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
It is said of Charles Chauncy, of the First Church in Boston, that his
favorite authors were Tillotson and Baxter.[14] Far more suggestive is the
account we have of the books read by Jonathan Mayhew of the West Church in
Boston, the first open antagonist of Calvinism in New England. Soon after
1740 he was reading the works of the great Protestant theologians of the
seventeenth century, including Milton, Chillingworth, and Tillotson; and
the eighteenth-century works of Locke, Samuel Clarke, Taylor, Wollaston,
and Whiston. He also probably read Cudworth, Butler, Hutcheson, Leland, and
other authors of a like character, some of them deists. Not one of these
writers was a Calvinist for they found the basis of religion either in
idealism or in rationalism.
The biographer of Mayhew says it "is evident from some of his discourses
that he was a great admirer of Samuel Clarke, whose voluminous works were
in his day much read by the liberal clergy." Clarke's Boyle lectures,
delivered in 1704-5, showed that natural and revealed religion were
essentially one, that moral action in man is free, and that Christianity is
the religion of reason and nature. At a later period he defended the two
propositions, that "no article of Christian faith delivered in the holy
Scriptures is disagreeable to right reason," and that "without liberty of
human actions there can be no real religion or morality." Even if one such
man as Jonathan Mayhew read Clarke's work in the Harvard Library, it
justified the alarm felt by Whitefield lest the students should be led away
from their Calvinist faith.[15]
[Sidenote: The Great Awakening.]
It was "the great awakening" that showed how marked had been the growth of
liberal opinions throughout New England in the forty years preceding.
Silently, a great change had gone on, with little open expression of
dissent from Calvinism, and without a knowledge on the part of most of the
liberal men that they had in any way departed from the faith of the
fathers. It was only with the coming of Whitefield and the revival that
this change came to have recognition, and that even the slightest
separation into parties took place.
The revival was an attempt to reintroduce the stricter Calvinism of the
earlier time, with its doctrines of justification by faith alone,
supernatural regeneration, and predestination made known to the believer by
the Holy Ghost. The liberal party objected to the revival because it was
opposed to the good old customs of the Congregational churches of New
England. The itinerant methods of the revivalists, the shriekings,
faintings, and appeals to fear and terror, were condemned as not in harmony
with the established methods of the churches. In his book against the
revivalists, Dr. Chauncy said that "now is the time when we are
particularly called to stand for the good old way, and bear testimony
against everything that may tend to cast a blemish on true primitive
Christianity."[16]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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