New England Religion: Unitaranscendentalism and Presbygationalism

TheCanadian Review of American Studies, Volume 11,No. 1,Spring 1980 NewEnglandReligion: Unitaranscendentalisrn andPresbygationalism Gilman M. Ostrander Cathenne L. Albanese. Transcendental Religion and the New America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977. 210 + xxii pp. Mane Caskey. Chariot of Fire: Religion and the Beecher Family. NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1978. Yale Historical Publications: Miscellany No. 117. 442 + xv pp. One way to render intelligible the religious history of nineteenth-century NewEngland is to present it as literary Unitarians and Transcendentalists saw it, or wished to see it. This approach eliminates the Catholic Church fromconsideration, except to mention the errant conduct of Orestes Brownson and Isaac Hecker. It eliminates the Methodists and Baptists, together with numerous other sects, except as they were noticed and described by Emerson and other literate observers. The Episcopal Church remains as a dignified Arminian haven from Calvinist onslaughts but divested of the sense of mission that the Anglican Church had possessed in colonial and evenFederal times. The literary approach to nineteenth-century New England religion focuses its attention upon controversies within the Congregational Churches of Massachusetts and. Connecticut and upon the emergence of Unitarianism in Massachusetts as seen from the liberal perspective. The gross constituents of evangelical ardor, fratricidal sectarianism and inquisitorial persecution have been refined out of it so far as possible. It is an account which pays little if any notice to "the West Point of Orthodoxy" at Andover or to the rival Scottish Presbyterian orthodoxy that prevailed at Princeton under Archibald Alexander and his successors after 1812. Congregationalists and Presbyterians were intermixed in New England religion before and after the Plan of Union for western missionary work of 1801,and the combination 58 Gilman M. Ostrander proved to be a bitterly contentious union of conflicting orthodoxies, represented principally by Princeton, Andover and Yale, Harvard having been ' lost to the Unitarians more or less officially in 1805. As the preeminently literary religion, the Unitarian Church assumed a cultural importance out of all proportion to its size or, for that matter. its theological content. New England Unitarianism did without an explicit creed of its own, because of the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of arriving at a consensus on questions of critical significance. William Ellery Channing emerged as the most distinguished and influential of the practicing Unitarian ministers, and certain of his sermons came to be accepted as the unofficial expression of Unitarian principles, though they could not be considered as binding on other ministers. It is probably impossible to say when this loosely defined and organized denomination ceased to be liberal opinion within the Congregational Church and became a sect itself, but once it did emerge, it provided itself with an in~titutional history of its origins. Institutionally, Anglican King's Church in Boston became the first Unitarian Church in America in 1787, when bishops refused to accept the revisions in the Book of Common Prayer that James Freeman had prepared for the congregation. In 1805, Harvard fell to the Unitarians against Jedidiah Morse and the forces of orthodoxy, when an avowed Unitarian, Henry Ware, succeeded David Tappan as Holhs Professor of Divinity (Morse retreating to Andover to prepare his counterattack ). In 1819, Channing expounded the principles of the new church in his ordination sermon for Jared Sparks on "Unitarian Christianity." In 1825, the American Unitarian Association was formed in Boston. In 1832, Emerson resigned his Unitarian pastorate, giving his personal objection to the Communion service as his reason, and entered into a movement that acquired the name of Transcendentalism. This chronology of events is arbitrary, and the importance placed upon the Hollis Professorship in 1805 is misleading insofar as it implies that Morse and the conservatives lost ground that they had heretofore held with the appointment of Ware. Actually Ware's predecessor as professor of divinity, David Tappan, appears to have contributed more to the intellecutal history of Boston Unitarianism than Ware did. It was chiefly Tappan who introduced Scottish moral philosophy to Harvard as well as the Unitarianism of David Price. It was Tappan who introduced William Ellery Channing and Joseph Stevens Buckminster to the religious ideas that they later expounded. According to Josiah Quincy, in his history of Harvard, Tappan was subject...