Unitarianism

Henry Adams looked back with inimitable irony on the New England Unitarianism in which he had been reared. "Viewed from Mount Vernon Street , the problem of life was as simple as it was classic," he reminisced. "Politics offered no difficulties, for there the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also sure, because human nature worked for Good." Reflecting upon the intellectual leaders of antebellum Boston , Adams found their optimism superficial and irritating. Yet, from his vantage point of final disillusionment, he mingled his sarcasm with nostalgia.

The emergence of Unitarianism in New England represented the climax of "a very gradual, almost an imperceptible, process." For several generations Arminian opinions had been slowly gaining currency in the vicinity of Boston and its nearby college; but with the notable exception of Jonathan Mayhew ( 1720-1766), eighteenth-century Massachusetts Arminians had not been forward in placing their views before the public. The term "Liberal," which they applied to themselves, they used in the sense of "broad-minded" or "unsectarian." By this designation they expressed their unwillingness to accept adherence to a strictly defined Calvinist creed as a test for church membership.

The years covered by this study, 1805 to 1861, approximate the duration of the sway classical Unitarianism enjoyed at Harvard, beginning with Ware's celebrated election as Hollis Professor and ending with the Civil War. The war seemed to mark the alteration and decay of the old intellectual system, for during it the philosophical ideas of Sir William Hamilton substantially eroded Thomas Reid's common sense philosophy, which had formed the foundation for antebellum Harvard Unitarianism. But, for the relatively long period between these dates, a firm consensus was maintained at Harvard on questions of fundamental importance, and this consensus is best studied as the moral philosophers organized it.

More important than modifications of doctrine, however, was a change in men's very attitude toward theology. The emphasis on ethics rather than dogma, which the eighteenth-century Liberals pioneered, was one of the mainstays of nineteenth-century Unitarianism and eventually became characteristic of American Protestantism in general. When a Harvard moralist claimed that "a man is not a Christian in proportion to the amount of truth he puts into creed, but in proportion to the amount of truth he puts into his life," he was expressing an attitude that was becoming widespread.

If Transcendentalism was descended from Harvard Unitarianism by way of revolt, what is called the "genteel tradition" of American literature was descended from Unitarianism more directly. The Brahmin poets and literary critics of the middle and later nineteenth century maintained Unitarian standards of moralism, social conservatism, and respect for classical learning. Out of the Boston of the Unitarian moral philosophers emerged "the Boston of Longfellow, Holmes, Lowell , and the later Emerson, the Boston of the North American Review, the Athenaeum, the Saturday Club, and the Atlantic Monthly, the Boston called the 'American Athens.'" When the spread of the railroads in the 1850's consolidated the nation into a single publishing market, Boston established itself for a time as the commercial, as well as the intellectual, capital of American letters. The fact that Andrews Norton was the father of Charles Eliot Norton may be taken as a symbol of the relationship between Harvard Unitarianism and American genteel culture.