It is not like certain website may want to believe people that the "original movement began in Poland back in the mid-1500s when a
member of the Minor
Reformed Church challenged the
Trinity doctrine."
Unitarians, are people wanting to keep to
Only One True God have been around for ages. Though we do agree that the the church denomination which is called Unitarian Church did come into existence many years after the death of the son of God. Most people in Poland were such believers in Only One God and took Jesus as the son of God, who really died, whilst God can not die.
Those who agreed with the member of the Minor Reformed Church who challenged the Trinity doctrine were given the ultimatum to convert to Roman
Catholicism or leave.
Most of the once preferring to keep to the biblical Truth went to Transylvania, which is where
they first used the name “Unitarian” to describe themselves.
Unitarianism came to the U.S. in the 1780s; Boston’s King’s Chapel was
its first church. Many Unitarians, including the ones who attended
church with the family of Andrew Sullivan, the author of
the Dish, refer to themselves as Universalists. The
term originally meant universal salvation, opposing the idea that God
would punish or not save anyone. …
°°°
19°Century U.K.
Unitarianism has made way in
England.
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| Newington Green Unitarian Church, London, England. Built in 1708, this is the oldest non-conformist church in London still in use as a church. (October 2005) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
When
Lord
Hardwicke’s Marriage Act became law the Unitarians in
England were a small sect, and had not a single place of
worship. It was not till 1779 that it ceased to be required
of Dissenting ministers that they should subscribe to the
Articles of the
Church of England previous to taking the benefit
of the
Toleration Act, and even this small boon was twice thrown
out in the Upper House by the King’s friends and the
Bishops. In 1813, however, one of the most cruelly
persecuting statutes which had ever disgraced the British code
received its death-blow, and the Royal assent was given to an Act
repealing all laws
passed against those Christians who
impugn the commonly received
doctrine of the Trinity. It
was no easy matter to get this act of justice done; the Bishops
and the Peers were obstinate.
In 1772, we read, the Bishop
of Llandaff made a most powerful speech, and produced from the
writings of
Dr. Priestley passages which equally excited the
wonder and abhorrence of his hearers, and drew from Lord Chatham
exclamations of “Monstrous! horrible!
shocking!” A few years after we find Lord North
contending it to be the duty of the State to guard against
authorizing persons denying the doctrine of the Trinity to
teach. Even as late as 1824, Lord Chancellor Eldon doubted
(as he doubted everything that was tolerant in religion or
liberal in politics) as to the validity of this Act, and hinted
that the Unitarians were liable to punishment at common law for
denying the doctrine of the Trinity. Yet the Unitarians
have a remote antiquity. They can trace their descent to
Apostolic times, and undoubtedly were an important element in the
National Church, in the days of William and the Hanoverian
succession.
Dr. Parr, says Mr. Barker,
“spoke to me of the
latitudinarian divines with approbation. He agreed with me
in thinking that the most brilliant era of the British
Church since the Reformation was when it abounded with divines of
that school;”
and certainly Unitarians may claim to be
represented at the present day in Broad Churchmen within the
Establishment, and in divines of a similar way of thinking
without. They have been much helped by their
antagonists. No man was less of a Unitarian than the late
Archbishop Whately, yet, in a letter to Blanco White, he candidly
confessed,
“Nothing in my opinion tends so much to dispose
an intelligent mind towards anti-Trinitarian views as the
Trinitarian works.”
As a sect, the Unitarians are a small body, and at one time
were much given to a display of intelligent superiority as
offensive in public bodies as in private individuals. They
were narrow and exclusive, and had little effect on the masses,
who were left to go to the bad, if not with supercilious scorn,
at any rate with genteel indifference. There was in the
old-fashioned Unitarian meeting-houses something eminently high
and dry. In these days, when we have ceased to regard
heaven—to quote
Tom Hood — as anybody’s rotten
borough, we smile as a handful of people sing—
“We’re a garden walled around,
Planted and made peculiar ground;”
yet no outsider a few years ago could have entered a
Unitarian chapel without feeling that such, more or less, was the
abiding conviction of all present.
“Our predominant
intellectual attitude,”
Mr. Orr confesses to be one reason
of the little progress made by the denomination. A
Unitarian could no more conceal his sect than a Quaker.
Generally he wore spectacles; his hair was always arranged so as
to do justice to his phrenological development; on his mouth
there always played a smile, half sarcastic and half
self-complacent. Nor was such an expression much to be
wondered at when you remembered that, according to his own idea,
and certainly to his own satisfaction, he had solved all
religious doubts, cleared up all religious mysteries, and
annihilated, as far as regards himself, human infirmities,
ignorance, and superstition. It is easy to comprehend how a
congregation of such would be eminently respectable and calm and
self-possessed; indeed, so much so, that you felt inclined to ask
why it should have condescended to come into existence at
all.
Mrs. Jarley’s waxworks, as described by that
lady herself, may be taken as a very fair description of an
average Unitarian congregation at a no very remote date.
Little Nell says, “I never saw any waxworks, ma’am;
is it funnier than Punch?”
“Funnier?” said Mrs. Jarley, in a shrill voice,
“it is not funny at all.” “Oh,”
said Nell, with all possible humility. “It is not
funny at all,” repeated Mrs. Jarley; “it’s
calm, and what’s that word again—critical? No,
classical—that’s it; it’s calm and
classical. No low beatings and knockings about; no jokings
and squeakings like your precious Punch’s, but
always the same, with a constantly unchanging air of coldness and
gentility.”
Now it was upon this coldness and
gentility that the Unitarians took their stand; they eliminated
enthusiasm, they ignored the passions, and they failed to get the
people, who preferred, instead, the preaching of the most
illiterate ranter whose heart was in the work.
In our day a wonderful change has come over
Unitarianism. It is not, and it never was, the Arianism
born of the subtle school of Alexandrian philosophy, and
condemned by the orthodox Bishops at Nicea; nor is it Socinianism
as taught in the sixteenth century, still less is it the
Materialism of Priestley.
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| CDV portrait of James Martineau (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Men of the warmest hearts and
greatest intellects belonging to it actually disown the name,
turn away from it as too cold and barren, and in their need of
more light, and life, and love, seek in other
denominations what they lack in their own. The
Rev.
James Martineau, a man universally honoured in all sections
of the universal church, confesses:
“I am constrained
to say that neither my intellectual preference nor my moral
admiration goes heartily with the Unitarian heroes, sects, or
productions of any age. Ebionites, Arians, Socinians, all
seem to me to contrast unfavourably with their opponents, and to
exhibit a type of thought and character far less worthy, on the
whole, of the true genius of Christianity. I am conscious
that my deepest obligations, as a learner from others, are in
almost every department to writers not of my own creed. In
philosophy I have had to unlearn most that I had imbibed from my
early text-books and the authors in chief favour with them.
In Biblical interpretation I derive from Calvin and Whitby the
help that fails me in Crell and Belsham. In devotional
literature and religious thought I find nothing of ours that does
not pale before Augustine Tauler and Pascal; and in the poetry of
the Church it is the Latin or the German hymns, or the lines of
Charles Wesley or Keble, that fasten on my memory and heart, and
make all else seem poor and cold.”
This is the
language of many beside Mr. Martineau — of all, indeed, to
whom
a dogmatic theology is of little
import compared with a Christian life.
Let us attempt to describe Unitarianism negatively. In
one of his eloquent sermons in its defence, the late
W. J. Fox
said,
“The Ebionites, Arians, is not essential to
Unitarianism; Dr. Price was a Unitarian as well as Dr. Priestley,
so is every worshipper of the Father only, whether he believes
that Christ was created before all worlds, or first existed when
born of Mary. Philosophical necessity is no part of
Unitarianism. Materialism is no part of Unitarianism.
The denial of angels or devils is no part of
Unitarianism.”
Unitarianism has no creed, yet briefly
it may be taken to be the denial of a Trinity of persons in the
Godhead, or of the natural depravity of man, or that sin is the
work of the devil, or that the Bible is a book every word of
which was dictated by God, or that Christ is God united to a
human nature, or that atonement is reconciliation of God to
man. Furthermore, the Unitarians deny that regeneration is
the work of the Holy Spirit, or that salvation is deliverance
from the punishment of sin, or that heaven is a state of
condition without change, or that the torments of hell are
everlasting.
It may be that the Broad Churchman entertains
very much the same
opinions, but then the Unitarian
minister has this advantage over the Church clergyman, that he is
free. He has not signed articles of belief of a contrary
character. He has not to waste his time and energy in
sophistications which can deceive no one, still less to preach
that doctrine so perilous to the soul, and destructive of true
spiritual growth, and demoralizing to the nation, that a
religious, conscientious man may sign articles that can have but
one sense and put upon them quite another. Surely one of
the most sickening characteristics of the age is that divorce
between the written and the living faith, which, assuming to be
progress, is in reality cowardice.
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p. 196 - p 202 from The Religious Life of London
by J. Ewing Ritchie
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continues with: 19° century London, Unitarians and Evangelical Alliance
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