Unitarianism in America: A History of its Origin and Development — John Shaqi
Unitarianism in America: A History of its Origin and DevelopmentCooke, George Willis
History
Unitarianism in America: A History of its Origin and Development
Cooke, George Willis
Unitarianism -- United States
[15] S.K. Lothrop, History of Brattle Street Church, 7-40; E. Turrell, Life
of Benjamin Colman, D.D., 96, 125, 178, 180.
[16] The Churches' Quarrel Espoused, edition of 1860, 140.
[17] Ibid., 143.
[18] Ibid., 145
[19] The Churches' Quarrel Espoused, edition of 1860, 32.
[20] Ibid., 58.
[21] Ibid., 72.
[22] Ibid., 65.
[23] Ibid., 30.
[24] Ibid., 33.
[25] The Churches' Quarrel Espoused, edition of 1860, 34.
[26] Ibid., 37.
[27] Ibid., 64.
[28] Ibid., 54.
[29] Ibid., 55.
[30] Ibid., 32.
[31] The Churches' Quarrel Espoused, edition of 1860, 32.
[32] Ibid., 39.
[33] Ibid., 40.
[34] Josiah Quincy, History of Harvard University, i. 44-54.
[35] Ibid., 65, 200.
[36] Josiah Quincy, in the seventh chapter of his History, gives a detailed
account of this movement. It is also dealt with by Brooks Adams in his
chapter on the founding of the Brattle Street Church, in his
Emancipation of Massachusetts, though he gives it a somewhat
exaggerated and biassed importance. Most of the facts appear in
Lothrop's History of the Brattle Street Church.
III.
THE GROWTH OF DEMOCRACY IN THE CHURCHES.
From the moment when the Puritan control of the church and state in New
England was so far weakened as to permit of free intellectual and religious
activity the democratic spirit began to manifest itself. The old régime had
so fixed itself upon the people that the progress was slow, but none the
less it was steady and sure. So far as the new spirit influenced doctrines,
it was called Arminianism, the technical theological name for democracy in
religion at this time.
[Sidenote: Arminianism.]
Arminianism is a dead issue at the present day, for the Calvinists have
accepted all that it taught when the name first came into vogue. Every kind
of reaction from Calvinism in the New England of the first half of the
eighteenth century took this designation, however; and to the Calvinists it
was a word of disapproval and contempt. Toleration, free inquiry, the use
of reason, democratic methods in church and state, were all named by this
condemning word. Vices, social depravities, love of freedom and the world,
assertion of personal independence, had the same designation. It is now
difficult to understand how bitter was the feeling thus produced, how keen
the hurt that was given the men who tried to defend themselves and their
beliefs from this odium.
What the word "Arminian" legitimately meant, then, is what we now mean by
liberalism. Primarily theological and doctrinal, it meant much more than
the rejection of the doctrine of decrees and the autocratic sovereignty of
God or the acceptance of the freedom of the will and the spiritual capacity
of man. First of all, it was faith in man; and then it was the assertion of
human liberty and equality. In a theological sense it did not have so wide
a purport, but in a practical and popular sense it grew into these
meanings.
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