fection lies in the greatest love; and in seeking to conform us to that perfection of which he is the type, he desires that we should become God, like himself, in the perfect expression of the creative thought, and the fulfilment of his will. Great and holy idea, of the communion of all men in kindness, justice and truth, of their union. with God through the mediation of their spiritual Chief, on whose cross was nailed materialism, by whose agony selfishness was ruined, and from whose tomb ascended and diffused itself, the passion of humanity, of Human-Unity! * Liberty had visited the world on that day, when it was said: Call no man master, for all ye are brethren; ye have all but one master, even God. Yet the emperors could hope, when they offered to the Church a shred of their purple and the shadow of their diadem, for a time when the Vicar of Christ would be called most Holy Father, and when the successors of the Apostles would graciously permit themselves to be addressed as "My Lord." These things exist, but the word of Christ has not changed, and it is this which will change the world. "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my word shall not pass away until all be fulfilled.” Word of liberty and of fraternity! Eternal testament of martyrs! Sacred contract of human emancipation! Immutable Code, in which slaves and tyrants are condemned together! Divine title of universal nobility; woe to him who doth not understand thee! Woe to him who can doubt or dispute thee! But thrice woe to those who would corrupt thee and compel thee to lie in the interest of slavery !! With the promulgation of the Gospel proceeds the true emancipation of the human race; and as the tree is known by its fruits, so where man is still oppressed by man the Gospel of peace and good will has not found rest for the sole of her foot. The republics of Sparta and of Rome were but military tyrannies that lived and that perished by the sword. The republics of our modern age are but commercial tyrannies that live and that perish by the purse. The intelligent association of Christian industry will seal their death warrant. Let the Gospel, then, be for us all the Sacred Ark and the Holy Fire. Let us not understand it like idolators, who worship the letter; let us remember that Christ has enveloped the growing truth in The synonyms of this word are no other than Christianity, or Christ-Unity, and Deity, or Divinity, from Deus, or Divus, and unitas: God-Unity, or Godhead. parables, as a babe in swaddling clothes. Initiated into their dear Lord's secrets, his disciples understood that when he died for man he lived anew in the human heart; wherefore, taking him as the symbol of unity, they wrote his mystic legend in the language of comparison and parable, familiar to the East. Thus to express the removal of that curse which rested over the birth of man, they preserved in their tradition the honors of virginity to the mother of Jesus. They showed the Holy Ghost itself as influencing the mysteries of conception, in order to teach men that true Love comes from God, is God himself, and that they will be the children of God, whenever they shall be born of true Love-unions. It is thus that they showed us Jesus surmounting alike the temptations of pride and of animal lusts, and ministered unto by angels in the desert, after having put to flight the evil spirit. Thus, in order to show us the power of the word, which creates the new Social World, they show us Jesus appeasing the tempest, healing the sick, reviving the dead, and multiplying food to nourish the people; for the word of the Gospel appeases the storms of rage, cures the moral diseases of humanity, and can multiply, by fraternal association, that necessary food which is still insufficient for all. Our Father who is in Heaven has not spoken to reason in order to confound reason! He has not descended from Heaven in order to set snares for men's souls! He has not deceived Humanity by pretending to desire the salvation of all, while rendering the greater number responsible for truths which he had not taught them to understand! He has not died at last, upon the cross, in order to ransom all men, then left the greater number to be lost, reserving merely a few priests and their imbecile acolytes! It is because the Ark of the Holy Word has not yet been freed from its swaddling bands, because the lamp is covered by the bushel, that the people are sickened by this nonsense. It is because Liberty, soon banished from the corrupted Church, as Christ had been from the Synagogue, has wandered eighteen hundred years from solitude to solitude, and from exile to exile. And when she presents herself in cities where guardians of the old oppression watch, seated in their chairs of state, the doors are closed against her. When she would speak, they stifle her voice; and those who know her still speak of her only in symbolic and figurative terms. M. E. L. THE NEMESIS OF UNITARIANISM. THAT goddess whose ensigns are the wheel and the rudder, indicating her power to overtake the evil-doer by land and by sea, -has not tired with the flight of the ages: when the smoke of battles has cleared away, when the conflicts of Truth and Error, Right and Wrong, have paused, there she sits in serene triumph, and the false thing bites the dust. It is an error to suppose that Nemesis was a Destroyer: rather, as the word indicates, she was a Divider, one who ever proved and sifted each thing, and severed the transient from the permanent. She was as much pledged to preserve the good as to destroy the evil; a daughter of Erebus, she yet bore her progeny to Zeus, or Life. Unitarianism a thing is an ism so long as its aim is private, not universal: in the stem, not the flower- began its struggle in America about forty years ago. In these days, when thought is to some extent coördinate with the steamer and the telegraph, forty years is a pretty long life; besides, it is to be remembered that Unitarianism was the result of many ages of gestation. It was called new, but it was the oldest of movements, and rested upon some æons of experience and investigation. It came into a world which was athirst for purer spiritual fountains; indeed, it was evoked by the spirit of the age to supply a demand which the liberal conditions of Western Society for the first time suffered to be distinctly announced. What has Unitarianism done for man? What would the world say if steam should be to-day confining its blessings to a few companies, or if the telegraph should be called "a Boston notion," which is the best name Dr. Bellows could give to old-fashioned Unitarianism? What would a philosopher say if a considerable number of cities, which had been furnishing themselves with water on the principle that water rises to its level everywhere, should conclude to tear up their works and try the system of ancient aqueducts? Surely the great movement for free-thought, the conception of God as a Father, the idea of the emancipation of man from superstition and wrong, were no less magnificent than their contemporaneous physical studies; and yet the Unitarian movement is filled with doubt and confusion. Never was there such a cry of Lo here, and Lo there. One is rushing back to Calvinism, another to Romanism, another to Swedenborgianism: Spiritualism reaps its harvest, and Atheism also, we fear. The masses no more think of identifying their spiritual fortunes with the church than of taking stock in the projects for a line of aërial ships to Europe. We have many and plausible excuses for this. It is said that "most people are not fit for anything but Orthodoxy," and "Catholicism is the best thing for such and such a class.”* Of course, Orthodoxy or Catholicism is best for its adherent, until a higher thing has the grace to create and answer a higher want; but that a religion of Freedom, Justice, Reason, and Love, is a religion for any one set or class, is a purblind and fatal conceit. Rather is it certain that there is a Free Unitarian in every man's heart; very few of our orthodox brothers are there who are not troubled with this inevitable inmate. "The very marrow of this accursed human nature is saturated in heresy," exclaimed Father Ryder. We welcome the impatient confession, believing as we do in the divinity of Human Nature, and knowing that for the highest religion nothing higher could be said than that it is the light that enlighteneth every man. Let any one read St. Austin and Calvin, and afterward Dr. Channing, and he will see that it is impossible that the yearning hearts of men could be separated from the beautiful faith of the latter but by some misunderstanding or trick. Men are not constituted to be satisfied with the terrible tenets of Calvin, any more than they are to assuage their thirst with melted lead. We are not deceived by the vehement utterances of the revival; we have long recognized man as the Inconsistent Animal. We have seen a minister who had grown red in the face with declaring that all men were born in a state of utter corruption, go home and take his little mass of corruption from its cradle and call it an angel. We do not believe his people went home to bewail and repent of Adam's transgression. The people have long since been divorced from the old theology; they do not care to fight the fight of dissent, but they will flock about any Beecher who laughs at it, and preaches about freedom. Thus the great audience of the Unitarian movement was already prepared for it; and it was adapted in its essence to the hunger to appease which it was sent. Also its success, so long as it was a real thing, * The inference is that Unitarianism must be the religion of the enlightened few; that being the modern translation of the doctrine of election. was equal to that of the preceding real movements, as those of Fox and Wesley. Its effect was not so apparent, for ideas are not so demonstrative as nerves and emotions; but the warning voice had been heard by all Churches, and we suppose that a thoroughly and logically Calvinistic sermon was not afterwards preached in New England. Edwards, Emmons, and Hopkins have become an extinct clerical species. Again, in estimating the dimensions of Unitarianism at the present, we are loudly warned not to be deceived by size, nor imagine it a guage of power, -to remember that a pyramid is not so great as a watch. It is true that it is only the religious fillibusters who imagine that the power of a Church consists in quantity rather than quality; and yet there is a great deal in the old Jeffersonian motto, "The greatest good of the greatest number." There is something in expansion, something in the democracy of Ideas: they are a trust for Humanity, and their place is not under a bushel, but under a candlestick, where they may give light to all who are in the house. This radiation is an attribute of quality more than of quantity. The plain fact concerning Unitarianism is this: before it was placed the alternatives to be free and human, and have an expansion equal to the ever-growing thought of Man, which had already sent up the wave which prophesied that level for its flood; or to become an additional sect and inherit Boston. It selected the latter, so far as a personality is permitted to limit itself. Then Nemesis proceeded to her work. - It began about fifteen years ago, when Theodore Parker, a legitimate child of the movement, preached a discourse in South Boston, at the ordination of a brother minister, on "The transient and the permanent in Christianity." At that time, and in preaching that discourse, Mr. Parker was par excellence the representative Unitarian; for, if a man has knocked his father down, the son most like him is the one that knocks him down. It was plain to the orthodox that Parker was a logical chip of the old block which Freeman and Channing had introduced into Boston; so they began with fierce joy to put questions to Unitarianism. "Is this man Parker one of you? Will you acknowledge him or disown him? Under which King, Bezonian? Speak, or die!" Then the Unitarians with one accord began to curse and to swear, saying, "We know not the man." Ralph Waldo Emerson, of the Hanover |