The agitation thus started went on its way with many varying manifestations, and with a growing incisiveness of statement and earnestness of feeling. The new teachings gained the interest and the faith of the young in increasing numbers. In pulpits and on the platform, in newspapers and magazines, in essays and addresses, this new teaching was uttered for the world's hearing. The breeze thus created seems to have grown into a gale, but The Christian Register and The Christian Examiner gave almost no indication that it had blown their way. In the official actions and in the publications of the Unitarian Association there was no word indicating that the discussion had come to its knowledge. All at once, however, in 1853, it came into the greatest prominence, as the result of action taken by the Unitarian Association; and, thenceforth, for a quarter of a century it was never absent as a disturbing element in the intellectual and religious life of the Unitarian body. The early Unitarians were believers in the supernatural and in the miracles of the New Testament. They accepted without question the ideas on this subject that had been entertained by all Protestants from the days of Luther and Calvin. When Theodore Parker and the transcendentalists began to question the miraculous foundations of Christianity, many Unitarians were quite unprepared to accept their theories. They believed that the miracles of the New Testament afford the only evidence for the truthfulness of Christianity. This issue was distinctly stated in the twenty-eighth annual report of the Unitarian Association for 1853, wherein an attempt was made to defend the Unitarian body against the charge of infidelity and rationalism made by the Orthodox. The teachings of the transcendentalists and radicals had been attributed to all Unitarians, and the leaders of the Association felt that it was time to define explicitly the position they occupied. Therefore they said, in the report of that year:--"We desire, in a denominational capacity, to assert our profound belief in the Divine origin, the Divine authority, the Divine sanctions, of the religion of Jesus Christ. This is the basis of our associated action. We desire openly to declare our belief as a denomination, so far as it can be officially represented by the American Unitarian Association, that God, moved by his own love, did raise up Jesus to aid in our redemption from sin, did by him pour a fresh flood of purifying life through the withered veins of humanity and along the corrupted channels of the world, and is, by his religion, forever sweeping the nations with regenerating gales from heaven, and visiting the hearts of men with celestial solicitations. We receive the teachings of Christ, separated from all foreign admixtures and later accretions, as infallible truth from God."[2] At the same meeting a resolution was adopted, "without a dissenting voice," which declared that