Author: Allen Johnson

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2017-10-22

Total Pages: 650

ISBN-13: 9780265588673

Excerpt from Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 4: Chanfrau-Cushing The name Unitarian was borrowed from England but it was some time before the inde pendent thinkers of America could bring them selves to adopt it. Charming himself hesitated, fearing that if a new party with a distinctive name were to be formed, it would soon produce a Unitarian orthodoxy with all the limitations and petty tyrannies of the old. He deplored the necessity of organizing a new denomination. I desire, he said, to escape the narrow walls of a particular church, and to live under the open far and wide and seeing with my own eyes and hearing with my own ears. Soon, however, he recognized that the movement had gone beyond his control and then he not only threw himself heartily into it, but became its acknowledged leader. In 1819 he preached a ser mo'n defining the position of the Unitarian party and defending their right to Christian fellow ship. The disruption that followed grieved him, but he accepted it as inevitable. In the following year, 1820, he organized the Berry Street Con ference of liberal ministers, at a meeting of which in May 1825 there was organized the American Unitarian Association. The first num ber of the Christian Register, the weekly um official organ of the Unitarian denomination, ap peared in 1821. Associations and publications alike became vehicles for Channing's thought. Charming Unitarianism came to be and has remained the recognized term for that form of religious liberalism which, while unwavering in its assertion of the right of the human reason as a part of the essential dignity of human nature, still clung fondly to the supernatural element of the Christian tradition. Channing's objection to the Trinitarian ortho doxy of the time was not so much to its doctrine about the nature of the Godhead, as to its View of the nature of man. This he made clear in his epoch-making sermon, The Moral Argument against Calvinism. The idea that human nature was essentially depraved and incapable of natu ral growth into goodness was abhorrent to him. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.