympathy with Helvetius, D'Holbach, Diderot or Voltaire, those fierce disturbers of intellectual peace; he had as little with William Law and Coleridge, dreamers and visionaries, who substituted vapor for solid earth. The Unitarian leaders were