has an independent history, with high and proud traditions, a noble civic life, and a future as well as a part of no means commercial importance. New Haven has, moreover, an intellectual life of its own, quite apart from, or at least independent of the University. And yet, in all America, there is no city so loyal to the university within its borders as New Haven to Yale. The Yale spirit permeates New Haven and the increasing beauty of the city is the outward embodiment of Yale ideals of service. I do not know I do not know but that it might justly be said that Yale traditions are more tightly held and perpetuated by the people of New Haven than by the shifting body of students or even the very much pre-occupied teaching staff of the University. Yale outside of New Haven is almost unimaginable. The thing celebrated by this YaleNew Haven pageant is therefore a very real thing, a very noble thing, a thing well worth the expense of time and money. It is a productive thing -productive of educational and civic values. We would like to see it become an annual feature of New Haven-Yale life. By EPHRAIM EMERTON PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY IN HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL T HE church out of which Unitarianism grew was possessed by an idea of God which removed him as far as possible from the world of men and things he was believed to have made. That church tremThat church trembled before the thought of a being whose chief attribute was arbitrary power limited only by a strict sense of absolute justice and dealing with the souls of men as a despot might deal with the lives and fortunes of his subjects. He had placed us here in this world without our will, had laid upon us a burden of moral obligation and yet had so made us that we were of our own wills unable to comply with the terms of this moral law. All our doing, so far as it was the result of our own will, was evil in his sight. Only through his infinite mercy was this despotic sovereignty tempered to such of his creatures as he had selected in virtue of an inscrutable plan. Whoever was outside the scheme of this selection was, wholly without any fault of his own, excluded from the working of the divine mercy. Against this conception of a divine ruler of the world the first Unitarians revolted. It seemed to them, as it has seemed to all their successors, that a world governed in this fashion would not be worth living in. It contradicted all thin ideals of fairness and reasonableness. We can quite understand the answer of an early Unitarian, who having listened patiently to the definition of God by an orthodox friend replied "Why! That is the being I have been taught to call the Devil!" The Unitarian, in his thought of God, postulates as something absolutely essential the idea of beneficence. of beneficence. Whatever else God is, he must be good, or he is unthinkable. But we may fairly be asked:—what is good? Have we, frail creatures of the dust, such standards of goodness that we can dare apply them to the being, part of whose definition must always be that he is unknowable to us? Well it is a fair answer to this fair question, that we must use such standards as we can comprehend, or our words and our thoughts cease to have meaning for us. We must think of the divine goodness in terms of human goodness, only in infinitely higher degree. What contradicts our conceptions of goodness cannot be good to us, and no devices of language and no self deceptions can ever make it so. That is one essential of the Unitarian departure from the previous standard in this matter of the divine nature:-the emphasis on the element of beneficence. It insisted that equally with power and wisdom this quality of goodness was necessary to any adequate conception of God. It thought of him under these three aspects. In each of them he was and must be perfect. If either of these elments of divinity were absent or enfeebled then the others also must inevitably suffer. Absolute power, unrestrained by wisdom and untempered by love would beat itself to pieces in mere violence of exercise. Absolute wisdom, unsupported by power and unsoftened by love would be futile and barren. Absolute goodness, unaided by power and unguided by wisdom would waste itself in mere sentimentality. If we can think of all these three perfections in perfect balance and harmony, then we can make for ourselves an idea of God that meets every possible standard of human desire. Now this balance and this harmony of mutually completing and perfecting elements is what makes up the idea of the Unity of God. Unitarians were not the first to make this triple formulation of the divine nature. It is a favorite device of the earliest thinkers within the field of Christian vision. The difficulty was that until the early nineteenth century men were unable to be satisfied with it without going further and trying to find expressions of it which came near destroying the essential idea of unity which they were all the time anxious to maintain. They could not rise to the simplicity of the idea of divine unity. They could not think of God as One without trying to divide his personality. Because the relations in which God stood to the world of his creation and to man, were manifold, therefore they could not avoid thinking of him as essentially divided according to these relations. God as the all-creating, all-governing Father was one thing. God as the mediator between man and himself was another thing. God as the all-pervading, all-inspiring Holy Spirit, was a third thing. The only reason why men did not go on multiplying personalities to correspond to all the other imaginable relations of God to the world and to man was that they feared to swing too far back into the old polytheisms of the ancient world and that the ingenuity of Greek philosophizing theologians was clever enough to bring all these other possible relations under the three heads of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Unitarians are not blind to the cleverness of this theological device; but they feel that the only safe way to escape from the always present danger of a divided deity is frankly to throw aside all attempts to formulate the idea of diversity and place all their emphasis on the idea of unity. They dread more than anything else any infringement upon this primary necessity of their thought of God. Unitarians do not understand the perplexity which seemed to make some modification of the idea of unity necessary in order, as the theologians would say, "to bring God nearer to Man." The nearest thing in life to the Unitarian is his thought of God. It is the source and center of all his thinking about religion. The simplest relation he can imagine is that which brings him in confidence and happiness to the being whom he thinks of as his creator, his father and his friend. In this simple relation all others are included. In this confession of the fatherhood of God he finds his "ample creed," as one of own poets has phrased it. It satisfies all his need of a scientific expression of the divine nature, because it includes those attributes of power, wisdom and love beyond which not even Greek ingenuity ever cared to go. It invites him to the exercise of that instinct of worship which is the outward form of the inward turning of the soul to the highest thing it can conceive. It opens the way for that direct approach of the human soul to its author and its end which emancipates him from all servitude to prescribed rites and ceremonies. It interprets to him the meaning of those great words "the freedom of the sons of into relation with mankind. God." But now, perhaps, some one will ask: why go any further? Why not be content to rest here, and say: this is enough? Why undertake to define our position with regard to the detail, when we have laid down a principle that seems to include all detail? If we were engaged, as a recent writer spoke of President Eliot as engaged, in "taking a day off and writing up a new religion,' we might indeed stop here and let every application of our general principle take care of itself. But we are not in that position. Whether we will or no, we are part of the great historical tradition of Christianity. It is not open to us, not even to the youngest of us, to cut loose from that splendid if at times perplexing inheritance. We may, indeed, study the religions of the world, the more the better. We are pretty certain to find much in them that commends itself to our approval perhaps even to our enthusiastic admiration. But when all is said and done, none of us, even if he will, can become in any reasonable sense of the word a Buddhist or a Mohammedan; nor can we make ourselves "free religionists" in any such sense that we can deny our birthright and reject all that Christianity has helped to make us. Certainly, as Unitarians, we are not called upon to launch out upon any uncharted seas of abstract speculation. The problems that confront us are those which have always busied the thoughts of Christian men, and we are bound to give ourselves as much certainty as we can about these, only trying as far as we can, to bring them into relation with the greater problems of all religion. The very first demand of every religion is that the divine being, who under one or another aspect lies at the background of all religious experience, shall be brought That demand has been met in a great variety of ways. In the appealing polytheisms of the ancient world it was done by peopling the intervening space with a wonderful race of subordinate deities, of demigods and heroes, through whom the intercourse of men with the ultimate rulers of the universe was made possible and attractive. Christianity tried to set itself from the beginning against all such attempts. It proclaimed the one God, by the side of whom there were no others. The proclamation was simple and absolute enough, but to carry it out consistently proved from the first impossible. The writings of early Christianity are full of the still active impression that the gods of the heathen were real existences, only evil in character, but none the less real. And when these same writers came to formulate their own conceptions of deity and of divinity they showed precisely the same instinct. They could not get along without their own world of angels and archangels to correspond to the lesser deities of the ancient system, and then, as Christianity produced its heroic characters, we find in the conventionalized saints the obvious counterpart to the semi-divine heroes of antiquity. One wonders at times. what it was that saved Christianity from falling back into the whole delusion of the ancient polytheisms. The answer is to be found in the continual protest of her mcst spiritually minded members. That protest culminated in the Protestant Revolution, and Unitarians are the children of Protestantism. But organized Protestantism, like organized religion everywhere, was a thing of compromises. It professed to maintain undiminished the fundamental propositions of Roman Catholic theology and only to abolish such deviations from these as seemed to conflict with their essential mean ing and purpose. In pursuance of that determination to maintain fundamentals John Calvin burned Michael Servetus at Geneva for seeming to assert the doctrine of the indivisible unity of God, and every living Protestant theclogian of importance supported him in his action. What did that mean? It meant that these organized Protestant bodies, Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinistic, had got to the point of seeing that saints and angels were out of harmony with a true Christianity, but had not risen to the point of freeing themselves from the notion of a divided deity. It needed the light from the sacrifice of Servetus to illumine the darkness of the pitiful theological squabbles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and show the way to the Sozzini and their successors until now. It is this fundamental Unitarian proposition of the divine unity that has held together all the diverse elements of opposition to the traditional crthodoxy of the Church and led them out into the comparatively clearer air of modern theology. plest expression of that relation was found in the idea of speech. The Word, the utterance of God, the sharing with what was outside himself of that which made up his innermost nature, that is the figure under which the purest Greek theology tried to state its doctrine of mediation. This word cf God was a something different from God and yet the same; distinct from him and yet inseparably bound up with him, proceeding from him and yet co-eternal with him; differing in its activity and yet the same in substance. Put in the simplest form, it is nothing more than the idea of the divine activity thought of by itself, and that is an intellectual feat of which almost any reasonable mind is capable. If Christian theology had stopped here Unitarians would have had no quarrel with it. There is very much in this notion of the divine word as a separate subject of contemplation that appeals to the Unitarian consciousness. As a theological device it is more than ingenious; it is appealing in a high degree. But now another step was taken. The idea of the Word of God, the Logos, if we must use technical terms, was too abstract to quite answer its practical purpose of bridging the chasm between absolute deity and the mind of man. It must be made concrete, and there, as if waiting for this process to claim him, stood the figure of the man Jesus of Nazareth. Already, long before the definite formulation of creeds, he had passed from his simple, natural human function as teacher and revealer of religious truth into the mysterious half world of myth and legend. His failure to fulfil the crude material anticipations of contemporary Jewish hope had only made him so much the better subject for the more highly developed speculative capacity of the Greek world. It was easy to think of Jesus as one of the expressions of that divine word, often heard before and certainly in the unbroken progress Let us see if we can follow the course of this process. What was, What was, necessarily, the effect of this idea of unity upon that primary problem of every religion: to mediate between the idea of God and the daily life cf man? The ancient religions had accomplished this mediation through the multitude of intermediate beings that formed their various polytheisms. Christianity, following the lead of the best Hebrew tradition, had-or thought it had-rejected all these. And yet, when the subtlety of Greek thought began to play with this question of mediation, it could not get away from its own inherent tendencies. It could not be satisfied to bring the individual man face to face with his God, but must somehow insist upon a mediating agency. That mediation was found in the doctrine of the Person of Christ. God the Absolute was unthinkable. He must be brought into relation with his world. The sim-cf mankind to be heard again. But |