I.

HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION.

UNITARIANISM, as a doctrine of the unity of God, is much older than the Christian Church, not only in the direct line of development from Judaism, but on various subsidiary lines. This is true of the explicit doctrine, and it is much more widely true of that implied in many forms of primitive religion. The heroic company of scholars which has argued for a primitive Monotheism, from which the various polytheisms of the world were a decadence, has not been wholly given over to believe a lie. Their crude result has been the clumsy symbol of a striving after unity, or tendency to it, in the most primitive and polytheistic forms of worship and belief. Thanks to this tendency or striving, the Vedic Hymns elevate Indra or Varuna into a prominence that sometimes leaves the other deities of the pantheon with their occupations gone. Behind the dualistic strife of Ahrimanes and Ahura-Mazda a power is conceived that reconciles their opposition, and in the Greek mythology we have an ultimate fate to which the Olympian gods must yield. Underlying and overtopping all the different theological schemes, with their multiplicity of gods and goddesses, there was the sense of the Divine, of that mysterious power

do the Synoptic Gospels; but this is only what we should expect from what we know of Paul and his relation to the early Church, and of the character of the Synoptics, as the last result of a long process of traditional aggregation. The highest point in either of the three is found in the idea of a dignity and office to be bestowed on Jesus as a reward of his faithfulness, and through the medium of his death and resurrection. That all the Epistles of Paul were written before the first of the Synoptics shows, when we consider how little the Epistles colored them, how tenaciously the human side of Jesus held its ground. As the deification proceeded, the Jews were alienated more and more. In the Epistles of Paul the process of exaltation is much further advanced than in the Synoptics; but it stops short of actual deification, as does the Fourth Gospel also, though that goes a little beyond Paul. The nature of Christ was a matter of free speculation for the next two hundred years, and even further on. Midway of the third century Sabellius advocated the doctrine that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all emanations of the Logos, which he identified with the Supreme God. For a time this quaternity, this fourfold mystery of the divine nature, threatened to be the orthodox doctrine; but it was finally condemned as heretical, and in its place the doctrine of the Nicene Creed was set up,- namely, that Christ was of the same substance with the Father, and was the product of his eternal generation. The great advocate of this doctrine at Nicæa, in 325 A.D., was Athanasius; and its great opponent was Arius.

very little Unitarianism, as opposed to Trinitarianism, for some dozen centuries, though there was here and there a good deal of earnest criticism of the creed of our traditional orthodoxy, some of whose doctrines were slowly getting themselves established all along this weary time. The doctrine of the Atonement had to wait till the eleventh century for anything approximating to its modern form.

Considered doctrinally, the Reformation was a reactionary movement; and its reaction was to those opinions and beliefs which were most horrible in the earlier centuries, which had most oppressed the mind and heart of Catholic Christendom, and which had been shorn of something of their hatefulness. As for the doctrine of the Trinity, Luther accepted it by sheer force of will; Melanchthon would not consider it too seriously; Zwingli was sounder (less tritheistic) upon this point than Calvin himself, while he differed from him by the heavens' width in regard to total depravity, finding in every child a new-born Adam, thanks to the power of Jesus' death and resurrection, and matched the Free Religionists of our own time in his abundant sympathy with the religions of the heathen world. Castellio, one of the finest spirits of his age, at first befriended by Calvin, afterwards became the victim of his implacable enmity for his free handling of predestination, and was so beset that in his lonely banishment he was literally starved to death. The name of Servetus is much better known. With all his brilliant qualities, he was somewhat crotchety, or, in more precise language, "one of those bold spirits who sometimes