Our Liberal Heritage #48
"Teaching Children to Know Themselves"
Will Frank
Bronson Alcott, a Unitarian Transcendentalist, believed in the innate wisdom and goodness of every child. He disagreed with fellow Unitarian John Locke's notion that children's minds are blank slates written on by experience.
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Our Liberal Heritage #47
"I HEARD THE BELLS ON CHRISTMAS DAY"
Will Frank
The 19th century Unitarian poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-
1882), the author of such as "Paul Revere's Ride,��
"The Song of Hiawatha," "Evangeline," and "The
Village Blacksmith" knew personal tragedy.
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Our Liberal heritage #46
WAS ARIUS THE FIRST UNITARIAN?
Will Frank
It is common in Unitarian Universalist circles to name the theologian Arius of Lybia (256-336 C.E.) as the first theological unitarian, and therefore as a founder of our religious tradition. But was he the first Unitarian?
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Our Liberal heritage #45
ORIGEN OF ALEXANDRIA
Will Frank
The earliest source in our Unitarian Universalist heritage since the writing of the Bible is
that of Origen Adamantius of Alexandria (185-254 C.E.). Origen was born into a world
of political and religious strife. His father was persecuted and martyred, and so Origen
had sympathy for those persecuted. Origen combined Christian faith with Platonic
thought.
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Our Liberal heritage #44
THE CALL OF THE HOLLIS STREET CHURCH
Will Frank
The third meeting house of the Hollis Street Unitarian Church in the South End of Boston, its 200-foot steeple towering over the city from 1810 to 1884, contained one of the most musical steeple bells of the city calling people to worship. The Rev. Horace Holley had nurtured the congregation into prosperous conditions. The beauty of its choir was widely admired. Yet as the years passed the dominant call from that church became not the sweet notes of its bell or choir but the strident call to witness for the downtrodden, the enslaved, the homeless, and to shake the comfortable assumptions of middle-class townspeople.
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Our Liberal heritage #43
UNIVERSALIST QUOTATIONS
Will Frank
Here are a few Universalist quotations from the 18th to the 20th century, gathered by the New York State Convention of Universalists.
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Our Liberal heritage #42
A MEMORIAL TO UNLIMITED RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
Will Frank
In Britain, with it Established Anglican Church, Unitarian and other Dissenting churches were not given legal status and security until Parliament passed the “Dissenters’ Chapels Act�� in 1844. Unitarians rejoiced, and formed a committee that resolved “that, viewing this measure as the first legislative recognition of the great truth, that the sanctity of private judgment in matters of religion may be a principle in men’s minds paramount to the holding of any peculiar dogma, we would venture to suggest the formulation of some permanent memorial, educational or otherwise, to perpetuate in the most useful form the great principle of unlimited religious liberty. ��
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Our Liberal heritage #41
SOCIAL, VOLUNTARY, AND CONGREGATIONAL
Will Frank
When, on one snowy evening early in 1841, the new Unitarian Church of the Disciples was being formed in Boston, the minister, James Freeman Clarke, wished for it to be organized on a new basis. To Clarke, a church was one body of people, united for the purpose of becoming one with God. The church should be an active, sharing community, not just the customary collection of passive listeners.
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Our Liberal heritage #40
NOT TO SUCCUMB TO FEARS
Will Frank
On Wednesday, November 18, 1835, Harriet Martineau was hurried through the angry crowd
into the meeting of Boston abolitionists, led by Unitarian women. Harriet Martineau, an eminent
English Unitarian opponent of slavery, was making an extensive trip through America to seek ways
to reconcile American practice with its democratic ideals. She talked forthrightly with cordial
Southern slaveholders, but in Boston, where slavery was illegal, she faced hostility and threats of
bodily harm. Fear was palpable and widespread in Boston that to raise the question of anti-slavery
would threaten to breakup the beloved Union.
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Our Liberal heritage #39
Called To The Ship Of Misery
Will Frank
During the Civil War, Unitarians and Universalists were the most prominent among those
laboring for a humanitarian amelioration of suffering. Witness this episode during the Peninsula
Campaign of 1862.
The Rev. Henry W. Bellows, the most prominent Unitarian institutional leader of the era and
founder of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, had pestered Secretary of War Edward McM. Stanton into
providing some medical supplies for the Commission ’s work. Government contributions hardly
began to meet the need, and Bellows sent out urgent pleas for private funds and volunteer nurses.
Churches pooled funds to purchase supplies. Eight women of his church (The Unitarian Church of
All Souls, New York) promptly offered their services, including his wife, Eliza Bellows. Along with
11 other Sanitary Commission volunteers, these women took passage by ship from New York to
Norfolk and then to the battle area in the Virginia Peninsula between the James and York rivers.
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Our Liberal heritage #37
We Should Be Mobbed
Will Frank
Harriet Martineau’s travel through America to find a way to heal the rift between the theory of the American “experiment�� in equality and participatory democracy and the practice of inequality and exclusion culminated in her visit to Boston in late 1835. Her main focus was slavery and its abolition. In the South as in the North she had befriended both slaveholders and abolitionists who were Unitarian as herself. The year 1835 was early in the anti-slavery movement, when the majority of the citizens of Boston blamed the rising vocal calls for abolition as a dire threat to the beloved American Union. Mass meetings “to soothe the South by directing public indignation upon the Abolitionists�� had led to mob action and direct threats to anyone suspected of Abolitionism. A few had been mobbed and killed. Yet the women who led the Anti-Slavery Society of Boston, most of whom were Unitarian, would not be deterred.
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Our Liberal heritage #35
The Only Object In Live
Will Frank
In all ages people have sought the purpose of life. What does life ask me to do? How can I learn how to live? Here is a commentary by Margaret Fuller, as she discusses her youth.
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Our Liberal heritage #36
Universalists and Unitarians
Will Frank
In 1859 the Universalist journal New Covenant of Chicago published the following piece on how to distinguish the two faith systems, as they appeared in the mid 19th century:
“We are frequently asked, 'What is the difference between Unitarianism and Universalism?'" There is but little, if any, difference in the theology of these two denominations of Christians, no greater difference, perhaps than that which exist between different individuals connected with these different communions upon points of doctrine of minor importance. Upon all the essential doctrines of the Gospel, there is perfect harmony of opinion.
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Our Liberal heritage #34
A Repreive Just In Time
Will Frank
One of the founders of Universalism in America was Dr. George De Benneville (1703-1793) as a teenager had come to Universalism out of witnessing the compassion of “heathen�� Moslems. His long service to Universalism almost was not to be. Being a French Huguenot in exile in England, he knew the French language and decided to return to France to preach his newfound religion of universal love to a people he felt were kept in ignorance by a repressive orthodox regime that banned liberality in religion.
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Our Liberal heritage #33
Are These Heathens?
Will Frank
Dr. George De Benneville (1703-1793) was came from a French Huguenot family taking refuge from persecution in England in the 17th century, which made him a natural religious liberal, open to new religious insight. Yet he lived at a time when prejudice against others who were different was common, a prejudice which the young De Benneville shared. His family had the favor of king William and had money, and so also shared the arrogance of the privileged classes.
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Our Liberal heritage #32
The Grandest Recreation
Will Frank
Quillen Hamilton Shinn was Universalism's greatest missionary. For decades in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries he was constantly traveling and preaching and organizing
churches throughout the North and the West and the South.
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Our Liberal heritage #31
A Brilliant Galaxy of Talent
Will Frank
Modern higher education in England and Scotland was born in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries largely out of Unitarian stock, out of Unitarian ideas promoted by Unitarian tutors and students. The established and prestigious universities of Oxford and Cambridge required a religious test of orthodoxy for admission as students or teachers. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, were bubbling up with new exploratory thought, unorthodox ideas in religion and then in the arts and sciences. At their pinnacle were Sir Isaac Newton, John Locke, and John Milton, towering figures who had developed a Unitarian orientation in their understanding of the universe and humanity and put their expanding ideas in print, before there yet were any Unitarian churches to connect them spiritually with others of like mind. Along with them were ministers of religion, ejected in 1662 from the established Anglican Church for their unorthodox ideas. These were often men of high university attainment, now banished from Church and University, who felt called to provide university education to Nonconformists, such as liberal English Presbyterians, who evolved by the eighteenth century into Unitarians. They founded a score of Dissenting Academies, which revolutionized education.
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Our Liberal heritage #30
The Necessity Of Free Inquiry In Religion
Will Frank
Early New England persecuted religious deviants. Yet the concept and practice of the right of private judgment in religion grew in the 17th and 18th centuries to become a foundational religious and civic value. This reliance on freedom of thought as the only path toward truth derived from sources as diverse as Roger Williams of Rhode Island in the plea for the right of conscience in his Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, the English Unitarian John Locke’s ringing Letter Concerning Toleration, and the Arminian rejection of inherent and original sin in favor of God-given reason and conscience that provides human beings with the capacity to do right or wrong. By the mid-eighteenth century individual religious liberty, not the rulings of magistrates, had become a core value of the emerging Unitarian movement in America. Charles Chauncey and Jonathan Mayhew, open-minded ministers of prestigious churches of Boston, voiced their own evolving ideas that encouraged their influential congregations to explore new realms of open-ended thought, which led a whole province toward what would be identified as Unitarianism. In Virginia at the College of William and Mary, alert and inventive students, foremost among them Thomas Jefferson, inspired by John Locke and his Unitarian professor William Small, followed a similar path
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Our Liberal Heritage #29
Start For The Field If I Can Reach It?
Will Frank
Clara Barton, the Universalist “Angel of the Battlefield�� of the American Civil War, was convalescing from broken health and was out of sorts in Switzerland in 1870, when suddenly war broke out between France and Germany on July 18. Immediately she girded herself for action, to render humanitarian and nursing care for wounded soldiers, just as she did in the American Civil War. She hastily jotted a diary note: “Start for the field if I can reach it.��
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Our Liberal Heritage #28
Where Is The Me?
Will Frank
Sophia Lyon Fahs was stimulated to take a path that led her to become one of the great innovative liberal religious educators of the twentieth century by a sudden question by her 7½-year old daughter Ruth in 1914 — “Mother, Where is the me? It seems to be always my hand, my foot, my head or my skin, but where is the me?��
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Our Liberal Heritage #27
Love Each Other Or Perish
Will Frank
In Nazi Germany, the Rev. Clemens Taesler, minister of the largest Unitarian church in Germany, the Unitarian Free Religious Society of Frankfurt, espoused the values of American Unitarians William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker and German rationalism and idealism. Yet when Hitler came to power in 1933 he gravitated toward the spirit of the times, proclaiming the need for a new German Christianity that would renew the soul of the German people, Nazis showing the way. The Nazi regime rewarded him and his church with a freedom earlier denied Unitarians by orthodox established church authorities. Taesler even gained a position to teach religion in the public schools. By 1936 other liberal ministers in Frankfurt shunned Taesler for allowing himself to be coopted by the Nazis, but Taesler thought he was helping the survival of liberal religion by adjusting to the Nazi reality. His church remained packed with 1,200 worshipers seeking a way to reconcile their liberal values with the Nazi wave sweeping over them.
Taesler survived World War II.
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Our Liberal Heritage #26
Liberty, Faith, Zeal, Leadership, Organization
Will Frank
In November 1869, the Rev. Henry W. Bellows, the great organizer of mid-19th century Unitarianism in America, wrote to an English colleague, the Rev. John Kenrick, of the condition of Unitarianism in the United States as compared with that of England. Here are some excerpts.
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Our Liberal Heritage #25
Yours For The Good Cause
Will Frank
The Universalist Church of the Good Shepherd in Racine, Wisconsin, was having trouble paying its bills and keeping its ministers. By 1856 the church debt had grown to $3,000, a very substantial sum for that day. The debt continued to grow through a series of ministers. A lay leader, Abner C. Fish, put his last hopes in a call beyond the accepted norms of the day that a minister should be male and not too politically radical. He wrote to the Rev. Olympia Brown, the fiery suffragist and the first woman minister ordained by the Universalists, then in Connecticut and seeking a settled ministry.
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Our Liberal Heritage #24
Love and Compassion, The True Meaning of Christmas
Will Frank
Throughout his life, Charles Dickens was impelled by an awakened social conscience. Poverty, oppression, and ignorance were all around. It shocked Dickens to see the middle class of the England of his day turn its back and the churches be unwilling to see beyond their airy creeds. In his twenties, Dickens joined the only religious movement that seemed to him to make the quality of human life a central concern--Unitarianism. He said, “I have carried into effect an old idea of mine and have joined the Unitarians, who would do something for human improvement, if they could; and who practice Charity and Tolerance.�� Dickens did not remain a steady participant in church life for more than a few years, but Unitarian values were central to his faith for the rest of his life.
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Our Liberal Heritage #23
Healing, Mutuality and Hope
Will Frank
Michael Servetus, martyred for his Unitarian ideas in 1553, was an unsparing prophet. He challenged prevailing assumptions about the truth of Jesus Christ being God incarnate in the so-called Trinity and belief systems rather than ethical living as the keys to eternal life. Servetus was burned at the stake by John Calvin--a prophet burned by a pastor. Yet Unitarian minister Andrew Hill argues that Unitarians today owe more to Calvin than to Servetus. We can be uncomfortable with the challenges of prophets like Servetus, while our congregations are maintained more by the community building of pastors like Calvin. Yet the “prophethood of all believers,�� as Unitarian Universalist theologian James Luther Adams put it, may be the essential that might save us.
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Our Liberal Heritage #22
The Strength of Moral Fiber and Spiritual Power
Will Frank
Although the Universalists had ordained women before, the first woman ordained into the Unitarian ministry was the Rev. Celia C. Burr Burleigh. She was born in a small town in western New York in 1826, and early became an active Unitarian layperson. She frequently contributed articles to Unitarian magazines. She was an active leader and president of her local Women’s Suffrage Association. Eventually, her involvement in the Unitarian movement became so intense that she felt drawn toward the Unitarian ministry. Her husband offered his strong encouragement, but William H. Burleigh, a poet, soon succumbed to death, severing the “marriage of co-equal hearts and minds.�� Celia Burleigh, heeding a call and inspired by her husband’s faith in her and in a free religion, pushed forward her preparation for the Unitarian ministry. Great support for Celia Burleigh’s calling also came from her former minister, Rev. Dr. John W. Chadwick, a very prominent Unitarian minister of that day. Finally, on October 5, 1871, she received ordination from her home church, the Unitarian Church of Brooklyn, Connecticut. Julia Ward Howe delivered the charge to the congregation.
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Our Liberal Heritage #21
The Great Word of the Century -- Unity
Will Frank
On November 1, 1882, the famous advocate of Unitarianism in the West, the Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, stood up to preach. He faced only about twenty five people, seated on kitchen chairs in a shabby and bare rented hall. There were the remnants of the Fourth Unitarian Church of Chicago. Their neighborhood had declined in status. They had lost their minister and their building. The future looked bleak. Without lectern or organ, Jones spoke on the “The Ideal Church,�� putting into his delivery everything he had.
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Our Liberal Heritage #20
Do You Love Your Child Because You Have Washed It?
Will Frank
Hosea Ballou was an “Ultra-Universalist�� who believed that sin is always punished in this world, not in the next. To this was opposed not only the prevailing Universalist sentiment that corrective punishment after death would lead to purification and the ultimate restoration of all souls to God, but also the prevailing Unitarian sentiment that through free will, human beings could choose a good or evil path, and that salvation would come through the building of character. Even the great William Ellery Channing declared that he had never heard of a “more irrational doctrine�� than Ultra-Universalism. Ballou remained undaunted.
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Our Liberal Heritage #19
Flowers and Liberty
Will Frank
Ednah Dow Cheney, the Unitarian reformer, leaves us her memories of the 1850s church of Theodore Parker, the dynamic forward-thinking Unitarian minister. The congregation had to hire the Music Hall, which could seat thousands, for worship services, as Parker’s radical ideas of theology that transcended the Unitarian Christianity of the time and his radical sense of human worth and equality and his social activism drew in ever-larger numbers of worshipers. Here is a sample of Cheney’s memories.
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Our Liberal Heritage #18
Little Edward Began To Smile
Will Frank
Moncure Daniel Conway, from Fredericksburg, Virginia, was one of the most dynamic Southern Unitarian ministers of the 19th Century. He had early become enthralled with the ideas of fellow Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson. As a consequence he entered Harvard Divinity School to prepare for the Unitarian ministry. While at Harvard, he spent many enjoyable weekends at Concord with the Emersons, their children, and their friends.
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Our Liberal Heritage #17
Three Cheers for Susan B. Anthony
Will Frank
In 1876, the great Universalist Clara Barton was lecturing in a town in Iowa. The Civil War veterans who hosted the lecture advertised that Barton was “not after the style of Susan B. Anthony and her clique; Miss Barton does not belong to that class.�� Seeing Anthony and other Unitarian workers for women’s rights so maligned, Universalist Barton addressed the assembled veterans.
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Our Liberal Heritage #16
Kindness, Compassion and Beneficence
Will Frank
William Pitt Smith, a Revolutionary War physician from New York, was moved by his faith of Universalism to devote much of his energy to proclaiming God’s love for all human beings. It seemed to him absurd and unscriptural that a benevolent God would damn any human soul to eternal misery. The notion dishonored God. The idea of eternal damnation was a “pagan�� invasion of pure Christianity, he thought. Dr. Smith hoped that instead of living down to the example of a judgmental “Partialist�� God, we might live up to the example of God of all-encompassing love, as borne out on earth in the life and ministry of Jesus.
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Our Liberal Heritage #15
Reconciling a Lapsed World
Will Frank
In 1790, the Universalists held a great national convention in Philadelphia. Benjamin Franklin had just died a few weeks before, on April 17, and the memory of him as a great American patriot, communicator, statesman, and scientist was fresh and lasting. It has long been known that Franklin was attracted to Unitarianism as a rational and moral religion. He was present at the first openly Unitarian worship service in London in 1994. Franklin never joined a Unitarian church but was a friend of the emerging Unitarian movement.
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Our Liberal Heritage #14
I Acknowledge My Obligation to the Rev. Dr. John Taylor of Norwich
Will Frank
The inspiration for moving the Norwich congregation, in the mid-18th century still led by the venerable but semi-conservative Rev. Peter Finch, to the more radical position of Unitarianism, and then for the building the Octagon Chapel on the site of the unsafe old meeting house, came from Dr. John Taylor, then associate minister to the congregation. Taylor, under the influence of the liberal thought of Samuel Clarke and others and from his appointment in Norwich in 1733 quickly developed and disseminated a set of ideas that formed the basis of Unitarianism in England and America.
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Our Liberal Heritage #13
To Admit The Truth Wherever We Find It
Will Frank
Religious Dissenters in England were developing the Unitarian and similar movements in liberal religion through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Integral to this development was the building of the Octagon Unitarian Chapel in Norwich, Norfolk County, which opened its doors for worship for the first time in May 1756, an event 250 years ago that at this moment is celebrated by Octagon Unitarians as a signal anniversary. This is the first of two articles honoring this anniversary.
The rise of Unitarianism in Norwich faced great challenges. By the time of the English Civil War and its aftermath in the mid 17th century, Norwich was already known for its religious diversity and harmony. Yet with the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Anglican orthodoxy returned and Unitarianism remained illegal as a severely punishable offense. Liberal congregations, as that led by Dr. John Collinges, had to worship in secret. “To secure my liberty�� and to “keep my soul free from any violation,�� as Collinges put it, he and other religious liberals had to be wary and covert.
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Our Liberal Heritage #12
Will Piety and Modesty Gulch Want Me?
Will Frank
Thomas Starr King was a great orator and a great patriot for the Union during the Civil War. As well as serving as minister of the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco, he traveled throughout California and Oregon speaking and raising funds for the Union. Violence was commonplace in the mining towns, and there were plenty of Confederate sympathizers around. His life was threatened, but to him the cause was just, and he was the man of the hour. And so he went.
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Our Liberal Heritage #11
I Felt Lonely And Yet Hopeful
Will Frank
On a bright Saturday in April 1860, a ship entered the Golden Gate and docked that afternoon at San Francisco. On board were a tired minister, the Rev. Thomas Starr King and his ill wife, Julia. They had come from Boston, called by the Unitarian Church of a raw San Francisco. The couple were driven in a carriage, as Starr King recalled it, “to the Oriental Hotel, a forlorn looking wooden building in a wretched part of the city, but the best house kept in the place.�� Their old friends in the East were behind them, and here awaited a new home and a new mission.
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Our Liberal Heritage #10
Things Commonly Believed Among Us
Will Frank
Late nineteenth century Unitarianism, especially in the West, was split between the Christian Theists and the Free Religionists. The Unitarian movement seemed to be breaking apart, and there was tension on all sides. Into the controversy stepped the Rev. William Channing Gannett. He proposed to the Western Unitarian Conference, meeting in Chicago in June1887, a statement of “things commonly believed among us.�� “All names that divide ‘religion,’�� Gannett declared, “are to us of little consequence compared with religion itself. Whoever loves Truth and lives the Good is in a broad sense, of our religious fellowship; whoever loves the one or lives the other better than ourselves is our teacher, whatever church or age he may belong to.��
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Our Liberal Heritage #9
You've Treated Us Like Gentlemen
Will Frank
Clara Barton, the Universalist founder of the American Red Cross, in October 1862 during the Civil War organized a wagon train to carry medical supplies from Washington to the front near Harper’s Ferry. The eight drovers and mule breakers assigned to her were rough and coarse. They had driven wagons throughout the disastrous Peninsula Campaign and vowed never again to go near the fighting. And now they were asked to risk their lives once more, and do so under the direction of a woman.
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Our Liberal Heritage #8
HOW WE CAME BY THE NAME “UNITARIAN��
Will Frank
Early Unitarians simply called themselves “Christians,�� believing that they were returning to a real and not corrupted form of the religion of Christ, a religion based on a wise and loving God and the teachings of Jesus rather than on the complex and harsh religion about him that later developed. It was an opponent of Unitarianism who prompted that label to be affirmed by American religious liberals. In New England around the turn of the 19th century Calvinist voices bitterly denounced the heresy of so-called “Liberal Christianity.�� Finally one of the most prominent of Boston’s Calvinist ministers, Jedidiah Morse, published what he took as the most extreme passages from the pens of English Unitarians, and added a long condemnation in the form of a preface, without appending his name, making it seem that this was a manifesto produced by the liberals themselves.
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Our Liberal Heritage #7
They Took A Stand
Will Frank
Unitarian Universalists have been leaders in affirming the worth, dignity, equality, and potential of each human being, and then acting on these principles. Yet, we, as others, are subject to unrecognized social prejudices current in the larger society. Witness the case of Olympia Brown, the first woman to be ordained as a minister by any denomination in America.
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Our Liberal Heritage #6
Essex Hall
Will Frank
Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley were among those attending the first openly Unitarian worship service ever held in England, April 17, 1774. Six months earlier, the Rev. Theophilus Lindsey had resigned from the Anglican priesthood and moved with his family to London. His mind was fixed on a radical new experiment, to form an avowedly Unitarian congregation free from any compromise. Unitarian currents had long been running through the English intellect, but the doctrine was, after all, a heresy and strictly illegal. To Lindsey, now was the time for Unitarians to come out of the shadows and openly proclaim their faith.
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Our Liberal Heritage #5
Pro Libertate, Ratione, Et Tolerantia
Will Frank
Sixty years old, plagued with chronic illness, and suffering from impaired vision and hearing, a man was confined to his home in Cracow, Poland, when the mob burst through the door. They had come for this damnable heretic. Dragged into the market place in his night clothes, he was forced to watch as enraged university students made a great bonfire of his treasured books and manuscripts. The crowd could not decide whether their victim should be burned alive or drowned, and in the confusion one of the university professors spirited him out of harm’s reach. The heretic’s name was Faustus Socinus (Sozzini). His heresy was Unitarianism.
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Our Liberal Heritage #4
A Real Heretic
Will Frank
On January 12, 1511, Miguel Servet, whom we know as Michael Servetus, was born in the province of Aragon in Spain. His brother became a priest, while Michael studied medicine and became a physician. Yet the world remembers Michael Servetus primarily for his contribution to the Liberal Reformation.
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Our Liberal Heritage #3
"O HUSH THE NOISE, YE MEN OF STRIFE"
Will Frank
The Christmas carol, "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" is familiar throughout our culture. It was written in 1849 by the Rev. Edmund Hamilton Sears, a Unitarian minister who served the Wayland, Massachusetts, Unitarian Church. With a retiring personality, he nevertheless was a Unitarian evangelist and the author of many books, hymns, and poems. An ardent pacifist, abolitionist, and biblical critic, Sears was always searching for ways to link Christian contemplation with non-violent social justice.
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Our Liberal Heritage #2
The First Christmas Tree in New England
Will Frank
The Christmas customs of the English settlers in America did not include the Christmas tree. In fact, during much of the early history of New England, the Puritans strictly forbade the celebration of Christmas. It is from Germany that Americans have derived the custom of decorating the home with an adorned evergreen tree, the Tannenbaum. Unrecorded German immigrants may have first introduced the Christmas tree to German settlements in Pennsylvania and the South. In New England, however, the honor most likely goes to the Rev. Charles Follen, a liberal German immigrant and Unitarian minister.
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Our Liberal Heritage #1
Stand Firm and Faithful
Will Frank
Martyrs die, but in part because of them Unitarian ideas and values live. The first recorded martyr for the Unitarian faith was Katherine Weigel (or Vogel), of Cracow, Poland.
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